The Second Temple
© ITCHS 2024
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DRAFT
[Ed: This essay is a draft chapter for a book-length consideration of the character of the Silent Years, the years between the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament and the prophetic works of the New Testament. The first chapter considers The Seven Day Week as a Jewish conception progressively imported into the Roman Empire. The second considers the development of Monotheism, the third Slavery. The chapter below is one of three considering major Jewish institutions which may have contributed to a growing influence on surrounding cultures. The second of the three is The Synagogue.]
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What are often called the Silent Years can perhaps be at least equally thought of as years of the Second Temple. The Silent Years—years without a written prophet accepted into canon—would begin around 400 B.C., but technically would still be in effect after 2000 A.D.
\Within Christianity, however, the Silent Years begin with the conclusion of Malachi in the Old Testament (c. 425 BC) and can be thought to end with John the Baptist, an active prophet like Elijah, around 25 A.D. The period of the Second Temple starts somewhat earlier and ends a little later: from the completion of the Second Temple, around 520 B.C., to 70 A.D.
Much of the story of the Second Temple, like much of the story of the First Temple (Solomon’s Temple) is authoritatively discussed within the Old Testament itself. And almost necessarily, the story of the Second Temple is strongly a story of comparison but much more of contrast. Some of these contrasts are of central importance to Judaism itself. Other contrasts are not emphasized in Scripture but must have been influential in intellectual and spiritual development of the entire Mediterranean World.
It is, however, best to start with the non-contrastively interpreted facts.
A Competing Temple
At the end of Solomon’s reign, four centuries before the fall of Judah to the Babylonians, Israel divided into two kingdoms, a northern and a southern. The Northern Kingdom divorced itself from the First Temple in Jerusalem, set up a competing temple on Mt. Gerizim, introduced Golden Calf idol worship in that temple, and generally fell into religious chaos of competing faiths, mainly pagan.
From an Old Testament prophetic perspective, God gave up on the Northern Kingdom and led them into an Assyrian Captivity in 722 B.C. Subsequent prophets warned the Southern Kingdom that it was risking a similar fate, and there were some efforts to reinstitute the pure practices of a canonical faith, starting with Asa’s, Jehoshaphat’s and Hezekiah’s impressive efforts, particularly Hezekiah’s just after the Northern Kingdom fell.
The Babylonian Captivity
The prophetic tradition, however, asserts that these reform efforts were not fundamentally successful in returning the Southern Kingdom to God and that the three Babylonian invasions and destruction of Solomon’s Temple leading to a full-blown Babylonian Captivity indicated God’s renunciation of Judah. From a spiritual perspective, perhaps, the ultimate moment in that renunciation was the departure of the Shekinah glory, the visible symbol of God’s presence, out the East Gate of the Temple, witnessed in a vision given to Ezekiel in Babylon (Ezekiel 9,10).
A Second Temple Ordered by Persia
A lifetime later, the dedication of the Second Temple in the sixth year of Darius the Mede is described by Ezra the Priest in Ezra 6. Everything about the ceremony seems to have been derived directly from the Five Books of Moses, but there is absolutely no mention of a Shekinah glory. The lack of that glory reflected the prophetic insistence that Judah had been judged.
Now the Bible remains quite interested in the Second Temple and even in its glorification by King Herod in order to please the Jews in the decades just before the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. (See Shelley Cohney, “The Jewish Temples: The Second Temple,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-second-temple. Last visited 02/26/2024).
From this simple beginning, however, it is important to consider the Second Temple from a much more international and cosmopolitan perspective which is not the canonical perspective and which was not the perspective of David and Solomon in the construction of the First Temple.
First among these cosmopolitan perspectives is that the building of the Second Temple is prominently the product of foreigners, the kings of Media-Persia.
