Texts in Context:
The Realm of
the Second Temple
By Gabriel Blanchard
Persia, Macedon, Seleucia, Egypt, and Rome strove for the empire of the earth; but one little province on the Levantine coast, subject to them all in turn, would conquer them all.
Strangers Out of a Strange Land
When we last turned our sights to the people of the little land between the Jordan River and the sea, they had fallen on singularly bad times. Nebuchadnezzar II, ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, had besieged and ultimately conquered Jerusalem, deporting thousands of its inhabitants (those of the aristocracy and the scribal class1) to exile in Babylon itself, and razing the beautiful temple that had been built three or four hundred years before during the reign of Solomon, the zenith of Israelite glory. A couple of entire books of the Tanakh, namely Esther and Daniel, are about the fortunes of the Jewish community in Mesopotamia from that time forward … all the way up to the time at which the Neo-Babylonians were vanquished in their turn, and their rule replaced by that of a Persian Šâhanšâh named Kūrush. The title means “King of Kings”; the personal name, we usually drag through Greek and then Latin before making it English, which is how we turn it from “Kūrush” into “Cyrus.”
Cyrus too made it into more than one book of the Tanakh, notably Isaiah, Ezra, and II Chronicles.2 Unlike the native empires of the Fertile Crescent, the Persians set out to be benevolent, and thereby beloved, rulers of their subjects—once they decided to act sensibly and accept that they were Persian subjects, at least. Accordingly, Cyrus issued a decree permitting those exiles who wished to do so to return to Palestine and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Led by Zerubbabel (a grandson of the next-to-last monarch of Judah, King Jeconiah), tens of thousands of exiles made their way from Mesopotamia back to the land of their fathers.
The Prophet Zartosht
Not all of the Jews did go back to Yehud Medinata (“Judea Province”), as it was now styled. On the contrary, Babylon became a major haven of Jews and Jewish culture, and remained so for hundreds of years. However, it was not out of contact with Palestine; travel through the Fertile Crescent had been normal for many centuries at this point, and Babylon and Jerusalem were only about as far removed from one another as, say, San Diego and San Francisco—a taxing journey, certainly, but a doable one. Accordingly, not only Babylonian but Persian learning, and perhaps even Persian religion, affected Judaism in interesting ways.
This Persian religion was what we now call Zoroastrianism, or in Persian, Din-e Zartošti, “the religion of Zartosht” (a native form of the name we usually write Zoroaster3). Zartosht is traditionally believed to have lived around the sixth century BC, and to have reformed the polytheistic paganism of the ancient Iranian people into a religion with something much more like a systematic theology, including what seems to be an early example of monotheism or something very like it. The supreme creator-deity Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”) was the source of all being, life, and goodness, and was attended by a kind of heavenly court, consisting in the six Amesha Spentas (divine emanations) and their subordinates, the yazatas or lesser deities. However, Ahura Mazda was opposed by Angra Mainyu, a corrupt spirit with attendants of his own, who was the source of druj. Druj is often translated as “the lie” but also denotes evil in general, decay, and chaos. Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were therefore locked in conflict over humanity, until the day when the Saoshyant (“he who brings increase”) would appear to deliver us; after that would come the Frashokereti, the renewal of all things.
It probably does not take much imagination to see, let’s say, a family resemblance between Zoroastrianism and the substructure of both Christianity and Islam! Judaism, both in its exoteric and mystical forms, has moved in a different direction from the other Abrahamic religions; however, in the Second Temple period (539 BC-70 AD), Persian influence would have been at its height, and even in the earlier parts of the Judaic canon there were elements that sat very comfortably beside Zartosht’s oracles about a cosmic war between light and darkness. A large amount of speculative Judaic theology was written in this period, much of it in the form of a new literary genre that claimed to contain secrets from the heavens, often disclosed by angels: this genre was accordingly called “unveiling,” or in Greek, apocalüpsis [ἀποκάλυψις].
Who’s Afraid of Vicissitudes?
Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire was therefore, from the Jewish point of view, not ideal. It replaced a known quantity—the benevolent and respectful Shahanshah, whose own religion was not at all bad by Judaic standards—with one who was broadly unknown, except that he came from among the idolators of the northwest. Still, Yehud Medinata did not fare badly at first: after the Successors’ Wars, it fell under the Ptolemies, the new dynasty of Egypt, who were reasonably benign and beautifully uninterested in the internal affairs of Jewry. It was likely around this time that much of the work of collecting, verifying, and editing the works that ultimately became the Hebrew Bible was done.
But as in centuries past the Egyptians had quarreled with the Hittites over Canaan, so now the Ptolemies had to contend with the horribly interested Seleucid Empire. As third century BC turned into the second, Yehud Medinata changed hands. For about thirty years, the Syrians remained as indifferent as the Egyptians to the peculiarities of the locals. Unluckily, from 170 to 167 BC, a series of local intrigues over the high priesthood eventually led the eighth Syrian emperor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, to try to exterminate Judaism and Jewish culture by the cruelest means available. Circumcision and the study of the Torah were outlawed; tests like requiring people to eat pork or work on the sabbath were instituted, the alternative being death by torture (two grisly instances of this policy are recorded in II Maccabees 6-7); the Temple itself was overtaken by a syncretic Judæo-Greek cult, and its altar was used to sacrifice pigs to Zeus.
These outrages prompted revolt. It was mainly led by a priest, Yehudah, of the hitherto insignificant Chashmonai family; in English, the family are better known as the Hasmoneans, and Yehudah as Judah, nicknamed Maccabee or “the Hammer.” Despite repeated attempts to crush the revolt, it only grew, harrying the Seleucids through guerilla tactics and night attacks. By the end of 164, Antiochus IV had died; within just a couple of months, the Maccabees retook the Temple, ritually cleansed it, and rededicated it to the worship of their God (the origin of Hanukkah, from the Hebrew חֲנֻכָּה [ch’ānukkâh], meaning “consecration”).
At this point, the essential aim of the revolt had been accomplished. Nonetheless, the fighting did not entirely die out until 141, at which point Simon (a brother of Judah Maccabee) was recognized as both the high priest and the prince of an autonomous Judea. There were complications: for example, a tentative pact of mutual aid the Hasmoneans had struck with the Roman Republic; or the renegade high priest Onias IV, who had fled to Egypt and set up a rival temple in Leontopolis (near modern Cairo). But the essential issue of Temple service was put to rest.
“Here a Little, There a Little”4
Nonetheless, there were religious disputes among the Jews of this period, which partially overlapped with their political divisions. For most of the Second Temple period, there were about six distinct groups within Judaism,5 not all of which recognized all (or any) of the others:
- Hellenists
- Samaritans
- Zealots
- Essenes
- Sadducees
- Pharisees
מִי שֶׁלֹּא רָאָה יְרוּשָׁלַיִם בְּתִפְאַרְתָּהּ — לֹא רָאָה כְּרַךְ נֶחְמָד מֵעוֹלָם. מִי שֶׁלֹּא רָאָה בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ בְּבִנְיָנוֹ — לֹא רָאָה בִּנְיָן מְפוֹאָר מֵעוֹלָם.
[Mî shélló' râ'âh Y'rûshâlāyim b'thif'ār'tâhh—ló' râ'âh k'rākh' néch'mâdh mē3ôlâm. Mî shélló' râ'âh bēyth Hāmmiq'dâsh b'vin'yanô—ló' râ'âh bin'yân m'fô'âr mē3ôlâm.]
Who hath not seen Jerusalem in its glory—never hath he seen a fair city. Who hath not seen the holy Temple when it was built—never hath he seen a building.
