Temple and Priesthood in Ancient Judaism

From the beginning of the Hellenistic period, the Temple was a central communal location for the Jewish people, an important national symbol, and a touchstone of Jewish identity and culture. Priests not only played roles within the Temple but also were important figures in society, both while the Temple stood and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in the wake of its destruction.

The roots of the Temple and priesthood extend far back into the biblical period. After the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and the subsequent Babylonian exile, the desire to return to the land and rebuild the Temple was realized by the edict of Cyrus in 539 BCE. The rebuilt Temple was completed in 516 BCE, ushering in what is often referred to as the Second Temple period. Traces of the history of this time can be found in the latest books of the Bible, especially Ezra and Nehemiah, but by the time these books were being written, the destruction and exile had already caused significant shifts in how the institution of the Temple and the priesthood were imagined and understood.

Most texts purporting to describe the Second Temple in fact reflect characteristics of the Temple that Herod rebuilt and expanded much later, beginning in the late first century BCE.

The various passages in the Bible describing the Tabernacle and Temple, their rituals, and their functionaries served as models and creative wellsprings for Jewish writers of the Second Temple period. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian authors all drew on biblical descriptions when thinking about the significance of the Temple, describing its architecture and rites, or criticizing its contemporary leadership. These foundational biblical passages include Exodus 25–40, Leviticus 1–10, 16, 23–24, and Numbers 7–9, 18, 28–29, which relate details about the Tabernacle and describe the establishment of the Aaronide priesthood; 1 Kings 6–9 and 2 Chronicles 1–8, which describe the foundation of Solomon’s Temple; Ezekiel 40–44, which envisions a future Temple; and Ezra 3–6 and Nehemiah 7–8, 10–11, which describe the foundation of the Second Temple. A wide variety of authors and groups from Judea and the Jewish diaspora wrote about the Temple, drawing on these biblical texts and reflecting and refracting them through the prism of their own interests and ideologies and their own social and cultural contexts. Writings about the Temple and priests during this period are thus as diverse as the Jewish communities from which they emerged. They drew not only on the Bible but surely in some cases on their experience of the actual institution.

At the same time, there are recurring motifs in writings about the Temple, in part because they were shaped by biblical precedents but also because of the nature of the Temple itself. The Temple was a massive central space (although it was not especially large in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, covering about one-third of the current Temple Mount) where Jews assembled as a collective and engaged with the ritual life of the people.

Repeatedly, authors express highly positive sentiments about the Temple, sometimes engaging specifically with what makes the Temple and its ritual meaningful. Mirroring biblical accounts of the Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple, and Ezekiel’s vision, authors describe the dimensions of the Temple and its various spaces in detail. Linked to the massive scale of the Temple during the Herodian period was the importance of pilgrimage and the large crowds that gathered there, especially on holidays. While the social experience of the Temple was often seen as positive, some sources—again mirroring biblical motifs and likely stemming from current historical-political realities—chose rather to criticize the Temple and those administering it. Other sources describe outright conflict and violence.

The Temple eventually became a central Judean institution with a large-scale social dimension, and Judeans were a diverse population with a range of ideas about the proper way of conducting traditional practice and culture. The reality of the Temple must therefore have diverged from how at least some groups understood its activities and its significance. The Temple was also a powerful and evocative concept. A number of authors, both before and after the Temple’s destruction, used it as a metaphor, linking it especially to groups and leaders. Perhaps for similar reasons, and also drawing on the imagined temples of the biblical texts, there developed multiple versions of a nonphysical Temple, sometimes located in heaven and sometimes imagined as part of the end of the world.

A variety of Jewish authors took an interest in Temple-related practices such as the regular half-shekel temple tax imposed on all Jews, including those in the diaspora, and the daily and festival rituals with their sacrifices. In the aftermath of the destruction in 70 CE, when these practices and rituals ceased, Jews continued to focus on the Temple, to imagine it, to respond to its loss, and to use the idea of the Temple for their own purposes. Earlier sources reflect a powerful feeling of loss, while slightly later sources begin to reclaim the Temple, construing it and its rituals in accordance with their authors’ particular agendas.

Archaeological remains provide some physical evidence for the location of the Second Temple, its structure, the practices associated with it, and the priesthood connected with it. This material provides a tangible, visual way of encountering what the authors of the textual sources may have experienced roughly two millennia ago. (See also the images in “The Jerusalem Temple.”)

Although the Jerusalem Temple was a key component of the Judean experience, it was not the only temple. Into the Hasmonean period, the Samaritans, who were quite similar to Judeans in many ways and interacted closely with them, had their own temple at Mount Gerizim. Jewish temples also existed in Egypt, at the military garrison in Elephantine (built in the sixth century and destroyed in 410 BCE), and during the Hellenistic period in Leontopolis, founded by the deposed high priest Onias. The same rituals practiced in the Jerusalem Temple were practiced at Onias’ temple in Egypt.