As long as the Babylonians remained the dominant power, the Jews, at least the Jews who counted, remained captive in Babylon, or at least in the Mesopotamian lowland. But when the Babylonians were overthrown, almost immediately Cyrus, King of Persia, organized a return of as many Jews as desired to do so back to Palestine. Cyrus’ decree, therefore, became foundationally important to a newly re-founded Israel. Not surprisingly, that decree is quoted at the end of Second Chronicles (36:23). The decree is quoted at longer length at the beginning of Ezra (1:2-4). (A later and fuller document of record to the same effect found in the reign of King Darius is quoted in Ezra 6.)
In both forms, Cyrus claims that the Jewish God, mentioned by specific name, has commanded Cyrus to build Him a house—that is, He has commanded Cyrus to build a Temple. As a start for that rebuilding, the rest of Ezra 1 lists the gifts of Cyrus, the Temple plates and instruments which had been taken by Sheshbazzar and carefully stored in Babylon throughout the Captivity. These donations, which can of course be thought of as reparations, come to a magnificent monetary total, in a time when precious metals were not only useful but were also standard forms of financial wealth.
An accurate accounting of these donations in present currency is always a fool’s errand, depending as it does on the fluctuating price of gold and silver on the international market. It must have been largely a fool’s errand for Cyrus and his treasurers as well. But the sum of the metallic contributions in modern currency is nevertheless staggering and must be at least suggested. It is not unreasonable to estimate that sum by the early 2020’s as better than $1 billion! (See notes to Ezra 8: 24 ff, The Open Bible: Expanded Edition, New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983, p. 471.)
There were other bequests from the king in the form of tax reliefs and in-kind contributions toward burnt offering sacrifices and the like that prayers might be said “for the life of the king and his sons.” (Ezra 6:10).
By the time of the completion of the Second Temple, Cyrus’ successors, Darius and Artaxerxes, had also supported the construction. The decree of Artaxerxes recorded in Ezra 7: 12-26 supports not only the construction and furnishing of the Temple but also the purchasing of “bulls, rams, and lambs with their grain offerings and their drink offerings” to be offered on the altar of the Second Temple.
Ezra, acutely aware of the magnitude of wealth entrusted to him as well as the dangers of the long journey home, proclaimed a fast, seeking from God “the right way for us and our little ones and all our possessions. For I was ashamed to request of the king an escort of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy on the road, because we had spoken to the king, saying, “The hand of our God is upon all those for good who seek Him, but His power and His wrath are against all those who forsake Him” (Ezra 8: 21b – 22).
Slow Construction
In following days and years, work on the Temple languished.
We can consider some of the factors in that lack of enthusiasm, but for the present, it took not only the full and unstinting support politically and monetarily of the Persian Empire but also the goading of the ethnarch, Zerubbabel; the cupbearer to the Persian King, Nehemiah; and the Priest, Ezra: as well as God’s direct intervention in prophetic ministries of the post-exilic prophets to get the work finished.
Despite the unquestionable generosity of the princes of Medea-Persia, goodwill offerings by citizens of the Empire, and freewill offerings of the returning Jewish community itself, the Second Temple was not nearly so impressive as the First Temple as envisioned and supplied by David and constructed by his son, Solomon. Thus, the laying of the foundation was met with mixed emotions:
Then all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the LORD, because he foundation of the House of the LORD was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of the fathers’ houses, who were old men, who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this temple was laid before their eyes; yet many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy for the noise of the weeping of the people, for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the sound was heard afar off. (Ezra 3: 11b – 13.)
Whether the Second Temple was all that impressive as an architectural achievement or not, it was also unquestionable that it filled a void at the heart of Judaism. The Five Books of Moses have the regulation of the Temple (originally as Tabernacle) as a central theme, and particularly the regulation of sacrifice. Moreover, the Five Books required Jews to come together for three major festivals each year, and after David and Solomon, that congregation of all Israel was to be at the Temple in Jerusalem. Before that time, Israel had worshipped at the Tabernacle, a moveable tent, first employed during the wanderings in Sinai.
