The History of the Genesis of the 'Second' Temple (?)

[rgprice]

Let's look at Judith 5 for example:

Judith 5:
19 But now they have returned to their God, and they have come back from the Diaspora where they were scattered. They have reclaimed Jerusalem, where their sanctuary is, and have settled again in the hill country, because it was unoccupied.

20 “So now, my master and lord, if these people are inadvertently at fault, or if they are sinning against their God, and if we verify this offense of theirs, then we will be able to go up and conquer them. 21 But if they are not a guilty nation, then let my lord keep his distance; otherwise their Lord and God will shield them, and we will be mocked in the eyes of all the earth.”

Here we see this idea that "it has been proven" that when the Jews follow their God, then they are unstoppable, but when they sin against their God their own God will destroy them. So, anyone going against the Jews needs to understand if they are on the right side or wrong side of their own god. So where is this established? Look at works like Jeremiah.

We can take all of Jeremiah, which opens with prophecies against Israel. But following the destruction and punishment of Israel, we are then told of the prophecies against the Nations: Egypt, the Philistines, Moab, Babylon, etc.

17 Israel is a hunted sheep driven away by lions. First the king of Assyria devoured it, and now at the end King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon has gnawed its bones. 18 Therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I am going to punish the king of Babylon and his land as I punished the king of Assyria. 19 I will restore Israel to its pasture, and it shall feed on Carmel and in Bashan, and on the hills of Ephraim and in Gilead its hunger shall be satisfied. 20 In those days and at that time, says the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought, and there shall be none, and the sins of Judah, and none shall be found, for I will pardon the remnant that I have spared/

Who is the audience here? It isn't Babylonians, nor is it ancient Israelites. The audience here are the Greeks, and others who would plan to conquer and subjugate the Jewish people. The message. "Our God is all-powerful, he will destroy any and all who oppress us. Look at the examples of the past. Don't be a fool. Even if you think you have won, our God will not forget and he will take vengeance on you. Look at all of the great civilizations who tried to enslave us? All were punished by our God."

Is this some historical account of the Babylonian conquest? Hell no. Does the writer actually know anything about the Temple? No. This is a Hellenistic story about the resilience of the Jewish people and the power of their God, who is so friggen hard-core that he will smite his own people and destroy his own house, but just like a father who beats his own kids, he'll beat you even worse.

[StephenGoranson]

rgprice, I have not expressed an opinion about, e.g., Sibylline Oracles.
imo, there was a first temple in Jerusalem.
imo, about Jesus, gMark is not the sole source.

[rgprice]

I want to remind people that the Pentateuch does not require or advocate the establishment of a permanent "temple" or building of any kind.

Exactly. The Temple is introduced in Kings and in works of other prophets, none of which were recognized by the Samaritans. Why do you think that is?

Now in theory, the Samaritans were also Israelites. But the Samaritans regard Mt. Gerizim as their holy site, not some temple. This suggests that some "special temple" is not an authentic part of Israelite history, because no such temple has any significance to the Samaritans. If there really was some "First Temple", and the destruction of the First Temple really was seen as some calamity by the Israelites, then why don't the Samaritans have anything to do with it? It's not a "common tradition", but rather, narratives about the Temple appear to develop after the split.

It was the Jews who controlled and cared about the so-called "Second Temple" in Jerusalem and thus it was the Jews who created the backstory about the predecessor to this Temple. But the Samaritans didn't care about the "Second Temple" because there was no "First Temple" to begin with. There really should be no question that Mt. Gerizim preceded the Temple as the sacred house of Yahweh. Why would this be is the case if story of Solomon's Temple was based in any way shape or form on reality? It wouldn't. The story of Solomon's Temple was invented after the establishment of the so-called "Second Temple" in Jerusalem under the control of the Jewish priesthood.