Hellenists and Samaritans: The Ambiguously Jewish
The Hellenists were those Jews who had been more or less thoroughly Hellenized in culture, but kept certain essentials of Judaism, such as abstaining from the worship of other deities and refraining from work on Saturdays. It was probably by and for Egyptian Hellenists (some of whom supported both the Temple in Leontopolis and the one in Jerusalem) that the Septuagint was produced.6
The Samaritans were a group with mirky origins, who probably became ethnically distinct from Judean Jews at some point between the end of the exile and the Seleucid conquest in the second century BC; they claim to be descendants of the pre-exilic Kingdom of Israel, and maintained a temple of their own on Mount Gerizim until 110 BC, when it was destroyed by the second Hasmonean king, John Hyrcanus. (There are still a few hundred Samaritans in existence, living in central Israel and the West Bank.) Whether they were really Jews was a matter of debate among the other sects; the consensus answer was a begrudging “yes,” but many Jews refused to associate with them.
Zealots and Essenes: The Radically Jewish
The Zealots were more a political movement rather than a religious one, who advocated armed rebellion against any foreign domination of Judea. Their lack of interest in theology probably put them at odds with the Essenes; their politics put them at odds with the two remaining Judaic sects, which were also the largest.
The Essenes were unique, adopting beliefs and customs that are practically unknown in Judaism before or since. They took a high view of celibacy and adopted vegetarianism; they renounced the Temple as hopelessly corrupt; they withdrew from the rest of Judaic society, living in communes where all resources were shared; they were punctilious about ritual purity (for instance, they would hardly move on the sabbath); and, as well as copying the Torah and other parts of the Tanakh frequently, they wrote many works of mystical and apocalyptic literature, including their own Community Rule, the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, and The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness. (Enoch and Jubilees are considered canonical to this day by Beta Israel and the Tewahedo Church, both native to Ethiopia.)
Sadducees: Just Outside the Jewish Mainstream
Finally, there were the two Jewish groups most familiar to readers of the New Testament, i.e. the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Let us take the former first.
The Sadducees were an aristocratic group; as of the middle of the first century BC, they advocated collaborating with Roman rule. Most Sadducees were priests, although even so they formed a minority in the priesthood. They rejected many doctrines shared by most other Jews, including: the authority of rabbinic tradition (more on this in a moment); the divine inspiration of books other than the Torah; the existence of angels; the existence of the soul; and the coming of “the Last Day,” when God would resurrect the dead and judge all mankind. They also maintained stances on several points of legal and liturgical practice which the Pharisees firmly opposed. Due to the fact that prominent priests might be Sadducees, the dissent between the two groups was not always abstract or peaceful, and at times, members of both parties reputedly introduced rulings on religious practice merely to spite their opposite numbers.
Pharisees: The Jewish Mainstream
However, the bulk of the Jews, both priests and laity, were formally aligned with the Pharisees (or at least in more sympathy with them than anybody else). It is no accident that, with a couple of statistically unimportant exceptions, all modern forms of Judaism descend from Pharisaism.
Besides the priesthood (whose primary concern was with the service of the Temple, not theology), the Pharisees maintained that there was also a prophetic or teaching office that descended from Moses. With it, they believed in a substantial body of originally unwritten material that was meant to be transmitted alongside the Written Torah (תּוֹרָה שֶׁבִּכְתָב [Tôrâh Shêbbikh’thâv]): the Oral Torah (תּוֹרָה שֶׁבְּעַל־פֶּה [Tôrâh Shêbb’ȝāl-Pêh]), which included the principles of interpretation and application that gave the Torah its moral significance. And keeping the Torah, in their view, was the all-consuming vocation of the Jews, before which all else could and must give way. In particular—besides contradicting the Sadducees by affirming the authority of rabbinic tradition (and with it, a broader canon than the Torah alone), the existence of immaterial spirits both angelic and human, and the complex of related doctrines summed up as “the Last Day”—the Pharisees emphasized that even the study of the Torah was worthless without sincere obedience, and that the heart of sincere obedience to God was mercy.