Centrality of the Ark of the Covenant
The Ark of the Covenant from that Tabernacle eventually had been regained from its own captivity among the Philistines and eventually had been transported by David to Jerusalem, where it became the heart of the First Temple (II Samuel: 6). However, the Ark of the Covenant disappeared from biblical history with the destruction of the First Temple. Ethiopian tradition has it that the Ark was spirited away by zealous priests and that it presently resides in Ethiopia. In any case, the Ark was never part of the Second Temple.
Ministry beyond Judaism
Within the canon of the Old Testament, by about 520 B.C., the Jews had a new Temple of their own at Jerusalem, yet without walls of the city to guard it. But as we have seen from facts in the Old Testament documents themselves, the Temple by the command of God had been authorized and largely paid for, including its sacrifices, by non-Jewish foreign kings. In that sense, the Temple had become an international house of God for His worship by Jews but also by the God-fearing people of the world. The prophetic tradition had for a long time previous looked forward to a time when the House of God would have such a ministry to the world beyond the House of Jacob.
(This would, of course, be problematic. Non-Jews claiming to desire to worship the God of the Hebrews at Jerusalem, to the extent that they remained of polytheistic background, might want to do so within a normal polytheistic mindset of worshipping other gods in their own sanctuaries as well. The problem could partially be resolved by limiting goyim to a Court of the Gentiles, but one can easily imagine that no one was very happy with the resultant as an international House of Prayer.)
Once God-fearing ethnic nations come into the picture, it is well that we start thinking in comparative and contrastive terms.
Gentile Temples
Judaism had no monopoly on the idea of temples. Temples could be found in every significant city-state throughout the Mediterranean. Beyond temples, altars to various gods were ubiquitous. They seem particularly to have been situated on very high ground, and the Old Testament refers repeatedly to the descendants of Jacob setting up unauthorized altars on high places throughout Israel.
The ancient world was far from atheistic. The ubiquity of holy places went with a sense that it was always good to find another god to honor. Again, Jews in Jerusalem would be at pains to make sure that their God in His Temple was not compromised with such polytheistic impulses.
The Five Books of Moses, contrastively, seemed to demand that all sacrifices be located at one place, originally at the Tabernacle which was itself moveable. From David on, the singularity of place for sacrifice gives Judaism a consistent central focus at Jerusalem.
In contrast to Judaism, none of the religions of the surrounding area claimed a particular relationship to a particular deity forcing religious observation to be entirely centered in that particular temple. Temples had their own traditions, not necessarily endorsed by every other temple to the same god or goddess.
For example, at Ephesus, there was a temple of Aphrodite, a temple, not the temple. Evidently a meteorite in ancient times had not entirely burned up in the atmosphere and a molten remnant of it had been found to have landed outside Ephesus. The molten remains had been sculpted into smooth curves during the meteorite’s descent, and the imaginative Ionians thought that they had found an image of the goddess sent them directly from the heavens. The temple at Ephesus was the direct result of this discovery, and it became one of the great tourist destinations of the ancient world. We are told in the Book of Acts how memento industries grew up to meet the tourist demand and how artisans from these industries were organized to oppose the introduction of Christianity.
City-state Temples
City-states almost inevitably had a patron deity, and the main temple in a city-state was a governmentally-sponsored temple to that divinity. Typically, the temple was built on the highest and most defensible ground. This, for example, is the case for the Acropolis at Athens. It is also true for the temple of Capitoline Jove at Rome, though at Rome the high ground is not nearly so much a separated and elevated table looming above the rest of the city.
There were other temples of course, a very great many others at Athens as again attested in Acts and a great many at Rome, many still extant like the very small but very important Temple of Vesta downhill from Jupiter’s temple and near the forum.
The state temple rather routinely became the center of the community in a variety of non-religious senses. It could be a place for philosophers to meet and to speculate. It could be closely associated with the central governmental deliberative body. And quite practically, it could be the central treasury of the state.
