FORMACIÓN INICIAL DEL PROFESORADO EN TORNO A LA INTEGRACIÓN INTEGRACIÓN

In the second part of this book, we focus on ancient Jewish attitudes toward the Second Temple. The following chapters will be fully in-formed by the lessons learned in part I. Here too we will see the benefit of studying purity and sacrifice as related ritual structures, utilizing the same assumptions and methods. Symbolic understandings of the temple cult will remain of interest, and it will not be assumed that those who speak symbolically are also speaking critically about the cult. We will also recognize the need to eschew evolutionist approaches, which continually crop up in the scholarship, especially toward sacrifice.

The project is bounded by a number of limits, chronological, practical, and thematic. We are interested in the later Second Temple period (c. 300 b.c.e. to 70 c.e.), but we cannot cover all material relating to sacrifice and purity in ancient Jewish sources. Thankfully, there is little need to review here some topics that are well covered elsewhere. For instance, excellent scholarship exists on the architec-ture and strucarchitec-ture of the Second Temple. These works analyze the literary evidence (especially Josephus, Jewish War 5:184–287, and Mishnah Tractate Middot) along with the results of recent archaeo-logical surveys to give us a picture of the Second Temple in its physical glory.¹In addition, a number of other writers have described the day-to-day practice of the Second Temple, based on the descrip-tions in, among other sources, Mishnah Tractate Tamid and book 1 of Philo’s Special Laws.²Curiously, a number of scholarly works of one sort or another contain descriptions of fictionalized visits to the temple.³Thankfully, with the existence of these vivid accounts—as well as other helpful general treatments⁴—we have no reason to survey here either the physical structure of the temple or the nature of its daily ritual. We can focus, therefore, on the issues of our

concern: what the temple meant to ancient Jews who worshiped there, and the reasons many scholars have been reluctant to recognize the varied religious meanings of ancient Jewish sacrificial service.

As is widely recognized, the temple was the fulcrum of ancient Jewish religion. The centrality of the temple as a social institution can hardly be denied, and certainly any responsible survey of ancient Judaism devotes at least a chapter to discussing the social and religious importance of the Second Temple to ancient Judaism.⁵ Jewish people living throughout the ancient world maintained ties with the Jerusalem temple, whether by making an occasional pilgrimage to the temple or by paying the half-shekel temple tax.⁶ Many Jews living within the land of Israel maintained their ties to the temple by even more frequent visits, and by sending or bringing their biblically mandated agricultural donations and other votive offerings.⁷But the temple’s centrality was not only manifest in the economic sphere. The temple was the location of political, judicial, and religious decision-making, serving as an assembly, court, school, and, perhaps, library.⁸ Even after the temple’s de-struction, the continued importance of the institution can be seen in the physical decoration and structural orientation of ancient synagogues: long after 70 c.e., these buildings commonly faced Jerusalem and were adorned with temple motifs. The importance of the temple is enshrined in scholarly discourse through the near-consensus periodization of ancient Jewish history into the ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘Second Temple’’ periods.

But it is not primarily these aspects of the temple that give rise to much of the scholarship on the Second Temple, although most of the items just mentioned are widely acknowledged and discussed in the scholarly litera-ture. Much of the scholarship on the Second Temple—like, indeed, much of the scholarship on ancient Judaism in general—serves not primarily to ana-lyze the stated topic but rather as a backdrop for something else, whether it is the study of the New Testament, rabbinic Judaism, or, ever more com-monly, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars of the New Testament, of course, are obligated to try to make sense of the tantalizingly brief narratives of the Last Supper and Jesus’ overturning the tables in the temple. Scholars of rabbinic Judaism must make sense of the rabbinic response to the destruction of the temple—indeed, for many scholars, the response to 70 c.e. is what makes rabbinic Judaism what it was. Scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have no choice but to understand why it is (or at least seems to be) that the sectarians withdrew from the Jerusalem temple. The problem is that there is a difficulty inherent in all three of these endeavors, one that has hindered scholarly understanding of the Second Temple and its ritual practices: it is all too easy for the temple to play the role of antagonist in the drama of the development of whatever phenomenon primarily interests the scholar, be it rabbinic Ju-daism, the New Testament, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As we will see later, scholars of the New Testament all too commonly find something truly flawed in the Second Temple, be it the moral corruption of the priests, the ostensibly offensive nature of the purity system, or the in-herent inefficacy of sacrificial ritual. Christianity, in these analyses, makes a 104 s e c o n d t e m p l e , s y mb o li s m , a n d s up e r s e s s i o n i s m

