The Third Temple (Hebrew בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ הַשְּׁלִישִׁי Beit ha-Mikdash ha-Shlishi, \"the Third Holy House\") is the future Temple that, in Jewish eschatological tradition, is to be built in Jerusalem to succeed the First Temple (Solomon's Temple, c. 957–587 BCE, destroyed by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II) and the Second Temple (516 BCE–70 CE, destroyed by the Romans under Titus). Its fullest biblical blueprint is the nine-chapter vision of the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 40–48, c. 573 BCE), and its building is one of the works Jewish tradition assigns to the Messianic Age.
\nIn the Wheel of Heaven framework the Third Temple is one of three names — with New Jerusalem and Embassy — for the single structure the Elohim have asked humanity to build to receive their formal return in the Age of Aquarius. Third Temple is its Jewish-historical name, the successor in a line that runs from the wilderness Tabernacle through Solomon's Temple and the Second Temple. New Jerusalem is its Christian-apocalyptic name, from the holy city that descends in Revelation 21. Embassy is its operational name — the reception residence, on neutral extraterritorial ground, whose architecture the Raëlian source material lays out in detail. The framework reads all three as one physical thing: the residence prepared for the Elohim's Great Return.
\nJewish tradition has anticipated a rebuilt Temple since the Second Temple fell in 70 CE. The classical legal statement is Maimonides's (the Rambam, 1138–1204) in the Mishneh Torah, which counts the building of the Temple among the works of the Mashiach, alongside the ingathering of the exiles and the restoration of the Davidic line. On the mainstream reading the Third Temple belongs to the Messianic Age and is not raised by ordinary human initiative before the Mashiach comes.
\nThe fullest source is the vision Ezekiel received during the Babylonian exile, about fourteen years after the First Temple's destruction (c. 573 BCE). An angelic guide carrying a measuring rod leads the prophet through a temple complex, giving detailed measurements for its walls, gates, courts, and chambers (Ezekiel 40–42); the divine glory returns through the eastern gate (43); a nasi, a \"prince,\" figures in the temple's operations (44); land is allotted to the temple, the priests, and the city (45–46); a river flows from under the threshold, deepening as it runs east until it heals the Dead Sea (47); and the vision closes by naming the city \"The LORD is There\" (Hebrew יְהוָה שָׁמָּה YHWH Shammah, 48:35).
\nEzekiel's temple differs from both historical Temples. Its outer court alone measures roughly 500 by 500 cubits — larger than the historic Temple Mount, and so impossible to fit on the historic site — and several fixtures of the earlier Temples are absent: the Ark of the Covenant, the menorah, the veil, the high priest. Readers have long divided over what the vision describes: a literal future building (the dominant Orthodox and dispensationalist reading), a symbol of God's permanent dwelling with the people (the symbolic-spiritual reading), or the Second Temple that a more thorough restoration might have produced. The framework reads the architectural detail as a real future installation, while granting that the vision also carries the wider eschatological charge scholars find in it.
\nThree shorter passages sustain the expectation. Haggai 2:9 promises that \"the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former.\" Zechariah 6:12–13 names a figure called \"the Branch\" (Hebrew צֶמַח Tzemah) who \"shall build the temple of the LORD\" — read in Jewish tradition as the Mashiach. And Isaiah 2:2–4, paralleled almost word for word in Micah 4:1–3, sets \"the mountain of the LORD's house\" above the hills as the place all nations stream toward to learn peace — the source of the \"swords into plowshares\" image and one of the tradition's principal statements of the Messianic-age Temple.
\nThe obstacle to any literal rebuilding is the status of the Temple Mount (Hebrew הַר הַבַּיִת Har ha-Bayit; Arabic الحرم الشريف al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, \"the Noble Sanctuary\"), the site of the First and Second Temples. Since the seventh century the platform has held two of Islam's major monuments: the Dome of the Rock (691–692 CE), which covers the Foundation Stone traditionally identified with the site of the Holy of Holies, and the al-Aqsa Mosque (705–715 CE), the third-holiest site in Islam. Under the arrangement in place since 1967, Israel controls security and access while the Jordanian-linked Islamic Waqf administers the site; Jewish prayer on the platform is restricted, and the Israeli rabbinate has generally forbidden Jews from entering it on grounds of ritual purity. A Third Temple built on the historic site would require removing or relocating the Islamic structures — a course no responsible party proposes, and one that would carry grave consequences.