[Secret Alias]

I have to admit. As I always try to be a nuanced thinker. The sacrificial cult never made sense in the context of the Pentateuch narrative. How did the Israelites spend 40 years in a desert with all these animals? Something doesn't quite add up. There had to be a proto-Israelite group or at least a few in which sacrifice wasn't seen as being essential to Israelite community.

[rgprice]

I have to admit. As I always try to be a nuanced thinker. The sacrificial cult never made sense in the context of the Pentateuch narrative. How did the Israelites spend 40 years in a desert with all these animals? Something doesn't quite add up. There had to be a proto-Israelite group or at least a few in which sacrifice wasn't seen as being essential to Israelite community.

Yes, a very good point. Sacrificial cults are something of an established society, not something one would do while wandering around trying to survive with limited resources. But again, this is another example of how these narratives are created in the context of their present to establish a precedent for the current practices. These are stories about things being done "now" that seek to create ancient traditions to support them. It's like the story of Creation and resting on the 7th day. The Sabbath was a current practice at the time of the writing, and the writer(s) wanted to establish an origin story for the practice. Surely people complained about the Sabbath. Obviously it had its benefits, but no doubt there were detractors as well. But the Sabbath was established by no less than God himself, who rested on the 7th day, so surely you can't go against that!

Its the same for all this. The sacrifices, the Temple, etc.

Some stuff, like the sacrifices and dietary rules, etc. are likely to be older and go back into older traditions. These are part of the Pentateuch, common to Jews and Samaritans. But the Temple? No, the Samaritans don't care about that. So this is something not likely to be as old of a tradition. Now sure Israelites and Semitic people had temples to Yahweh and other gods, but did the Israelites really have a single grand temple in Jerusalem that was a focus of their religion and of unique interest to Israelite royalty? Was the destruction of this particular temple really viewed as a stand-out event in the circumstances of the destruction of the Israelite kingdoms? Was re-building this temple really a focus of Israelite leadership while in exile? The Pentateuch and Samaritan tradition would argue no.

Rather, it seems, the temple in Jerusalem obtained special status under the Hasmonaeans who then claimed that this temple was so special and important and the base of power. And it was at this time that stories about it's supposed predecessor, Solomon's Temple, were created to set the precedent for the special role of this temple, just as stories had been created to set the precedent for the Sabbath, the sacrificial cult, the Mosaic Passover, Mosaic Law, etc.

[andrewcriddle]

I want to remind people that the Pentateuch does not require or advocate the establishment of a permanent "temple" or building of any kind.

Exactly. The Temple is introduced in Kings and in works of other prophets, none of which were recognized by the Samaritans. Why do you think that is?

Now in theory, the Samaritans were also Israelites. But the Samaritans regard Mt. Gerizim as their holy site, not some temple. This suggests that some "special temple" is not an authentic part of Israelite history, because no such temple has any significance to the Samaritans. If there really was some "First Temple", and the destruction of the First Temple really was seen as some calamity by the Israelites, then why don't the Samaritans have anything to do with it? It's not a "common tradition", but rather, narratives about the Temple appear to develop after the split.

It was the Jews who controlled and cared about the so-called "Second Temple" in Jerusalem and thus it was the Jews who created the backstory about the predecessor to this Temple. But the Samaritans didn't care about the "Second Temple" because there was no "First Temple" to begin with. There really should be no question that Mt. Gerizim preceded the Temple as the sacred house of Yahweh. Why would this be is the case if story of Solomon's Temple was based in any way shape or form on reality? It wouldn't. The story of Solomon's Temple was invented after the establishment of the so-called "Second Temple" in Jerusalem under the control of the Jewish priesthood.

FWIW Kings and the prophets are aware of the Samaritan temple at Bethel as well as the temple at Jerusalem (and the various high places). They generally disapprove of the temple at Bethel but they accept as a matter of history that until after the fall of Samaria most Israelites worshipped somewhere other than Jerusalem.