decided advance by ‘‘spiritualizing’’ the temple or by providing an ever more effective and meaningful service in the eucharist. Of course, in order to speak of a spiritualization of sacrifice (or of any ritual for that matter) one must assume that that particular ritual lacks all spirit (or meaning) to begin with.⁹ In a similar vein, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls commonly assume that the temple that the sectarians rejected was indeed worth rejecting, for any one of the reasons just noted, or perhaps others too (we will schematize their antitemple polemics in chapter 5). So the sectarians, too, may have ‘‘spiritu-alized’’ the temple, or in some other way provided a better alternative. Finally, for reasons already mentioned in part I, scholars of rabbinic and postrabbinic Judaism have also all too frequently operated on similar biases, positing that rabbinic Judaism makes a moral advance over ancient Judaism, replacing the sacrificial service with the rabbinic ‘‘service of the heart.’’¹⁰

The evolutionism that is all too common in these interrelated fields has led to the manifestation in scholarly discourse of a number of specific interpretive oversights and errors. First, while there is much literature devoted to the Second Temple and its symbolic significance, surprisingly little of that scholarship even attempts to connect the adduced meanings of the temple to an understanding of the rituals that took place there. Thus while one can find many analyses of the

‘‘cosmic symbolism’’ of the Second Temple, one can hardly find an analysis that attempts to connect directly the temple’s purificatory or sacrificial rituals to such cosmic symbolism.¹¹The reluctance to recognize that sacrifice itself could have meaning for those who practiced it remains regnant. Of course, this phenom-enon goes hand in hand with evolutionist arguments: as a meaningless vestige, sacrifice was destined to disappear.

A second problem pertaining to many of these analyses is the fact that when symbolic meanings of the temple (and in rare cases, of sacrifice itself ) are identified, they are ascribed not to those Jews who believe in the temple and its sacrifices but to those who ostensibly spiritualize it or reject it.¹²According to this approach, symbolic understandings of the temple—as representing the cosmos, for instance—are attributed to diaspora Jews removed from the tem-ple’s reality, mystics removed from all reality, or Christians and schismatics who no longer believe in the temple’s legitimacy or efficacy. As we will see, especially in chapter 4, there is little justification for this. The rush to ascribe symbolic understandings of the temple to those who ostensibly reject the temple is a reflection of the degree to which scholarship on these matters remains influ-enced by the various antisacrificial biases we have been tracking in this book.

A third problem is closely related to the second. Just as scholars too often ascribe any temple-related symbolic discourse to those who ostensibly reject the temple, so too scholars too frequently ascribe moral sensibilities to those who reject the temple but not to those who adhere to it. The problems dis-cussed in chapter 3 appear also in scholarly discourse on the ancient period:

the morality of those neoprophetic voices that criticize the temple is generally left unquestioned, and the immorality of those priests and others who maintain the temple in all its hierarchical exclusivity is often assumed.¹³ Those who reject the temple or managed to survive it are able to develop

meaningful, moral, and more inclusive modes of worship. Compared to these sensitive visionaries, temple-centered Judaism is understood to be decidedly lacking in morality and meaning.

And there is a fourth problem: just as scholars tend to attribute all sym-bolic understandings of the temple to those Jews who reject it in some fashion, scholars then tend to group disparate symbolic approaches together, without recognizing the practical and theoretical differences between them. Some Jews imagined that the earthly temple represented the entire cosmos. Other Jews imagined that the earthly temple corresponded to a heavenly temple within the cosmos. But scholarly discourse tends to lump these—and other—distinct ideas together as ‘‘cosmic symbolism.’’ We will see, however, that a fuller understanding of ancient Jewish meanings ascribed to the temple is predicated on a more precise analysis of these distinct ideas.