Many readers, coming to such a statement with the New Testament as their primary background for understanding the Pharisees, may find this assertion extremely confusing! Nonetheless, it is the case. Ironically, part of the problem is that primitive Christianity was closely aligned with the Pharisees—more so than with any other variety of Judaism. Christianity maintained the validity and exclusivity of the Jerusalem Temple, against the wavering-affirmation-to-explicit denial of the Hellenists, Samaritans, and Essenes; it rejected the violent means, and the whole concern with national autonomy, represented by the Zealots; it repeatedly denounced the teachings and party of the Sadducees; even at the zenith of their criticism of the Pharisees, primitive Christian texts go out of their way to affirm the Pharisees’ authority. Indeed, this may be partly why the sources and authors of the New Testament felt free to criticize the Pharisees as harshly as they did: not only were two thousand years of anti-Semitism as yet in the future; they probably also felt that this was, so to speak, an internal dispute—and civil wars tend (with exceptions) to be nastier than foreign wars.
Speaking of which …
A Ring Around the Sea
The aforementioned intrigues surrounding the monarchy and high priesthood had not ceased, especially as Hasmonean Judea conquered-and-converted the nearby regions of Idumea (formerly “Edom”), the Galilee (north of Samaria), and Perea (on the eastern bank of the Jordan). An untimely civil war, of the literal variety, erupted early in the reign of John Hyrcanus II, in the year 66 BC. Three years later, Pompey the Great—the same Pompey who would be dropping by the general area again in fifteen years for a nice “getting assassinated” holiday in Alexandria—was scooping up the bedraggled remnants of Seleucid Syria on Rome’s behalf. Both sides of the war appealed to him for help. He marched from Antioch to Jerusalem, and … all the way into the Holy of Holies, which, considering most Jews weren’t allowed there, was not what either side had been going for really. Pompey himself seems to have been a bit rattled by the experience, possibly because when he got to the innermost sanctum, where he (based on all prior experience) expected to find a cult image of the Judean God, he instead discovered—nothing.
After a long, dull series of further intrigues and further interventions by Cæsar, Antony, and Augustus, an Idumean named Herod took the throne: his claim was based on his father’s status as an adviser to Hyrcanus II, which said father had wangled into … no, it doesn’t matter. The point is, from 40 BC onward, Judea was independent only in name, and Herod the Great and his successors knew it. So did the people. It was hard not to, what with the Roman soldiers everywhere. The domination of Rome was laid now on every shore of the Mediterranean, like the stripe of crimson-purple that edged the toga of a senator. The Pharisees maintained that if the Jews only kept the Torah faithfully, God would deliver them from the degrading rule of the Gentiles; but it was probably hard not to think and hope that something a little more dramatic was in order.
1We don’t very readily realize this, since our relationship to writing is very different; but in classical antiquity (especially in places where logographic scripts rather than alphabetic ones were dominant), being a scribe was a job, both taxing and prestigious; it was far less like “being able to write” than it was like “being a computer programmer” today. Scribes accordingly formed a social class, alongside divisions that are more familiar to us, e.g. peasantry, merchants, priests, and warriors.
2The books of the Tanakh are named and ordered slightly differently from the Christian Old Testament. References here are given in terms of the latter, as more likely to be familiar to most readers.
3You may also have seen the form Zarathustra; while closer to the original Avestan form of Zartosht’s name, “Zarathustra” is not that original form, but an adaption to German. Several more names here have alternate forms and synonyms, e.g. “Ahriman” for Angra Mainyu.
4The information in this section was taken largely from this article on the immensely helpful website Sefaria, an encyclopedic guide to Judaism and Judaic texts.
5Another type arose before the destruction of the Temple; its later importance calls for its own post.
6The Septuagint was the first (and for a few hundred years the only) translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek; many, but not all, Scriptural quotations in the New Testament are specifically from the Septuagint, and it remains the standard form of the Old Testament in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Gabriel Blanchard has a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and serves as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might take an interest in our series introducing the concepts and celebrated books of the Great Conversation. Try dipping into it with our essays on art, education, humor, immortality, pleasure and pain, or the senses; or peruse the general index at your leisure. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 17th September, 2020. Page image of the Second Temple in the Holyland Model of Jerusalem, a 1/50th scale model of Jerusalem ca. the mid-first century, designed by archæologist Michael Avi-Yonah in the early 1960s and currently housed in the Israel Museum; photograph by Wikimedia Commons contributor Ariely, made available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).