This practicality started with ease of security. It would be hard to imagine anyone climbing unopposed all the way to the top of the Acropolis to carry away treasure from the treasury. Presumably the cost of guard duty at such a community center could be shared by a variety of financial interests It was even possible that the temple could collect income by acting as banker for private wealth, almost all of which was in the form of monetized precious metal.
We do know from the Old Testament and from extra-testamental Jewish writing that the Second Temple was compromised to some extent by the separable financial uses. And ultimately, in the inter-testamental period, a political interloper actually appropriated some of the sacred plateware to make bribes in the capital of the Seleucid Empire.
Defending the Treasury
Perhaps part of the reason for lack of enthusiasm among remnant Jews for rebuilding the temple was that they had little ability to defend such a temple. Jerusalem’s walls had been destroyed by the Babylonians and would not be rebuilt, even at minimal levels, for decades after the completion of the Second Temple. The First Temple had been a sitting duck for conquest almost as soon as it had been built. A Second Temple was a second sacred trust, but the Remnant Jews had little of their own to defend it with.
What the Jewish Remnant did have was, again, royal protection from the Medo-Persian Empire. Such protection was exceedingly precarious in times when most people traveled on foot and where the imperial government was perhaps a thousand miles away. Nehemiah recalls some of the close calls associated with that distant protective authority. It is worthy of note, however, that nothing in Ezra or Nehemiah suggests a laxness in the imperial support in itself.
And with Ezra as Priest, Zerubbabel as ethnarch, eventually Nehemiah as representative from the imperial presence, and the Word of God from the post-exilic prophets, the work got completed.
If all this seems to suggest that the Jews themselves were not great enthusiasts, it should be recognized that they were exceedingly poor. Archeological research for the last two or more centuries reveals that Israel throughout these centuries had little or nothing of the amenities of good living (cf Werner Keller, trans. William Neil, The Bible as History, New York: Barnes and Nobles, 1980, p. 306.) This assessment is confirmed in the first chapter of Haggai. They were a backwater of civilization supporting a temple largely funded from a distant empire with a fabulous sacred treasury which would force them to be always on guard as defenders.
From a Diasporan Perspective
But then we come to another contrast, the contrast between how Remnant Jews in Israel thought about the Temple and how the Jews in dispersion thought about the Temple. By the time of the Roman Empire, there may have been as many as 6 or 7 million such Diasporan Jews outside Israel within the Roman Empire. But there were a great many more outside the empire stretching through Assyrian and Babylonian territory into Medea and Persia and beyond up into the steppes of Russia and perhaps east into India. There were a great many Jews in the Mesopotamian lowlands alone, evidently many more than those who had returned from those lowlands to Israel with Cyrus’ command.
As a new Temple rose, however slowly and painfully, at Jerusalem, how would all those other Jews outside Jerusalem see it? When we get to such questions about the Diaspora, biblical sources are routinely silent, with a few New Testament references within stories focused on other issues and perhaps a few veiled references in the Post-Exilic Prophets. There are also shreds of evidence from outside Judaism and partial references within rabbinic literature. The following hopes to be minimally controversial about such issues.
Recognizing that there is very little authoritative to go on, we nevertheless might think it likely for Diasporan Jews to see the Temple itself as the symbol of the rebirth of the nation, a miracle of God indicating that God was not quite through with Israel, the people, yet. Would they not, to the extent that they still believed in the Five Books of the Law, be relieved that the daily and yearly sacrifices to cover the sins of Israel, that is the House of Jacob, were again being performed? (Would they not have recognized that they had kings of the East to thank for these spiritual blessings that now flowed very substantially to Jews throughout the Roman Empire?)
