"Monumental landmarks of the earliest Hebrew architecture center around the celebrated temple built by King Solomon in the tenth century B.C. on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. When ancient Israel was conquered by the armies of Babylonia serving under Nebuchadnezzar in 587-586 B.C., Solomon's temple, foremost symbol of Jewish religion and culture, was destroyed and the Jews exiled."

"Descriptions in the Old Testament, as well as archaeological deductions made by comparison with structures unearthed in Syria and in other parts of Israel, tell us much about the appearance of Solomon's temple. It was a rectangular structure surrounded by open courtyards; it had an inner sanctum, a forehall with two grand columns of bronze, and between these spaces a larger main room. Typologically it is allied... with the Greek temple and its ancestor in Aegean culture, the megaron."

— Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p72.