Jerusalem in Her Glory—The Second Temple Period
2 July 2008, tour leader Barak Zemer
Submitted by Eric Awerbuch
2 July 2008, tour leader Barak Zemer
Submitted by Eric Awerbuch
Before beginning our tour of the Second Temple period in Jerusalem, we stopped at the site of a nineteenth-century synagogue known as the “Glory of Israel.” This once prominent edifice was first constructed in the 1860s by Ashkenazi Hasidim, who were starting to move to Jerusalem as a result of the dwindling of the once powerful Ottoman Empire. The synagogue was mostly funded by wealthy European Jews. Unfortunately, when the Jordanians took control of the Jewish Quarter in the War of Independence in 1948 they destroyed the “Glory of Israel.”
The First Temple period ended in 586 B.C.E., on the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av (hence the reason Jews fast every year on that day) when Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed the entire city and exiled the Jews throughout the Babylonian empire. Cyrus of Persia, who conquered the Babylonian Empire, allowed the Jews to reenter the city 60 years later. While many of the elite chose to stay in the Babylonian empire as a result of the strong infrastructure that they established and their comfortable economic standing, a small contingent of Jews eventually reentered their holy city of Yerushalayim and built the Second Temple. Construction began in 535 BCE and the Second Temple was dedicated in 515 BCE. Five centuries later, King Herod (“the Builder”) (73–4 BCE) greatly expands the Temple. (Thus, it is more accurate perhaps to speak of two Second Temples.) This Temple is destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE in the wake of the Jewish revolt against their rule.
The Second Temple period is the time period of the next museum we went to known as the Herodian Quarter. Under the modern Yeshiva constructed by the Israelis after reunification of the city in 1967 there are the remains of wealthy Jewish family homes from 2000 years ago. We learned that the owners of these magnificent Jewish homes from were most likely cohanim (priests). The homes featured mosaic tile, Romanesque carved tables, private baths, and even many private mikvehs (ritual baths). Many of these priests gained their wealth either from corruption or from having a monopoly on the ritual products over whose manufacture they had a monopoly. At one point, the cohanim became so corrupt that bribes were needed in order to become the High Priest.
These priests used many imported goods made of stone, for stone, as opposed to clay, cannot absorb ritual impurity. We also saw graffiti, but not of the usual kind. This graffiti was of the ancient menorah and is the earliest contemporary representation of the menorah used in the Temple. Furthermore, there was a room called a teraklin (from the Greek triclinium), whose origins are in Roman culture, where three people would eat reclining on the floor. We heard a story of a Jew so wealthy, named Miriam, that when she went to get married she asked the rabbis how much she should receive per day from her husband. They suggest 500 gold shekels per day for cosmetics, and she balked at the number and told the rabbis to keep it. As a result of the great corruption and influence that the Romans tried to force upon the Jewish inhabitants in Jerusalem, the Jews revolted against the pagans beginning in 66 CE. The Romans placed the city under siege and living conditions became very difficult. Eventually, on the 9th of Av (again) in the year 70 C.E, the Temple was destroyed, followed by the rest of Jerusalem.
From the traditional Jewish perspective, the Rabbis maintain that the cause for this destruction was that the Jews allowed the Roman culture to become too influential and engaged in baseless acts of hatred between Jews, which is one of the greatest sins in the Jewish religion. To illustrate the point, Barak related to us the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza as told in the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 56): A certain man wanted to throw a party for all his friends, so he drew up a guest list and instructed his servant to send out the invitations. One of the men on the guest list was named "Kamtza," but the servant made a mistake and invited "Bar Kamtza" (literally, “son of Kamtza”) instead. Unfortunately, it turns out that Bar Kamtza and the host were actually dire enemies! When Bar Kamtza received his invitation, he was very grateful to think that the host had finally made amends. But when he showed up at the party, the host took one look and told his servant to immediately eject Bar Kamtza from the premises. When asked to leave, Bar Kamtza said: "I understand the mistake. But it's embarrassing for me to leave the party. I'll gladly pay the cost of my meal if you'll allow me to stay." The host would hear nothing of this, and reiterated his demand to have Bar Kamtza removed. Bar Kamtza appealed again: "I'd even be willing to pay half the cost of the entire party, if only I'd be allowed to stay." Again the request was denied, at which point, the distraught Bar Kamtza pleaded: "I'll pay for the entire party! Just please don't embarrass me in this way!" The host, however, refused to be assuaged and he threw Bar Kamtza out. The rabbis who had observed this exchange did not protest, and Bar Kamtza took this to mean that they approved of the host's behavior. The Talmud reports that Bar Kamtza was so hurt and upset, that he went straight to the Roman authorities and gave slanderous reports of the Jews’ disloyal behavior toward the Emperor. According to the tale, this so fueled the Romans' anger, that they proceeded to attack and destroy the Holy Temple.
