Temple Run Windows

[Andree Vandestreek]

Believe it or not, this temple started out in 1866 as a Puritan Worship Center.
I am sitting in the brick building that was built in 1906 when they changed over to a Christian church. The stained glass windows represent the first break with the strict Puritan ways, which would not have allowed for colorful windows.

When Christians come to my temple, they are sometimes uncomfortable with the tall Buddha statue in the front of the temple. I tell them that they can turn and face Jesus in the beautiful stained glass windows. This comforts many people who might not have learned about the benefits of meditation any another way.

Now, these beautiful stained glass windows are aging. It will cost 25 thousand dollars to preserve them properly. I know this seems impossible, but I refuse to give up, just like I refused to give up my dream of this temple so many years ago. Together we can save these beautiful windows, which have been shining the love of Jesus for more than 100 years.

I want to save these windows to pay my respects and express my gratitude to the Christians that built this beautiful building. We can all be so proud that this temple is here in Woodstock. I want to let the community know that I appreciate their kindness and acceptance.

I always remember that the Buddha taught us not to come and believe, but to come and see. So if you can, come and see. Jesus and the Buddha. Feel the warm sunlight streaming through the pictures of Jesus, and smile.

I'm pretty sure it will. It is a new dome (only a couple years old). I'm pretty sure they added the dome during a maintenance closure as part of a master plan. The reports I've read about the remodel mainly talk about a new basement area and restroom remodel and new shear walls. So it looks like the floor plan will be mainly the same with a seismic upgrade and new finishes.

I've noticed that the church often takes the photos of sealing and endowment rooms before the altars are added. I'm not sure why, because they sometimes take the pictures after. In the Palmyra Temple and Manhattan Temple sealing rooms the altars are in the center of the rooms just like most temples.

Thanks. That threw me off a bit. I am going to the Fresno Temple to do sealings on friday, and it's a model similar to Palmayra. I was thinking to myself how would it fit to not have an altar? lol. Must make those rooms feel tiny though once they put the altar in afterwards. I've never seen a pic of the cookie cutter temple sealing rooms with an altar.

Hi there,

My wife and I were married in the Manhattan New York Temple. I would like to have some images of the interior of the temple. I've looked for them online, but all I've found is low resolution. You seem to have some high-resolution photos here. Do you have any other high-resolutions images of the interior of the Manhattan temple that you could send me? I'd really appreciate it.

My e-mail address is dtj...@gmail.com.

By the way, high-resolution images of the interiors of temples used to be available at newsroom.lds.org, but I think they got rid of a lot of the older images in a past redesign of the site (not the most recent redesign, but the one before that).

Thanks,
Dustin
New York City

Since Palmyra, the Holdmans have been involved in creating or restoring windows for temples around the world, including those in Winter Quarters, Nebraska; Manhattan, New York; Payson, Utah; Tijuana, Mexico; Sapporo, Japan; and Salt Lake City, Utah.

When the Nauvoo Temple was rebuilt and dedicated in 2002, President Gordon B. Hinckley determined that the three-color stained glass windows would once again adorn the Temple. The beautiful Morning Star windows again glow at night as they once did and remind us of the sacrifice of those early pioneers who loved the Lord.

Built by brothers Brigham and Joseph Young, this gothic-arched window originally hung in the main-floor assembly room of the Kirtland Temple, a silent witness to the devotion of early Latter-day Saints and the outpouring of spiritual knowledge and manifestations they received.

Built by brothers Brigham and Joseph Young, this gothic-arched window originally hung in the main-floor assembly room of the Kirtland Temple,1 a silent witness to the devotion of early Latter-day Saints and the outpouring of spiritual knowledge and manifestations they received.

This window is just one example of the quality materials and fine workmanship used in building the temple. For three years, Church members consecrated their time, talents, and material goods to building the temple. Men labored to quarry rock and construct the building, while women spun, knit, and sewed clothing for the workers and later made the curtains that separated the rooms of the temple.4

A small shrine model, found in an archaeological excavation of the 10th century B.C.E. city at Khirbet Qeiyafa, together with a 9th century B.C.E. Temple excavated at Motza, help us better understand the Temple of Solomon, known only from the biblical text.

Close by in the valley are other archaeological sites, such as Tel Socoh to the east and Tel Azekah to the west. The famous battle between David and Goliath of Gath is also set in the Elah Valley near Khirbet Qeiyafa, at Ephes-dammim between Socoh and Azekah (1 Samuel 17:1).

