Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JEWS, JUDAISM

The roughly 600-year Second Temple period is framed by the destruction of the First Temple (to be rebuilt ca. 520-515 b.c.e.) and the Babylonian Exile of 586, on the one side, and the destruction of the Second Temple in the course of a Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-73 c.e., on the other. This period witnesses the appearance of diverse Judaisms — worldviews and ways of life believed to represent God’s will for the Jewish people and competing with each other for individual Jews’ loyalty. Accordingly, the designation “Second Temple Judaism” is misleading, there being no single form of Judaism practiced by all Jews in this period. Still, Jewish history in this period is unified by the advent of broad social, religious, and political characteristics distinct from those of prior periods and also quite different from the modes of Jewish identity and practice that emerged after the destruction of the Second Temple. While not defining a single, unitary Judaism, the Second Temple period accordingly warrants treatment as a distinctive era, a consequential stage in the evolution of Jewish civilization.

The central feature of this period was the creation, as a result of the Babylonian Exile, of a polarity between Judaism’s center, which, as in biblical times, remained Jerusalem, and the ever increasing plurality of areas of Jewish life in the Diaspora. While Jews continued to turn to Jerusalem as a spiritual center representing Jewish unity, most now chose to live and worship far from the biblical Promised Land. Thus, even as the temple and its cult continued to constitute the preeminent focus of Jewish religiosity, for most Jews the temple was no more than a distant ideal, a metaphor for Jewish peoplehood as they developed distinctive cultures in diverse areas far from the Holy Land.

Alongside the creation of the Diaspora, a second pivotal feature of the Second Temple period was that, with the exception of a brief period of Hasmonean rule, even Jews who lived in the land of Israel would now be governed by foreigners. To be sure, a gentile ruler might appoint a Jewish administrator to govern the Jews under Jewish law. Accordingly, it appears to be in this period that just such a law — the written Torah first evident in the time of Ezra — was produced. But even such home rule could not hide the reality of foreign domination or the fact that Jewish life was now to be shaped not by a distinctive Israelite culture but by the dominant culture of Hellenism, within which Jews in the land, just like those in the Diaspora, made their lives. Even as temple worship and limited governance under Jewish law continued, life for Jews even in the Holy Land was not what it had been before the Exile. Jews themselves began to recognize that biblical Judaism and the sacred history of the chosen people in the Promised Land had come to an end. This is explicit, e.g., in the book of Sirach, composed in Jerusalem ca. 190 b.c.e., which lists the Persian Jewish governor Nehemiah (538-532) as the last of the historical heroes of Judaism.

The Second Temple period’s end point, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 c.e. and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 133-135, made clear that the period’s central features — diaspora, loss of sovereignty, the growing irrelevance of the temple-cult — would become permanent aspects of the Jewish condition. The beginning of this period had taught Jews to live as Jews far from their national homeland. The end of the period made firm the message to which many had begun to respond even while the temple stood: Jews would need now to worship God and practice Judaism without the priestly service and with no expectation of an immediate return of Israelite sovereignty over the land. These facts, not surprisingly, stand at the foundation of the rabbinic Judaism that arises at the end of the Second Temple period and that, in the subsequent 500 years, becomes the dominant mode of Judaism practiced by all Jews.

Little is known of the religious practices and beliefs of the Jews at the beginning of Second Temple times, in the 5th through 3rd centuries. But that this period yielded consequential developments from the Judaism of the late First Temple period is evident from the more numerous Jewish sources of the 2nd century. These depict previously unknown political institutions and leaders: the council of elders (gerousia), the Sanhedrin, and the sage, later called rabbi. They reveal the existence of an important new religious, social, and cultural institution, the synagogue, and depict innovative religious practices, including the use of the ritual bath (mikveh), new burial customs, and the institution of conversion. A variety of new sectarian religious and political groups also appear: Hasidim, Zealots, Sicarii, Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, among others. With these groups innovative religious ideas emerge, including, among Pharisees and Essenes, the concept of resurrection. Here we also first find the concept of canon paramount in later Judaism, which defines a three-part Written Torah (Pentateuch, Prophets, and Hagiographa) and holds that at Sinai God also transmitted to Moses an oral law that expanded and explicated the written law found in the Pentateuch.