After this museum, we went to the site of relatively recent excavations, where archaeologists are revealing new parts of the Western Wall and other outer walls of the Temple Mount from the Herodian period. The Temple Mount was and is still considered by Jewish tradition to be the center of the world. The first person to excavate this area during the decline of Ottoman power in the mid-nineteenth century was Charles Warren of Britain. We saw a contemporary picture in which Warren is sitting upon what appears to be a bench, but turned out to be the beginning edge of gigantic bridge leading onto the Temple Mount. When Herod was rebuilding the Temple, he was limited because the exact dimensions of the Temple are listed in the Torah. Therefore, he decided to built a gigantic platform for the Temple, supported by an extensive complex of underground vaults, and it is this vast area (the equivalent of twenty-seven football fields) that became known as the Temple Mount. To this day it remains the largest prayer compound in the world.
The outer walls of the compound (of which the Western Wall is the only extant remnant) are built all the way down to the bedrock, thirteen levels below where we stood on the level of the Roman street. There are three different sources that we have that have different figures on how long the temple took to build. Josephus, a Jewish Roman historian, claims that it took ten years and 18,000 workers. In the Talmud, the Rabbis maintain that it took only three years. The New Testament claims that it took forty-six years.
Outside of the Temple Mount is a mikveh, one of fifty that have been uncovered so far (there are hundreds more). These were meant to serve the masses of pilgrims who would gather on the three pilgrimage feasts. (According to one tradition, so many would arrive on Passover, for example, that on a single day of the holiday six million people would need to cleanse themselves. A Jew must use a mikveh to purify before ascending the Temple Mount in order to keep the Temple pure. On this same street we saw ruins of stores that existed 2000 years ago where Jews could purchase animals for sacrifice and not risk their being blemished over the course of the long journey. On one of the stones that the archaeologists found there is Hebrew text which states, “This is the house for the sounding of the trumpets before the sabbath.” It appears that at this time period a priest would stand atop the southwest corner of the wall surrounding the Temple Mount and sound a trumpet before the sabbath to alert the population that the holiday is near. Today, there is a modern parallel in the sirens sounded in Jerusalem at the onset of sabbath.
One very cool fact about the outer wall on the Temple Mount is that Herod built it in a very aesthetically pleasing way, with each story indented inward less than one inch so that when one stands underneath the wall it does not appear that it will fall on him. After the Muslims took the city back, they used stones from the Temple to build an eighth-century Umayyad palace outside the wall. The archaeologists have found a staircase just to the south of the Temple Mount where the mass of Jewish pilgrims would enter. (Jesus, as a Jew making the Passover pilgrimage, would most likely tread these very stairs upon when he came from Nazareth). From this staircase there are two sets of mammoth-sized entrances unto the Temple Mount known as the Hulda Gates.
When the Byzantines (Romans after they became Christian in the early fourth century) took control of the city in the 6th century, they kicked all the Jews out and allowed them only to reenter to pray on the 9th of Av, in order to demonstrate that the destruction of the Temple was the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy. They turned the area around the Temple Mount into a garbage dump. Real estate became very cheap and the poorest Christians would live in this area. Eventually, in the seventh century the Muslims conquer the city and allow the Jews back, but build the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Temple, in addition to placing the Mosque of Al-Aqsa’ on the Temple Mount.
