Some of the stones of the Western Wall are of lesser quality than others, according to new research, and may indicate that the contractors of the Second Temple were not above cheating their royal client, Herod the Great.
“It started with a simple question. We looked at the Western Wall and saw that there are areas that are disintegrating and others that have not changed. Ostensibly, it’s all limestone and so we didn’t understand why this should be,” said Dr. Simon Emmanuel, of the Hebrew University’s Earth Sciences Institute, who studied the subject together with Yael Levinson. The two recently published their findings in the journal Geology.
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