While excavating a cultic room near the southern city gate, we uncovered a unique shrine model made of stone. Such models are miniature buildings to contain cultic artifacts. The very fact that this object was carved in stone is unusual, because such objects found so far had been fashioned out of clay by potters. (In fact, nearby, another shrine model was found, made from clay.)

The elaborate stone shine model from Khirbet Qeiyafa, which includes a doorway ornamented with recessed frames, clearly shows that temple entrances could indeed be decorated with multiple recessed doorframes, i.e., mezuzot.

This design is known from many structures in the ancient Near East. The earliest example of such recessed openings is from Tepe Gawra in Mesopotamia, dated to around 4500 B.C.E., in three temples that stood in the city square.

In fact, they were so typical of temple entrances that eventually they became a symbol of a temple and of the presence of the deity in his temple. In our study on recessed doorways in temples, and other buildings of worship, we followed this motif from 4,500 B.C.E. till today.[2]

The only examples known to us of this motif in Israel are from Khirbet Qeiyafa. Both are unique cult objects. The first is the stone model discussed here at length. The second is a basalt altar decorated on its narrow side like the faade of a structure including a doorway around which a number of frames were carved, representing recessed frames.

Thus, it would appear that this construction style reached the Land of Israel only in the Iron Age, and that Canaanite culture of the Middle and Late Bronze Age did not commonly decorate temple doorways with recessed frames; certainly none of the great Canaanite temples found in various places in the country, such as Hazor, Megiddo, Shechem, and Lachish, used this motif. These Canaanite Bronze age temples agree with most Assyrians and Egyptian temples, which also lacked this motif.

The triglyph decoration in the temple model from Khirbet Qeiyafa predates the Greek temples by several centuries; for example, it is about half a millennium earlier than the Acropolis temples of Athens. The evidence from Khirbet Qeiyafa suggests that the triglyph motif began no later than the early tenth century B.C.E., much earlier than previously supposed.

1 Kings suggests that such planks were used to panel the interior walls of the outer sanctum and the holy of holies. 1 Kings 6:5 also describes planks surrounding the outer sanctum and the holy of holies near the roof:

In short, the biblical tzelaot near the roof of monumental buildings, like a palace or a temple, are organized in groups of three together. This is the contribution of the Khirbet Qeiyafa shrine model to a better understanding of the text.[3]

We understand the term as windows with recessed window frames, as Yigal Yadin suggested long ago.[4] Such windows are engraved on many ivories which depict a woman looking through a window.[5] While the model does not have windows, it has recessed openings, parallel to the recessed frames around the Temple windows.

In 2012, less than a year after the temple model was found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a ninth century B.C.E. temple was found at Motza near Jerusalem.[6] Both the Motza temple and the Jerusalem Temple existed simultaneously, and thus the former can help us better understand the biblical text relating to the Solomonic Temple.

Archaeological excavations have uncovered similar temples that illuminate the cultural background shared with the temple in Jerusalem, such as the temples at tell Tayinat in Southern Turkey, the temple at tel Arad and the temple at Ain Dara in northwestern Syria.

For the past few decades, scholars have long debated whether the Temple was really built in the late tenth century, when King Solomon ostensibly ruled in Jerusalem. The findings in Qeiyafa and Motza shed some light on this question.

One of the main functions of the historian is to compare and cross-reference sources. If different sources attest independently to the same phenomenon, the historical reliability of that phenomenon is greatly enhanced. Thus, the discovery of the stone temple model at Khirbet Qeiyafa and the temple at Motza make it more plausible that a similar temple could have been built in Jerusalem in the same period.

Prof. Yosef Garfinkel is Yigael Yadin Professor of Archaeology of the Land of Israel at the Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been the head since 2017. In the early part of his career, he specialized in the late prehistory of the Levant, the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. As part of this work, he excavated various Proto-historic sites such as, Yiftahel, Gesher, Tel Ali, Shaar Hagolan, Neolithic Ashkelon, and Tel Tsaf. Since 2007, he has shifted his concentration to the early phases of the Kingdom of Judah in the 10th and 9th centuries B.C.E. As such, he has conducted excavations and surveys at Khirbet Qeiyafa, Socoh, Tel Lachish and Khirbet al-Rai, uncovering new data on the early kings of the kingdom: David, Solomon, and Rehoboam.

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