The Second Temple was built in Jerusalem by returnees from Babylonian exile around 516 BCE. Some 500 years later, King Herod undertook a program of large-scale renovations and expansions, which included the still-standing Western Wall. As part of a series of depictions of the Mount throughout ancient times, the archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer has created drawings of the results. He writes:

Herod extended the Hasmonean Temple Mount in three directions: north, west, and south. At the northwest corner he built the Antonia Fortress and in the south, the magnificent Royal Stoa. In 19 BCE [he] began the most ambitious building project of his life, the rebuilding of the Temple and the Temple Mount in lavish style. . . . Today’s Temple Mount boundaries still reflect this enlargement.

Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to meet with President Trump in the White House. High on their agenda will be Iran, and the next steps following the joint assault on its nuclear facilities, as well as the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza. But there are other equally weighty matters that the two leaders are apt to discuss. Eran Lerman, calling this a White House visit “unlike any before it,” surveys some of those matters, beginning with efforts to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states—above all Saudi Arabia:

[I]t is a safe bet that no White House signing ceremony is in the offing. A much more likely scenario would involve—if the language from Israel on the Palestinian future is sufficiently vague and does not preclude the option of (limited) statehood—a return to the pre-7 October 2023 pattern of economic ventures, open visits at the ministerial level, and a growing degree of discussion and mutual cooperation on regional issues such as Lebanon and Syria.

In fact, writes Lerman, those two countries will also be major conversation topics. The president and the prime minister are likely to broach as well the possible opening of relations between Jerusalem and Damascus, a goal that is

realistic in light of reconstruction needs of this devastated country, all the more destitute once the Assad clan’s main source of income, the massive production and export of [the drug] Captagon, has been cut off. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia want to see Syria focused on its domestic needs—and as much as possible, free from the powerful grip of Turkey. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration, with its soft spot for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will do its part.