Other Temples

[theterminator]

are there any predictions in the ot about rebuilding of the temple?

[DCHindley]

are there any predictions in the ot about rebuilding of the temple?

How could there be?

All the books of the "old testament" were written (although not necessarily redacted into their present form) before the temple was last destroyed.

I think there might be a few passages where an ideal temple is envisioned (like in Ezekiel) for a future age when God delivers on his promises to Abraham, which would, of course, have to replace any that might be in existence at the inauguration of the final age.

Are there any passages that have been re-interpreted as having secondary meanings (beyond their original contexts) that relates to things "future"? Sure. The groups pushing for a rebuilding of the Jewish temple have probably compiled, with ingenuity, a few lists.

DCH

[Clive]

Is there a concept of a new temple in the new heaven and earth or has that transmogrified into Christ and his bride?

when was the idea of a new heaven and a new earth invented?

[Clive]

Fascinating series of changes here - a box in a tent moving around , fixed buildings of various sizes and importance, Christ and his bride.

Son of man has nowhere to lay his head?

[DCHindley]

Other temples in the Judean dispersion are discussed in C C Torrey's Ezra Studies (1910, 315-318):

315

VIII. JEWISH TEMPLES OF THE DISPERSION

Thus far, we have considered the manner of the restoration,
and the material and religious condition of the revived com
munity. We have also seen that the attitude of the Jews of
Judea toward those of the Dispersion was one of cordial good
will and affection, like that of the mother who sees her son go
away from home to enter upon his career. It remains to ask,
however, how jealous the Palestinian Jews were of their own
temple, in opposition to Jewish temples built for the worship of
Yahwe in foreign lands. Until very recently, this question would
hardly have received serious consideration. Now, however, the
papyri from Elephantine have opened our eyes. There, in the
heart of Upper Egypt, in the sixth and fifth centuries B. c., stood
a notable sanctuary, to the history of which I have already alluded.
The members of the Jewish colony at Yeb were not only worship
ing the God of their fathers there, down to the year 411, with all
due ceremony and in perfect sincerity; but when the temple was
destroyed by their enemies, they sent a petition for help to
their brethren in Judea. Those scholars who have discussed
the questions raised by these papyri have all, with one voice,
pronounced the Jews of this Upper Egyptian colony schismatic,
and their temple an eyesore to the Jews of Jerusalem. We know,
from the papyrus letter, that the petitioners did not receive
any help from their Judean fellow-countrymen, in
answer to their request. All commentators explain this
fact as due to the hostility which the adherents of the temple in
Jerusalem must have felt toward the schismatic church in Egypt
(an unjustified explanation, as will presently appear). "How
could the orthodox in Judea," it is said, "give aid to a temple on
foreign soil, when it is declared with the greatest emphasis in
Deuteronomy that Jerusalem is the only legitimate place for the
worship of Yahwe?" Such a sanctuary, according to the accepted
view, must have been looked upon as an evil thing, by all the
faithful and zealous who knew the law. One eminent scholar,
speaking of the temple at Elephantine soon after the fact of its
existence was discovered, said: "This was enough to make, per
haps actually did make, Jeremiah howl." But were the people
of Judea in the time of the second temple really so very narrow,
and so very unreasonable, as this? Was Jeremiah so small-



316 EZRA STUDIES

souled a man as this estimate would make him ? On the contrary,
we have no good ground for supposing that the laws in question
had any reference to sanctuaries outside of the holy land.
More than one Old Testament scholar, writing before the dis
covery of the letters from the colony at Yeb, had expressed the
opinion that the ordinances in Deut. 12, forbidding worship at
sanctuaries other than the one in Jerusalem, were intended to
refer only to Palestine. This is certainly the correct view.
The laws in question were framed for the purpose of maintaining
the primacy of the temple at Jerusalem in the face of the
growing importance of Hebrew sanctuaries elsewhere in the land.
So long as the shrine on Mount Moriah continued to stand,
there could never be the least question as to its superior sanctity
in comparison with all shrines on foreign soil. So long as Jews
remained Jews, and "called themselves by the name" of Abraham
and Jacob, their loyalty must attach itself to Palestine. But
Abraham and Jacob had other famous shrines in the home-land,
some of which might easily dispute the first place with Jerusalem.
We may be sure that from the time when these "Deuteronomic"
commands came into circulation, their purpose was well under
stood in the Dispersion, and also, that they were generally
approved. Jerusalem was, in fact, accepted as the one primary
seat of worship by all the Jews in the home-land, excepting those
who attached themselves to Shechem and Mount Gerizim, of
whom more will be said presently. Those who went abroad into
the foreign lands, therefore, must have continued to give due
glory to the mother sanctuary and uphold its prestige, while (of
course) maintaining the right to build their own local houses of
sacrifice and worship. There were large Jewish colonies in the great
Gentile cities; it would be preposterous to expect them to give
up their worship, or to limit it to pilgrimages (!) to the mother-
country. Within the small territory of Palestine, the journey to
the central shrine might be made a requirement, but not so in
Babylonia, Egypt, and the isles of the sea. We see plainly from
the papyri of Yeb that the members of the Jewish church there
had no idea that they were doing anything irregular, or that could
be displeasing to their brethren in Judea. Inasmuch as their
sanctuary had been standing for more than a hundred years, at
the time when their letter was written, it can be put down as
certain that, if they had been deemed schismatic by the home