Especially in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the political and religious realities created by the Second Temple period led Jews to evaluate afresh who they were, what they believed, and how they would face an increasingly inhospitable world. At the heart of the dominant response to these questions was the recognition prompted by the ruinous Bar Kokhba Revolt, the end point of five centuries of struggles to regain control of the Holy Land, that the Jewish people were not well served by following ambitious political leaders who insisted upon military means to fulfill the biblical promise of a sovereign Jewish nation worshipping in a Jerusalem temple. The preceding centuries of nationalistic revolts had ended in the almost complete destruction of Jewish life in the Promised Land. Jews were better off now accepting Roman political domination and developing modes of piety independent of priestly and nationalistic aspirations.

The rabbinic Judaism that emerged in these centuries thus grew out of conflicting interests. On the one hand, the idea of Promised Land and the model of the temple-cult, central in Scripture, would remain primary. As a result, under rabbinic leadership, Jews prayed for the end of the Exile, the rebuilding of the temple, and the re-establishment of animal sacrifice. At the same time, these goals no longer would be concrete political and military aspirations. Instead they came to evince the advent of the messianic age, to be brought about directly by God at some undisclosed future time. The rabbis thus refocused Jewish concern from the events of political history, far beyond the people’s control, to events within the power of each person and family. What came to matter were the everyday details of life, the recurring actions that, day in and day out, defined life under God’s law. How did each individual relate to family and community? By what ethic did people carry out their business dealings? How did they acknowledge the debt to God for food and for the wonders of the universe evidenced in the daily rising and setting of the sun?

By making such aspects of life the central focus of Judaism and by developing explicit applications of priestly laws for every Jewish home and table, the rabbis assured that what the temple and life as a sovereign nation in the land of Israel had represented — an economy of the sacred — would be actualized in the life of every Jewish family and village. Wherever they were, the people would live as a nation of priests, eating their common food as though it were a sacrifice on the temple’s altar, seeing in their personal daily prayers and in their shared deeds of loving-kindness a replacement for the sacrifices no longer offered. In place of armed military action, this observance of the detailed system of ritual and communal law was now seen as the proper way to affect God, to lead God to act on the people’s behalf, to bring about the perfection of history that would cause God, finally, to bring the messiah and redeem the nation.

Rabbinic Judaism thus made the powerful point that despite the loss of temple and land, God still exists, still rules over the people of Israel. Only for this reason did the Torah still matter at all, still need to be explicated and followed. But the God who once was directly active in the sphere of world history now was understood to respond quietly to the acts of common Jews who studied divine revelation, who led their lives in accordance with divine precepts, who ate their food as though their home table were the temple altar, and who lived their lives as a kingdom of priests. In this way, rabbinic Judaism put each individual at the center of creation — where the temple and Jerusalem had always been conceived to stand — and ascribed to him or her the power to impart to the world order and meaning.

This ideology was poignant. With the temple destroyed and the land defiled, the conduct of common Jews was all that remained to deny the events of history and to affirm God’s lordship. Facing the devastating events of history that had brought to an end both the First and Second Temple periods, rabbinic Judaism insisted that common Jews had the power and obligation to create a new and better world, a world of holiness and sanctification, a world as they knew it should be, wished it to be, and, if they only worked hard enough, could assure that it someday would be.

Bibliography. E. J. Bickerman, From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees (New York, 1962); L. I. Levine, “The Nature and Origin of the Palestinian Synagogue Reconsidered,” JBL 115 (1996): 425-48; J. Neusner, From Politics to Piety, 2nd ed. (New York, 1979); L. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Hoboken, 1991).

Alan J. Avery-Peck

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JEWS, JUDAISM

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)