\nThe framework reads the Third Temple as the Embassy: the residence the Elohim asked humanity to prepare so that they can land openly and take up direct, continuous contact with the people they created. The source material makes the identification itself — the building humanity is to raise is at once the embassy of the Elohim on Earth and the Third Temple the Hebrew prophets foresaw.
\nThe reception residence. The architectural specification is given in The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974), in the \"Your Mission\" section of the New Commandments, where Yahweh sets the terms: a residence in a country with a mild climate; seven guest rooms, each with its own bathroom; a conference room and a dining room for twenty-one; a swimming pool; and a roof terrace on which a spacecraft twelve meters across can land, all set within a walled park on neutral, extraterritorial ground. The full specification belongs to the Embassy entry; what matters here is that the same passage names the building the Elohim's embassy on Earth.
\nThe temple sequence. The framework reads the Embassy as the latest in a single line of Elohim reception sites — not a break with the Temple tradition but its completion. The wilderness Tabernacle, Solomon's First Temple, the Second Temple, and the Embassy each served one function: a prepared physical place for the Elohim's presence on Earth, with the form updated to the conditions of its age. On that reading Ezekiel's river issuing from under the threshold (47:1–2), healing the sea it reaches, is the image of the Embassy as a source — the point from which the knowledge of the returning Elohim flows outward across the Aquarian age.
\nA center, not only a reception. The source casts the finished site as the spiritual and intellectual center of the world for the ages to come. Beyond the reception itself, the framework reads the Embassy as the seat from which the Aquarian age's knowledge and reorganization radiate: pilgrimage from every nation, research and educational institutions gathering around it, and a public replica open to visitors alongside the working residence. The scale of the biblical vision — Ezekiel's river, Isaiah's mountain of the LORD's house drawing all nations — fits that role.
\nNear Jerusalem, then anywhere. Yahweh's stated preference was for Israel, near Jerusalem, the ground of the original Eden operation. In Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975) the request is put directly to the people of Israel: to grant land near Jerusalem so the residence, \"the New Jerusalem as it was foreseen,\" could be built. The Raëlian Movement made its first formal request in 1991; an Israeli government commission in 1993 judged the movement peaceful, but Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declined, and no later government reopened the question. On 13 December 1997 a message attributed to Yahweh released the project from Israel, authorizing the movement to seek extraterritorial status from any nation, with Israel keeping a final option. A later 2015 message declared the Elohim's protection of Israel withdrawn. The framework records the source material's shifting stance as part of its own account, and registers the specific political content of these statements without endorsing or contesting it.
\nThe Jewish Temple movement. A current within Religious Zionism prepares in concrete terms for a Third Temple. The Temple Institute (Machon HaMikdash, founded 1987) has reconstructed Temple vessels — a gold menorah, the table of showbread, the priestly garments — trained kohanim, drawn up architectural plans, and pursued the breeding of a ritually pure red heifer (Numbers 19) required for the purification the site would need. These efforts are contested within Judaism itself: many hold that such building must await the Mashiach rather than human initiative, and Reform and Conservative Judaism generally do not expect a literal Temple at all. The framework notes the movement as a live engagement with the same expectation it reads through the Embassy, without adopting its program or its insistence on the historic site.
\nChristian dispensationalism. A strand of Protestant eschatology — dispensationalism, developed by John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century and popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and, later, the Left Behind novels — expects a literal Third Temple to be rebuilt before the Second Coming. Some Christian Zionist organizations have supported Jewish Temple-preparation work on that basis, an alliance the more striking for resting on incompatible expectations: the return of Christ on one side, the coming of the Mashiach on the other. Most other Christian traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, and the mainline Protestant churches — read the Temple prophecies symbolically and expect no literal rebuilding. The framework keeps these readings distinct rather than merging them; each tradition names the expectation in its own terms.
\nThe framework's identification of a diplomatic residence with Ezekiel's Third Temple is its own, and neither mainstream Judaism nor the academic study of these texts makes it. Rabbinic tradition holds the Third Temple to belong to the Messianic Age and to Jerusalem, not to an extraterritorial embassy in an unnamed country. Biblical scholarship reads Ezekiel 40–48 as exilic literature — a vision of restoration composed for its own moment — rather than as a blueprint for a building yet to come, and reads Haggai, Zechariah, and Isaiah in their sixth-century settings. The entry presents the Embassy reading as canon rather than consensus, and leaves it standing beside the scholarly one rather than in its place.
