What meant for a Jew the destruction of the Temple?

[Giuseppe]

1) prima facie, to be not more able to do sacrifice in Temple. A technical inability. Not really grave.

2) secunda facie, in the light of the great disasters that followed in 115-117 CE and in 135 CE : no longer be able to obey God.


A contradiction raised in Judaism, with the risk of threatening its very essence.

1) YHWH wants you to sacrifice in Zion in order to show your loyalty.

2) but you are not more able of sacrificing in Zion, even though you desired do it strongly.

3) Therefore: in spite of your good will (point 2), YHWH punishes you with greater evils (read: Second and Third Jewish War).

For the first time the idea was born of a just YHWH up to irrationality, exactly the god creator of marcionites: just but cruel.

Such a God can not be the true God.

Note that it's curious that the other Jews take the alternative solution. I suspect that the talmudic rabbinism, with its excessive emphasis on scrupulous observance of many thousands of requirements (some, let me tell you, that know of ridicule), betrays the psychological need to hide, before themselves, the essential (existential) inability to perform the main mitzvah, to sacrifice to God in Zion exactly as God wants the Jews have to obey from memorable times.

Other ''Jews'' take another different alternative: God destroyed the Temple, not the Romans, because the Deicide of his Son. YHWH was so angry that he will not even be called more ''YHWH''.

What do you think about this possible genesis of marcionism?

[Peter Kirby]

1) prima facie, to be not more able to do sacrifice in Temple. A technical inability. Not really grave.

I'm not sure you could find that many late first century Jews who would phrase it so mildly: "A technical inability. Not really grave."

Especially among those who made the trip to Jerusalem 3+ times a year, including the harvest/pilgrimage festivals (Pesach, Shavuot, & Sukkot).

(Felix Just has a decent page here: http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Festivals.htm ... most of the important Jewish holidays centered on the Temple.)

[Peter Kirby]

1) prima facie, to be not more able to do sacrifice in Temple. A technical inability. Not really grave.

I'm not sure you could find that many late first century Jews who would phrase it so mildly: "A technical inability. Not really grave."

Especially among those who made the trip to Jerusalem 3+ times a year, including the harvest/pilgrimage festivals (Pesach, Shavuot, & Sukkot).

(Felix Just has a decent page here: http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/Festivals.htm ... most of the important Jewish holidays centered on the Temple.)

To suggest an analogy, imagine if someone invaded the USA in the '50s and prevented Americans from celebrating Christmas, on pain of death.

Or imagine if someone blew up the White House and the Congress building in Washington DC.

Imagine if both happened at the same time?

That, roughly speaking, is how many first century Jews would feel about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

[Giuseppe]

There is a recent book of Jewish scholars against the (likely Christian) myth of 70 CE as fateful historical caesura in the eyes of contemporaries (or something of similar).

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com ... 1-12340089


I dont' have the book linked above, but I read from books.google:

There are wo general ways one might construe such a lack of emphasis: 1) the plain fact that the Temple already had, at best, minimal spiritual significance for most Jews by the late Second Temple period, and that its destruction merely left the way clear for a fuller expression of law-based pbservance (ehich had already captured the central position in Jewish religiosity); or 2) an underlying, taken-for-granted assumption of the continued centrality of Jerusalem and its Temple, within which the fact of the Roman destruction has yet to attain anything other than a temporal and temporary significance.
I suspect the second construction is the less anachronistic...

(p. 521)



I don't want minimize his importance already at 70 CE (it's sufficient to read Tacitus about the immediate effects) but I refer to later effects, once more time is given for the ''process of mourning''. Tacitus testifies that, after the fall of temple or shortly before, the apocalypticism became exaggerated, with visions and revelations. That implies that a hope of re-building the temple was still there as possible theodicy and remedy to evil.

What I'm saying is that the Jews saw that any theodicy didn't work really only in the light of the great disasters that followed in 115-117 CE and in 135 CE.

[Giuseppe]

I find the book online and I read this:

Thus not all will agree with my proposal
that the Diaspora uprising of 115–117 and the Judean revolt of
132–135 should both be understood within this context, in both cases
directly relating to the frustrated desire of Jews to see their Temple
rebuilt so that they could resume the worship that had been so precipitously
brought to an end.37 But these are at least real events which
need explanation, and they involved many hundreds of thousands of
Jews. Therefore I suggest that inclusion of such public events within
a model that attempts to explain reactions to 70 may seem at least
as reasonable as inclusion of the utterances of the individual authors
whose writings have been preserved from this period by happenstance
or due to the agenda of later Jews or Christians;

(Martin Goodman, Religious Reactions to 70, in Was 70 CE a Watershed in. Jewish History?, p. 516, my bold)

[andrewcriddle]

Several scholars hold that it was only with the failure of the bar kokhba revolt and it becoming obvious that the temple was not being rebuilt any time soon, that the full implications of the destruction in 70 CE sunk in.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

But what implication was that? The Pentateuch doesn't mention a physical building - indeed the exact opposite. The Jews could have set up a replica tabernacle in Pittsburgh and fulfilled their legal requirements. They refused to do that - presumably for political or nationalistic reasons. But I don't see why the end of the temple should have meant anything to any Jew other than for political or nationalistic reasons. It has nothing to do with religion - or at least the true religion.