The Chamber of Hewn Stones
Background and Biography Excerpts In Shabbat 15 a of the Babylonian Talmud we can readForty Years before the Temple was destroyed, the Sanhedrin was exiled from the Chamber of Hewn Stones and sat in the Stores on the Temple Mount.The Talmud deduces that the Chamber of Hewn Stones was built into the north wall of the Temple, half inside the sanctuary and half outside, with doors providing access both to the temple and to the outside. The name presumably arises to distinguish it from the buildings in the temple complex used for ritual purposes, which had to be constructed of unhewn stones. The Commentary on the Talmud gives a reason for moving the Sanhedrin. Depending on the Rabbi, they no longer had the authority to judge cases of fines and/or cases of capital punishment. However it is also possible that the structure was unsafe; possibly due to seismic damage or differential settlement on Temple Mount. By ~30 CE, the Herodian Temple Mount rebuilding project should have been mostly completed. Herodian building projects, marked by their use of large heavy stones, may have been occasionally beset by subsidence problems when built on weak soils such as was apparently underlain on Temple Mount. Josephus, for example, mentions foundation failures on Temple Mount1. Subsidence problems have also taken place in the breakwaters of a Herodian project in Caesarea2.