THE EXILE AND THE RESTORATION 317

church, they would have known it long ago. There were similar
religious conditions in other similar colonies, and it may well be
that we shall discover, some day, that in Babylonia and else
where there were flourishing Jewish temples, in which sacrifice
to Yah we was offered in the time-honored way. And of this we
may be certain, that the best representatives of Palestinian Judaism
would all, to a man, have hailed with genuine enthusiasm the
building of all such houses of worship for their "exiled" brethren.
We have in addition to the Elephantine documents two or
three other bits of information as to the loyalty to the temple at
Jerusalem shown in the Dispersion, and as to the friendliness of
the Jews of Judea toward the members of a colonial church. The
first of these is the account given by Josephus (Antt. xiii, 3, 4)
of a public contest between the Jews and the Samaritans in Egypt
in the time of Ptolemy Philometor, the question at issue being
this, whether in the law of Moses the preferred sanctuary is at
Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim. According to the narrative, the
Jews on this occasion showed great zeal for the honor of the
temple at Jerusalem. Whatever degree of credence we give to
the account, it is at least obvious that the one who first composed
it believed that the Egyptian Jews would all have shown such
zeal as this. Much more important is the testimony given by the
two letters prefixed to the book of II Maccabees." The
first of these, 1:1-9 (not vss. 1-10, as Swete s edition and all
the recent textbooks and translations have it!) is sent by the
Jews of Judea to their fellows in Egypt to urge them to observe
the feast of the re-dedication of the temple, and is dated in the
year 169 (143 B.C.) I do not see how its genuineness can be
doubted. It attests both the fraternal co-operation existing at
that time between the two religious communities, and also the
fact that the superiority of the sanctuary in Jerusalem was taken
as a matter of course on both sides. In view of the paucity of
material of this sort, it is an extremely valuable document. The
second of the two letters, which I also believe to be genuine, is
dated in the year 188 (124 B.C.). It bears the same witness as
the other, while the manner in which it goes into detail, in giving
the ground for their mutual rejoicing, makes the fact of long
continued and traditional good feeling all the more certain. It

**I have discussed these letters at length in the Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft, XX (1900), pp. 225-42, aud refer, for details, to that place.



318 EZRA STUDIES

is quite generally taken for granted that the adherents of the
temple at Leontopolis were always looked upon as rivals and oppo
nents of the Palestinian Jews, but this is surely an error. Rivalry
or enmity on occasional grounds is of course always and every
where possible; the circumstances of the founding of a new
sanctuary, for instance, might be the cause of bad feeling, even
long continued. Such rivalry and hostility have not infrequently
attended the founding of new Christian churches, it must be
admitted. But that the Jews of Judea ever opposed the temple
at Leontopolis, or similar Jewish temples in any other part of the
Gentile world, on the ground of infringement of the Deu-
teronomic law, I do not believe for a moment.

As for the failure of the church in Judea to give the much-
needed aid to the daughter-church in Upper Egypt, in the year
411: we are now able to connect this fact with a very important
and interesting historical event, which has only recently been
illuminated for us by these very same papyrus records. Josephus,
Antt. xi, 7, tells the following story. When the high priest
Eliashib died, his son Judah succeeded him; then, when the
latter died, he in turn was succeeded by his son Johanan ( I&dv-
vrjs). It was because of a deed of this Johanan that the Persian
Bagoses (Bo^cocr?;?), who was the officer (crrparrjyo^) of Artaxerxes
Mnemon, defiled the temple and imposed a tax on the Jews. It
happened in this wise. The high priest Johanan had a brother
named Jeshua ( I^croO?). Bagoses, who was a friend of the latter,
promised to bring it about that he, instead of his brother, should
be high priest. Johanan quarreled with his brother in the
temple, and the quarrel ended in the death of Jeshua. Bagoses,
vowing vengeance, not only defiled the temple by entering the
most holy place, but also fined the Jews thenceforward for seven
years, taxing them before the daily sacrifice fifty drachmas for
each lamb. Thus far Josephus. It has been customary to iden
tify this Persian officer with the Bagoas who held such an
important place at the court under Artaxerxes III Ochus; and
our historians have accordingly supposed a punitive expedition of
a Persian army to Jerusalem. Possibly Josephus himself made
this identification, though his use of the term ar pantos is not
sufficient evidence of the fact. But now, at last, we know that
the Bagoas (Bagoses) of Josephus story was a very different
person from the grand-vizier who made and unmade kings. When