A fifth problem is similar to the fourth. Just as scholars have not distin-guished adequately between various ‘‘cosmic’’ symbolisms, so too scholars could distinguish better the various charges that are raised against the temple by certain groups of ancient Jews. In the effort to bolster the antitemple camp—and perhaps unduly influenced themselves by the various antisacrificial biases we have traced here—some scholars seem too quick to group together various polemics that are best seen separately. For some, the criticisms are grouped together in order to make the case that the temple or its personnel were in fact corrupt. For others, the criticisms of the temple once grouped together are all seen as examples of ‘‘spiritualizations’’ of sacrifice. To be sure, there are certain common threads to these antitemple polemics (at least those that are anti-temple), and we can hardly suggest that the temple was a pristine place where nothing went wrong. Nonetheless, it is my belief that scholarly analysis could benefit from a clearer differentiation and schematization of these various views.

Finally, more attention must be paid to the various ways ancient Jews (and, indeed, early Christians) attempted to channel the sanctity of the temple into other realms of daily life, such as eating and praying. These efforts—also too commonly described as ‘‘spritualizations’’—are not criticisms of the temple, nor are they attempts to replace it. As we will see, these efforts are merely further attestations of the temple’s meaning and significance.

I will bolster these claims throughout the rest of this book. But before developing these arguments, it will be worthwhile to review two recent works, each of which presents a synthesis of the understandings of the temple in ancient Judaism. Because we will be able to rely on these works for what they do well, these works deserve attention here. But neither of these works is entirely free of the problems spelled out above, and so I hope these brief reviews will further underscore the need for the analysis that follows.

C. T. R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple

One helpful survey of the meanings attributed to the temple (and secondar-ily to sacrifice) in ancient Judaism can be found in The Jewish Temple: A 106 s e c o n d t e m p l e , s y mb o li s m , a n d s up e r s e s s i o n i s m

Non-Biblical Sourcebook, by C. T. R. Hayward. This work—aimed at the stu-dent and scholar alike¹⁴—surveys a number of the important Second Temple period texts, with an eye toward helping others understand and appreciate the meanings attributed by ancient Jews to the temple during its last centuries of existence. The work focuses primarily on the symbolic meanings ascribed to the structural elements of the temple and its personnel. Hayward devotes time and attention to two central ideas: (1) that the temple was understood as a symbolic representation of the cosmos, and (2) that it was understood as an earthly counterpart to a temple in heaven.¹⁵Of course, sacrifice plays a role in his analysis, as it must, but it is fair to say that illuminating the symbolic understandings of sacrifice per se is not Hayward’s primary focus. The work provides helpful analyses and bibliography—and I acknowledge my debt here.

As its title suggests, Hayward’s book seeks to present and comment on nonbiblical texts, understood here in the sense of the Protestant canon. No chapters focus on either the New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, while two chapters focus on the ‘‘apocryphal’’ Wisdom of Ben Sira (which, of course, is biblical for Catholics and others). But the Protestant Bible is not the only boundary drawn in this nonbiblical sourcebook. Three other realms of liter-ature are not treated systematically: rabbinic sources, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the various documents speaking of ascent to a heavenly temple. Pre-sumably, rabbinic literature is not treated systematically because these sources are beyond the chronological bounds Hayward sets for his study.¹⁶It is less clear why Hayward doesn’t devote more time to descriptions of the heavenly temple. Perhaps it was determined that these sources have been handled adequately elsewhere.¹⁷

Hayward does tell us why Qumranic literature gets scant attention: the Dead Sea sectarians rejected the Jerusalem temple, believing instead that their community functioned as a temporary stand-in for the current defiled temple.¹⁸ Hayward is certainly correct that much of the Qumranic literature criticizes the structure, practices, and priesthood of the Second Temple. But the exclusion of all Qumranic literature from a survey of ancient Jewish understandings of the temple is a methodologically flawed move, in at least two ways. First, even if Hayward’s view of the sectarian community-as-temple idea is correct (we will turn to this question in chapter 5), the idea that all of Qumranic literature agrees with this principle remains to be demonstrated.¹⁹ As we will see, many Qumranic texts provide insight into ways in which the temple and its sacrificial service were understood by many ancient Jews, in-cluding the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and, of course, the Temple Scroll.

