The Gate Is Still Open: Neilah and the Doors of Nicanor

Pictured above: The sealed Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount in evening light. After a photograph by David Castor, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Friends,

In October 1902, a groundskeeper on Mount Scopus, the ridge just north of the Temple Mount, broke into a burial cave and found a stone box.

It was an ossuary, the limestone chest a first-century Jerusalem family used to gather the bones of a relative a year after burial. This one carried an inscription in Greek and a shorter one in Hebrew. The Greek reads, in translation: "The bones of the sons of Nicanor the Alexandrian, who made the doors." The box went to the Palestine Exploration Fund and then to the British Museum, where it still sits.

Doors. Not just any doors. The Mishnah and Josephus had both written about a set of bronze doors on the Temple Mount, and here, on a bone box, was the family of the man who paid for them.

Today, as the fast enters its final hours, we want to tell you about those doors, because the last service of Yom Kippur is named after the moment they closed.

The Doors That Came Back from the Sea

Josephus counted the gates of the Temple's inner courts in his eyewitness description in The Jewish War. Nine of them, he wrote, were plated with gold and silver, "but there was one gate that was without the holy house, which was of Corinthian brass, and greatly excelled those that were only covered over with silver and gold." Each of its two doors stood thirty cubits high, roughly forty-five feet.

The Mishnah names it. Tractate Middot, "Measurements," records that when the Temple prospered every gate was refitted in gold "except the gates of Nicanor, because a miracle happened with them," then adds the plainer explanation some preferred: "because their copper gleamed like gold."

The Talmud in Yoma 38a tells the miracle. Nicanor sailed from Alexandria with two enormous bronze doors. A storm rose. The crew threw one door overboard to lighten the ship, and when they reached for the second, Nicanor wrapped his arms around it and said, "Cast me into the sea with it." The sea went quiet. When they docked at Akko, the story goes, the first door surfaced beside the hull.

Whether or not you take the storm literally, the ossuary makes one thing solid. A real Alexandrian Jew named Nicanor gave the Temple its most famous doors, and his sons were proud enough to carve it on his grave. Those doors stood at the top of fifteen semicircular steps between the Court of the Women and the inner court, the threshold between the crowd and the altar.

The Temple Mount Sifting Project has never found the doors. But it has found the floor they opened onto. Among the tons of earth dumped from the Mount in 1999, the Project's volunteers recovered hundreds of cut and polished stone tiles, over a hundred of them securely dated to Herod's reign. They are opus sectile, Latin for "cut work," a paving technique reserved for palaces, in stone imported from Asia Minor, Greece, Tunisia and Egypt. In 2016 a researcher on the Project's team reassembled seven of the geometric patterns, each panel exactly one Roman foot square. Josephus had written that the open courts were "laid with stones of all colors and all sorts." Now you can hold a piece of that pavement in your hand. That is the same earth your keepsake was rescued from.

Neilah: The Closing of the Gates

The final service of Yom Kippur is called Neilah, "locking." Everyone agrees on the word. The rabbis argued about the gate.

The Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot 4:1, preserves the debate. Rav said Neilah marks "when the gates of Heaven are locked." Rabbi Yochanan said no, it is "when the gates of the Temple are locked." He had the better proof text, since the Mishnah lists Neilah among daytime services and Temple gates closed before dark. But the tradition kept both answers, and the liturgy holds them together to this day. In the last hour the ark in every synagogue stands open. The congregation stands with it. The prayer that has said "write us in the Book of Life" since Rosh Hashanah changes one word and says "seal us." Then a single long shofar blast, and the gate closes.

The whole hour is built on one conviction. Until the last note, the gate is open.

Jesus taught in these courts, and on a hillside in Galilee he said, "Knock, and it will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives." The narrow gate we wrote about yesterday comes from the same sermon, a few verses later. And the last book of the New Testament turns the image inside out. In Revelation 3:20 it is not the worshipper knocking on the Temple's door. It is the Lord knocking on ours: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in."

That door opens from the inside.

The Takeaway

Nicanor could have let go of the second door. Everyone on the ship wanted him to. He held on, and the sea calmed. If there is a prayer you have been meaning to pray, a call you have been meaning to make, a person you have been meaning to forgive, Neilah says the gate has not closed yet. The shofar has not sounded. The doors that gleamed like gold are still ajar, and the one who stands at them is knocking from the other side.

Verse of the Day

Ἰδοὺ ἕστηκα ἐπὶ τὴν θύραν καὶ κρούω· ἐάν τις ἀκούσῃ τῆς φωνῆς μου καὶ ἀνοίξῃ τὴν θύραν, εἰσελεύσομαι πρὸς αὐτόν.

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him."

Revelation 3:20

Gmar Chatimah Tovah, a good final sealing,

The Temple Mount Soil Team

Keepsakes from the same soil

Each piece carries authenticated soil recovered by the Temple Mount Sifting Project, sealed in Israel and matched to its own numbered Certificate of Authenticity.