THE EXILE AND THE KESTORATION 319

the letter from the Jews at Yeb was written in the year 411,
Johanan was the high priest in Jerusalem; and the Persian
governor of Judea, presumably resident in Jerusalem, was
named VHjQ , i.e., Bagoas or Bagoses. This is the man, beyond
all question, who is intended in the narrative preserved by
Josephus; and we are now for the first time in a position to
understand the account, and also, to see why the request of
the petitioners at Elephantine was not granted. These
Jews in Upper Egypt can hardly have had any knowledge of the
relation existing between the clergy of Jerusalem and their
Persian governor, and they asked, in good faith, that Johanan
make request of Bagoas for their benefit. But we can see that
such a request would probably have been impossible at any time
after Johanan had assumed the office of high priest. Doubtless
the Jews of Palestine would very gladly have assisted their breth
ren of Upper Egypt if they had been able to do so.

DCH (Lunch is about over)

[Clive]

There is therefore no logical reason for sacrifice to have ended with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Is it not possible sacrifice was suppressed by xians from the 300's onwards in conjunction with the suppression of "pagan" sacrifice? Julian did attempt to rebuild the temple!

Or was sacrifice just falling out of fashion generally, priests and temples being replaced by rabbis and synagogues? Were similar changes from active doing hierarchical religions to talking listening egalitarian ones happening generally?

Is xianity a reversion to hierarchical sacrificial ways, but well hidden?

I cannot work out where Islam would fit on a high priest priesthood of all believers continuum. It looks like an utterly contradictory amalgam of all these streams!

[DCHindley]

There is therefore no logical reason for sacrifice to have ended with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Is it not possible sacrifice was suppressed by xians from the 300's onwards in conjunction with the suppression of "pagan" sacrifice? Julian did attempt to rebuild the temple!

Or was sacrifice just falling out of fashion generally, priests and temples being replaced by rabbis and synagogues? Were similar changes from active doing hierarchical religions to talking listening egalitarian ones happening generally?

Is xianity a reversion to hierarchical sacrificial ways, but well hidden?

I cannot work out where Islam would fit on a high priest priesthood of all believers continuum. It looks like an utterly contradictory amalgam of all these streams!

I've heard it proposed that some folks continued to offer sacrifices, perhaps not anywhere to the degree that had been done previously, after the Babylonian destruction of 587 BCE. Not everybody was deported, only the elite political class, leaving plenty of poorer priests behind.

Torrey even argues this. Only he does not think that the deportees had retained, much less preserved and refined, the religious traditions that we find in the Pentateuch. He thinks they assimilated to their environment, and perhaps remained pious as they could under the circumstances, but not to the degree required. He thinks that it was under the later Persian kings that the local elites re-invented themselves into the image that is portrayed in Ezra-Nehemiah/1 Esdras.

I have also heard that there are indications that some sort of offerings continued in Jerusalem even after the Roman destruction of 70 CE, but again, not anywhere close to those that were conducted in the Herodian temple, although these petered out in the next hundred years or so after the Romans banned Judeans from the city, but even this is obscure.

DCH

[Clive]

Are not kosher and halal slaughter only ritual sacrifice but without the full rituals?

[DCHindley]

Are not kosher and halal slaughter only ritual sacrifice but without the full rituals?

I think they are related in that both try to drain the blood from the animal before consumption. For the Judean, the soul of an animal is in its blood, and I suppose there is similar thinking in Islamic religion.

In sacrifice (not sure if Islam had sacrifices, really) on the udder hand, the drained blood is collected in some way and "sprinkled" on an alter of unhewn stone, with "horns" (corners, like a square?), and parts of or all of the animal are burned on a nearby fiery pyre. Sort of a bar-b-que for God, but without pork sausage or ribs.

Of course, they didn't have tomatoes which come from the new world to make the requisite sauce, so perhaps bar-b-que is the wrong term. There were no potatoes for "french fries" either, also from the new world. But none of that seems to stop Medieval-Tymes type dinner theaters from serving bar-b-que chicken and a baked potato which you eat with your hands like the savages we Europeans were. The jousting and broad-sword battles, tho, are actually very entertaining, although their Workers Compensation rates are sky high.

What does all this have to do with sacrifice? Absolutely nutten'.

DCH

[Clive]

The tomato potato and chocolate are possibly more important than realised the Colombian exchange and religious practice?