The second problem here is Hayward’s well-intentioned assumption that an exploration of the Jerusalem temple should ‘‘focus upon people and writings which were favorably disposed towards it.’’²⁰Hayward’s survey pro-vides an important antidote to the often anticultic approaches taken to this material. Hayward is correct when he implies that a lack of contemporary scholarly sympathy for the subject is often manifest in a scholarly focus on those texts that were critical of the institution in question. But in my view, the problem is not that scholars have studied these critical texts too much, it’s that

they have allowed themselves to be persuaded by these texts that the temple was a flawed institution. As we will see in the following chapters, there is much to be learned from a sympathetic reading of the critical literature.²¹ Still, Hayward’s sourcebook is commendable and extremely helpful with re-gard to what it does cover, and this analysis builds productively on his work.

Francis Schmidt, How the Temple Thinks

Another important recent work that seeks to present a synthesis of ancient Jewish understandings of the temple and temple service is Francis Schmidt’s How the Temple Thinks. Considering all that has been noted in earlier chapters regarding Durkheim, Hubert, and Mauss, it is certainly fitting to point out that Schmidt holds a chair in the history of Judaism at the E´cole Pratique des Hautes E´tudes. Indeed, in more ways than one, Schmidt is the heir to their tradition.²² In How the Temple Thinks we find a generally sympathetic, non-evolutionist look at ancient Judaism, one that is informed by the insights of functionalist anthropology.

Schmidt helpfully and correctly rejects the idea—believed by many, but in fact supported by little evidence—that the Second Temple was an institution in decline.²³Schmidt also correctly criticizes those who describe the alleged Qumranic or Christian rejections of the temple as ‘‘spiritualizations’’ of the cult.²⁴ He correctly identifies the two biases that motivate such approaches.

Christian theology, predicated on the replacement of Jewish sacrifice by the death of Jesus, is one important motive.²⁵ The modernizing tendencies of Reform-minded Jewish scholars, who viewed with favor the destruction of the temple and its replacement by the synagogue, is another.²⁶Thus Schmidt’s work provides an important corrective to much of the biased work that pro-poses to describe the Second Temple but in fact criticizes it.

Schmidt’s work is particularly important in its demonstration that the temple has meaning—in his words, it has its own ‘‘thinking.’’ Thus Schmidt correctly argues that when those living outside the temple seek to imitate its sanctity, they are not criticizing or replacing the temple, they are emulating it; we will return to this issue now and again. But Schmidt’s understanding of the temple’s thought is rather narrow. Schmidt believes the fundamen-tal purpose of the institution is ‘‘to prevent the mixing of orders,’’ which is achieved by ‘‘establishing over the natural and social world a control according to the categories of the sacred and the profane, of the pure and the impure.’’²⁷ In other words, the temple seeks to symbolize and enforce social hierarchies.

It is here, of course, that his indebtedness to the functionalist tradition be-comes most clear.²⁸Yet in my view, Schmidt has mistaken the means for the ends: classification is not a goal in and of itself. Indeed, although it is sym-pathetically written, How the Temple Thinks can still be taken as an indictment of the Second Temple. It comes off, in Schmidt’s telling, as an institution interested primarily in control and hierarchy. The temple and its priests were particularly obsessed with the exclusion of foreigners (mistakenly deemed in 108 s e c o n d t e m p l e , s y mb o li s m , a n d s up e r s e s s i o n i s m

Schmidt’s analysis to be inherently impure).²⁹ Moreover, in his overly sim-plified analysis of the conflicts of the Second Temple period, all seems to hinge on whether or not sacrifices may be offered at the temple by or for Gentiles.³⁰

While the priestly traditions do of course speak with frequency of

While the priestly traditions do of course speak with frequency of