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Historical context

The Second Temple

The heart of Jerusalem

Expanded by Herod, it was the center of Jewish worship. Jesus cleansed it; its veil was torn at the cross.

A temple rebuilt from the ashes

In 586 BC the Babylonians burned the temple Solomon had built. Decades later, when the Persians let the exiles return, a group led by Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, and the priest Joshua began to raise the sanctuary again on the same spot. The work was finished around 515 BC, in the sixth year of King Darius (Ezra 6:15). It was modest: the prophet Haggai records that those who had seen the old house thought the new one looked like nothing (Haggai 2:3). This building survived centuries of Persian, Greek and Roman rule. In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV desecrated the altar; three years later the Maccabees cleansed and rededicated it, the origin of the Feast of Dedication, Hanukkah, which John mentions as Jesus walks in Solomon’s Porch (John 10:22-23). This whole era, from about 515 BC to AD 70, is called the Second Temple period.

Herod’s construction site

Around 20 BC, Herod the Great set out to turn this old sanctuary into one of the wonders of the Roman world. According to Josephus, he gathered a thousand wagons for the stones and trained a thousand priests as masons and carpenters, so that only authorized hands would touch the sacred areas (Jewish Antiquities 15). The sanctuary itself was ready within a few years, but courts, porticoes and walls stayed under construction for decades: the people arguing with Jesus speak of forty-six years of building (John 2:20), and Josephus places the end of the work around AD 63. Herod nearly doubled the area of the mount with massive retaining walls, creating a platform of about 35 acres, roughly twenty soccer fields. The Western Wall, where Jews still pray today, is part of that retaining wall, not of the Temple building itself.

From the courts to the Holy of Holies

Anyone going up to the Temple first entered the vast Court of the Gentiles, open to everyone and lined with colonnades; the largest, the Royal Stoa, stood on the south side. Farther in, a low balustrade carried signs in Greek and Latin warning that foreigners could not pass on pain of death (Josephus, Jewish War 5). Next came the Court of the Women, where Israelite families entered together, and the Court of Israel, reserved for men; then the priests’ area, with the great altar of uncut stones and the basin for washing. At the top of a staircase rose the sanctuary: the Holy Place, with the seven-branched lampstand, the table of bread and the incense altar, and, behind a veil, the Holy of Holies. The ark of the covenant no longer existed; the chamber was empty, and only the high priest entered it, once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

Priests, sacrifices and incense

The Temple ran like clockwork. Every morning and every afternoon a lamb was offered as a burnt offering, the continual sacrifice commanded in Exodus 29:38-42, along with incense, prayers and the songs of the Levites. The priests were divided into 24 courses, and each course served one week at a time, usually twice a year, plus the great festivals. Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, belonged to the course of Abijah (Luke 1:5). With thousands of priests, duties were assigned by lot. The Mishnah, compiled around AD 200, describes the lot for the incense in the tractate Tamid and says only those who had never offered it could take part; for many it was a once-in-a-lifetime honor. At the top of the hierarchy stood the high priest. Under Herod and the Romans he was appointed and removed by the rulers, which made the office a political post as well.

Festivals, pilgrims and money

Three times a year, at Passover, Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles, Jerusalem filled with pilgrims from Galilee and the whole Diaspora. Josephus speaks of millions of people at a single Passover, a number historians consider inflated; modern estimates run to a few hundred thousand, still a huge crowd for a city of perhaps a few tens of thousands. Every adult Jewish man paid the Temple an annual tax of half a shekel, the two-drachma tax of Matthew 17:24, and according to rabbinic tradition the required coin was the high-purity silver shekel of Tyre. Hence the money changers, who exchanged the pilgrims’ coins, and the sellers of unblemished animals for sacrifice, especially doves, the offering of the poor. This trade was useful and legitimate in itself. But it most likely filled the Court of the Gentiles, the only place of prayer open to the nations, and that is where Jesus overturned the tables.

The torn veil and the end in 70

Josephus describes the curtain at the entrance of the sanctuary as a Babylonian tapestry of blue, scarlet and purple linen, embroidered with a panorama of the heavens (Jewish War 5). There were at least two veils, one before the Holy Place and one before the Holy of Holies, and scholars debate which one the Gospels mean when they say the veil was torn from top to bottom at Jesus’ death. The Letter to the Hebrews reads the sign as a new way opened into God’s presence through Christ’s flesh (Hebrews 10:19-20). About forty years later, in August of AD 70, during the war against Rome, Titus’s troops set the Temple on fire. Josephus, who watched the siege, says the fire started against Titus’s wishes; historians debate that version. The Arch of Titus in Rome still shows soldiers carrying the lampstand in triumph. Jesus’ word came true: not one stone was left on another.

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