The Hebrew Bible limits offering sacrifice to a single location: a Temple or “house for the Lord” built in Jerusalem. The original temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 bce and the second temple, built under Persian rule and greatly enlarged by Herod was destroyed by the Romans in 70 ce. The centrality of the Temple for ancient Judaism is illustrated by the names historians give to the era: “The First Temple Period” and the “Second Temple Period.” Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity developed along diverging paths in the wake of the Second Temple’s destruction. John Hamer of Toronto Centre Place will look at what we can know about the historic temples and trace the history of the contested sacred site from Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, to the present.