Andrew Criddle

[MrMacSon]

At the end of a review of Yonatan Adlers book, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal, Yale University Press, 2022, Martin Goodman, Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford, notes:

The Temple is a missing element in this otherwise wide-ranging study. A large proportion of the rulings in the Pentateuch (which Adler argues came to be treated as binding law in the last centuries BCE) were concerned with the Temple cult, and could only be put into operation by the hereditary caste of priests. https://www.academia.edu/104956325/The_ ... ew_The_TLS*
.

* also https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the- ... n-goodman/

Previoulsy, Prof. Goodman noted:

Hasmonaean rule over Judaea was founded on their role in the revolt and as High Priests in the Jerusalem Temple from the late 150s. The proclamation of Antiochus III assumed that the imposition of Jewish laws was a matter for the Temple authorities (“The person who violates any of these statutes shall pay to the priests a fine of three thousand drachmas of silver”) and the Greek geographer Strabo, at the end of the first century BCE, took for granted that Judaea was in effect a Temple state.

Adler is not the only modern scholar to cast a sceptical eye over the heroic narratives in the books of the Maccabees now preserved in the Apocrypha. Howoever, the early Hasmonaeans, for many decades dependents of the Seleucid state, would have required remarkable control over the private lives of their Judaean subjects to have persuaded them that customs such as the Sabbath were worth dying for if these customs were not already widely observed. The claim that the stories of resistance and martyrdom, which presuppose widespread observance of Jewish customs at the time of the Maccabean revolt, were fictitious makes it difficult for us explain the shape of the literary texts as we now have them. And if the Hasmonaeans were the first to impose Mosaic practices as law, it is a puzzle that the one religious festival which we know was instituted by the Hasmonaeans – the festival of Hanukkah, which celebrated their rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt – was not more firmly integrated into the Mosaic traditions which were later inherited by the rabbis, and, indeed, that the rabbis seem to have known so little about their Hasmonaean predecessors.

Adler’s study is focused on Judaea and its environs, but other explanations for increased observance of traditional practices include the need for Jews in the diaspora to assert their identity in societies where they lived as a minority, whether in Babylon or closer to the homeland in regions around the Mediterranean. And other explanations for an increase in basing practice on the authority of written texts include the political pressure on Hasmonaean High Priests to follow the legal interpretations of different groups when they were representing the whole people in worship in the Jerusalem Temple: a series of Hasmonaean rulers were said to have been dominated either by Pharisees or by Sadducees.

[pp.5-6 of the pdf, https://www.academia.edu/104956325/The_ ... ew_The_TLS]
.

[rgprice]

Another analogy. I would contend that the Temple is like the Trojan Horse. There may be hundreds of writings that talk about the Trojan Horse, but that does not mean that the Trojan Horse was real. And even if it was real, it doesn't mean that those other writings are rooted in real knowledge of the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan Horse is featured in the Iliad. Effectively all knowledge of the Trojan Horse comes from the Iliad. Later writers who feature the Trojan Horse in their narratives or accounts of history aren't doing so because they have independent knowledge of the Trojan Horse, they are doing so because the Trojan Horse had become an accepted historical prop.

So I would contend that writings like Jeremiah or Isaiah or whatever, that talk about the destruction of the Temple are talking about the Temple in the same way that Hellenistic Greek writers talked about the Trojan Horse. Not from real memory or real passed on information, but from the perspective of culturally accepted narratives. And, I contend, that those narratives were all developed based not on some real Temple of Solomon, but out of the desire to create a predecessor for the existing temple in Jerusalem, which we call the "Second Temple".

[StephenGoranson]

The Trojan Horse and a first Jerusalem temple would not seem to be a close match, given your previous statement in this thread (Mon Jul 17, 2023 7:39 am, in part)
"....Regarding the supposed First Temple, again I'm not say [saying] there never was any temple of Yahweh, of course there were many temples to Yahweh...."

[Secret Alias]

Shiloh is a whole other kettle of fish too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiloh_(biblical_city)