\nThe political dimension calls for care. The Temple Mount is sacred at once to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and its status is among the most contested questions in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; proposals to alter the site have repeatedly been a flashpoint for violence, as during the events surrounding the 2000 Second Intifada. The framework takes no side in that conflict. Its own reading in fact loosens the tie to the contested ground: because the December 1997 message frees the Embassy to be built in any consenting nation, the framework does not require the historic Temple Mount, and the expectation it reads need not turn on the disputed platform in Jerusalem at all.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité (1974), Sixth Chapter \"The New Commandments,\" Section \"Your Mission\"; collected as Intelligent Design: Messages from the Designers (current English edition, Raëlian Foundation). [Primary source for the Embassy/Third Temple architectural specification.]
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). \"Message of the Elohim, December 13th, 1997.\" In Intelligent Design: Messages from the Designers. [The source for the \"Great Return\" designation, treated more fully in the dedicated entry.]
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). \"Withdrawal of the protection of Israel, August 6, 2015.\" Various Raëlian Movement publication venues. [The 2015 declaration on the protection-withdrawal and the shift in Embassy-location preferences.]
\nThe Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Standard scholarly editions: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1977); The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2014). [The principal source for the Third Temple prophecies, particularly Ezekiel 40-48, Haggai, Zechariah, Isaiah 2, Micah 4.]
\nBlock, Daniel I. The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 1998. [The principal contemporary scholarly commentary on Ezekiel 40-48.]
\nBeale, G. K. The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. New Studies in Biblical Theology 17. InterVarsity Press, 2004. [A major contemporary biblical-theological engagement with the Temple tradition, including the Ezekiel 40-48 question.]
\nMaimonides, Moses. Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Beit ha-Bechirah (Laws of the Chosen House) and Hilkhot Melakhim u-Milhamoteihem (Laws of Kings and Their Wars). c. 1180. [The principal medieval Jewish systematic treatment of the Temple laws and the Messianic Age duties.]
\nAriel, Yisrael. The Odyssey of the Third Temple. Temple Institute, 1993. [The principal Temple Institute publication on the contemporary Third Temple preparation.]
\nInbari, Motti. Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? SUNY Press, 2009. [Principal contemporary scholarly study of Jewish Third Temple movements.]
\nGorenberg, Gershom. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. Oxford University Press, 2000. [Principal journalistic-scholarly engagement with the contemporary Temple Mount question, including treatment of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim engagements.]
\nScofield, Cyrus I. The Scofield Reference Bible. Oxford University Press, 1909 (revised 1917). [The principal source for the popularization of dispensationalist eschatology including the Third Temple expectation.]
\nLindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Zondervan, 1970. [The principal 20th-century popular dispensationalist treatment.]
\nLaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind (and subsequent volumes). Tyndale House, 1995-2007. [The principal popular-fiction development of dispensationalist eschatology.]
\nJosephus, Flavius. The Jewish War. c. 75 CE. Standard English translation: William Whiston (1737), revised editions. [The principal ancient source for the 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple.]
\nSendy, Jean. La Lune, clé de la Bible. Julliard, 1968. [The principal neo-euhemerist engagement with the Hebrew Bible's Temple tradition.]
\nSendy, Jean. Ces dieux qui firent le ciel et la terre. Robert Laffont, 1969.
\nBiglino, Mauro. Il libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee sulla Bibbia. Mondadori, 2011. [Contemporary philological engagement with the Hebrew Bible's Temple content.]
\nBiglino, Mauro. La Bibbia non è un libro sacro: Il falso letterario che ha fondato due religioni. Mondadori, 2012.
\nWallis, Paul. Escaping from Eden. 6th Books, 2020.
\nHareuveni, Nogah. Ecology in the Bible. Neot Kedumim, 1974. [Useful contemporary engagement with the Hebrew biblical environmental and geographical context.]
\nKook, Abraham Isaac. Orot (Lights). Hebrew, multiple editions. [The principal foundational text of Religious Zionist theology.]
\nRavitzky, Aviezer. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. University of Chicago Press, 1996. [Principal scholarly engagement with Religious Zionist theology including the Third Temple expectations.]
\n\"Third Temple.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Temple
\n\"Temple in Jerusalem.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_in_Jerusalem
\n\"Temple Mount.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount
\n\"Solomon's Temple.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Temple
\n\"Second Temple.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple
\n\"Ezekiel's Temple.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezekiel%27s_Temple
\n\"Dispensationalism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism
\n\"Temple Institute.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Institute
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