And would believing Diasporan Jews throughout the Roman Empire start thinking about the three great yearly prescribed feasts of the Law, all of which were to be performed at the Temple in Jerusalem? To attend those feasts in the time of Solomon would be arduous for people hiking on foot from northern Israel just under Damascus or from the south of Israel in the Sinai. Now, attending the feast for some Jews might mean coming from Spain or from Tangier at the Straits of Gibraltar. Outside the Roman Empire, it might mean coming from the Caspian Sea or from the Indus River Valley.
Of course, it would not be possible for every Jew or more precisely every Jewish male to make that journey three times a year or even once in a lifetime. But with the Temple, the journey to Jerusalem became the symbolic vision of being Jewish, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
And even if attending the feast in Jerusalem was only a pipedream for many Jews dispersed across the ancient world, we know from many historical documents that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was taken by an increasingly great throng of pilgrims each year.
The facets of such a different mindset, the mindset of Diasporan Jews concerning the Second Temple, could easily fill a book in itself. For the present text, that contrastive mindset is simply an accepted fundamental fact of Diaspora Judaism, working its way through every topic about the interaction between Jews and the non-Jewish world throughout the Silent Years. The Prophets may have become silent, but the Temple spoke loudly and clearly from Gibraltar to the banks of the Indus.
Herod’s Enhancements to the Temple
During the reign of Herod the Great (37 B.C. – 4 B.C.), a major reconstruction was taking place to allow room for a million pilgrims at each of three feasts (Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles), evidently by then a reasonable expectation. These pilgrims, with all their special needs for sacrifices, ritual bathings, lodging, and victualing, would have to somehow be accommodated by a city whose regular population could not have exceeded much above 200,000. For this colossal purpose, Herod built retaining walls, reaching 20 stories in height and creating a gigantic box, the retained area then being filled in, resulting in a flattened surface area equivalent in size to six football fields (Cohney, Ibid.).
All this, again, was done under Herod as a puppet king for the Romans. How do we suppose this stupendous project could have been funded?
We know the Jews in New Testamental times were death on Roman taxation. It is reasonable to assume that such taxes financed at least some of the Temple restoration. It seems entirely probable that imperial funds in one way or another supplemented Herod’s financial efforts. Again then, it seems highly likely that foreign finances were intimately concerned with improvements to the Second Temple as they had been centrally concerned with the refounding of the Second Temple by Persian interests.
A Temple of Hope
More than anything else, either for Remnant Jews in Israel or for Jews in Diaspora, the Temple would have meant hope. “‘The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former,’ says the LORD of hosts. . . . ” (Haggai 2:9a).
Haggai’s vision was of an internationally central Second Temple, however inferior it might be to the First Temple in magnificence of architecture. The Second Temple was the hope of God moving into all the world, where most Jews, Jews of the Diaspora, lived.
A century after Haggai, Malachi, the last of the Old Testament Prophets underlined the central importance of the Temple for God’s purposes:
And the Lord, whom you seek,
Will suddenly come to His temple,
Even the Messenger of the covenant,
In whom you delight.
Behold, “He is coming,”
Says the Lord of hosts (3;1b).
The Jews of Israel throughout the Silent Years tried to rebuild a national identity. By and large, they remained isolated and self-absorbed. The Jews of the Diaspora were scattered everywhere, and everywhere they were under foreign rulers and foreign elites. They were by and large poor people sojourning in a foreign land and didn’t leave much evidence about their day-to-day existence or about their interactions with foreigners. Historical consensus has lumped them as Ten Lost Tribes that can easily be ignored.
But the Second Temple was a light set upon a hill. Its inspiration was seemingly as much a matter of Persian imperial policy as it was a matter of Jewish Remnant concern. It was painfully built with constant danger from invidious non-Jewish populations.
But it did get built, eventually a city wall protecting it to some extent from the dangerous encircling world. If one were Jewish and living in Diaspora, the Temple’s reappearance meant that one’s personal sins along with Israel’s national sins could be covered sacrificially once more each year. The Second Temple in and of itself radiated a radically different religious approach from that of any other Mediterranean Basin people.
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