huge stones and broken by five stout gates, embellished palaces, a citadel, towers, courtyards; the ritual buildings themselves occupied a plateau that was about three hundred yards square.30 This construction repeated patterns and designs common in the Hellenized world, and the Jerusalem Temple began to loom as one of its great structures.
When the Romans, under Pompey, brought Israel’s independence to an end in 67 B.C.E., skirmishes, referred to earlier, were fought by resisting Jews in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount, but no lasting damage was done to the Temple as the dominance of Rome began. When the Roman client ruler, the quasi-Jewish Herod the Great, was elected “King of the Jews” by the Roman Senate in about 39 B.C.E., his challenge was to establish his legitimacy with a population that regarded him as an interloper. With a view to winning over his skeptical subjects—and to impressing his patrons in Rome—he undertook the project of making the Jerusalem Temple even grander. By about the year 20 B.C.E., having scrupulously commissioned more than a thousand Jewish priests as masons and carpenters, Herod had completed most of a major reconstruction, which indeed made the Temple of Jerusalem one of the most spectacular buildings in the world. Ad hoc construction on the compound would continue for another eighty years, until the catastrophe of 70 C.E., but the main redesign and renovation was accomplished quickly. Red-tiled roofs, colonnades, hundreds of pillars, grand stairways, a huge central sanctuary with looming columns, wall bridges, hundreds of finely hewn blocks, multiple courtyards, double and triple gates, porticoes—all made of gleaming gold-white Jerusalem stone and pale limestone, and positioned atop a spectacular butte visible for miles: the Temple was breathtakingly beautiful.
That the Temple magnificently enshrined the sacred precincts in which believers, gathering periodically by the hundreds of thousands, could make their joyous sacrificial offerings in petition and thanksgiving was what made the Temple precious to almost all Jews. Indeed, it was precious to non-Jews as well, with the so-called Courtyard of the Gentiles being one of the Temple’s most commodious spaces—an indication of Israel’s ecumenical openness that contradicts a later Christian disparagement of Judaism as exclusivist and clannish.
The glories of the Temple notwithstanding, Jews disdained Herod and his successors, and many were ambivalent about the Hellenized culture that stamped the architecture of his greatest achievement. But ambivalence drained away as they made “aliyah,” going up to the hilltop city for religious festivals, and from the city up to its sacred plateau. Jews were devoted to the Temple not for its physical splendor but for the devotion it inspired. That it brought them into intimate contact with the Holy One, in a setting whose magnificence could make the Holy One’s presence seem palpable, redoubled their love for this place. It was truly the navel of the cosmos, axis mundi, the house of God.
But where is God when God’s house is destroyed? As would happen in the twentieth century, scattered Jewish survivors of Rome’s mass violence in the year 70 were at the mercy of the dread that their God had abandoned them. Because their sanctuaries, religious symbols, and texts were destroyed in the Roman onslaught, and because they had been driven from the living center and seal of the covenant—Eretz Yisrael and its soul city, Jerusalem—the content of the Jewish religious imagination was in danger of being all but deleted.
But instead of simply disappearing, as so many peoples crushed by empire had and would again, the Jews, even as the Roman brutalizing continued intermittently for decades, retrieved from the tradition new meanings of old revelations, a fresh interpretation of the interpretations. They were able to do this only because once before, returning from Babylon six hundred years earlier, they had reinvigorated their religion around an equivalent experience of total loss. All first-century Jews, the followers of Jesus decisively included, were primed by an ancient tradition to transform that loss into a profound act of religious reinvention—spawning, ultimately, both Rabbinic Judaism and the Church.
I make these observations about expressly Jewish ideas—here and elsewhere in this book—from outside the Jewish community, aware of the dangers that adhere in Christian readings of Jewish history and thought. If I presume to do so, it is as a Christian aware of my own tradition’s essential tie to this legacy. When the Temple was destroyed, in sum, the sacred imagination was quickened, and something new happened between God and God’s people. Even if this was the initiating spark of Christianity as a separate religion, the phenomenon of renewal out of loss was Jewish to the core—because it had brought Judaism into being in the first place.
As the twentieth-century Holocaust can be said to have been at least analogously foreshadowed by events two millennia earlier, so with the Roman assault on Jerusalem. It, too, was a kind of replay. Jewish religion, after all, had its true beginning six centuries before, when armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, carted away the Ark of the Covenant, enslaved the people, and carried them off to exile. The Babylonian Captivity lasted about sixty years (597–538 B.C.E.), a period of time roughly duplicated by the Roman-Jewish war (and, coincidentally, roughly duplicated by the time elapsed from the liberation of Auschwitz until today). When the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, picking up the pieces of faith and tradition, they were—as this Christian reads the story—a different people, with a different God.
Out of the trauma of destruction and banishment, that is, they had created something new. Prophets, especially Ezekiel and Jeremiah, had recast the meaning of what happened—proclaiming a God who had used belligerent Nebuchadnezzar as a purifying instrument; a God who had accompanied His people into exile; a God, therefore, whose presence was no longer seen as restricted to the Temple of Jerusalem. Where, previously, the Holy of Holies had held the Ark of the Covenant, that sacred object, whatever it was,31 had been lost in the destruction. From now on, once the Temple was reconstructed, the Holy of Holies was to be left vacant—a numinous nonappearance that perfectly symbolized the new understanding to which the people had come. The God of Israel was seen as transcending place. A particular sanctuary defined by absence became the sacrament of God’s universal omnipresence. With that apophatic affirmation by means of negation, the imagination of Jewish religion sank its roots in paradox.
Editors and redactors, through the same experience of Babylonian exile, had recast the oral and written traditions that had long shaped the consciousness of this people—but now with a new order, a coalescence carrying a new meaning. Creation myths, ritual songs, poems, etymological tales, proverbs, parables, and narratives of memory were selected, discarded, reshaped—and composed. Only now did the people recognize in their rich store of tradition the collected revelation of God’s Word—the Bible, or Tanakh, an acronym for “Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” Returned from captivity, they became people of Torah—of the Book. And more: only now had editors arranged the revelation to begin with Genesis, a creation myth that accounted not, like others of the ancient Near East, for the origins of the tribe, but for origins of the cosmos. Genesis made the astonishing primordial claim that the God of this people, no mere local deity, was the Creator of the universe, the God of all people. Only now, that is, was the God of Israel understood to be one God, transcending not only place but time. Monolators had become monotheists.32 Such are the radical new religious convictions that came from prophetic reflection on the first of the Temple destructions. The religion of Jews was begun.
The second destruction of the Temple, in 70, was equally decisive. It sparked an immediate crisis in the life of every surviving Jew, and that crisis is the dominant—if not necessarily only—source of the Gospel preoccupations with the Temple. All Jews were forced to ask the great questions: how could the chosen people undergo such near eradication? And, in particular—now!—what is it to be a Jew without the Temple? The Temple was the seat of the priest-led theocracy established by God Himself! What is it to be Israel without that? Without priesthood, sacrifice, the Holy of Holies—sacred ritual that had brought Israel close to God for a thousand years?
Two surviving parties of Jews offered their answers—surviving parties, by the way, that were alike in having sought and found distance from the violent rebellion of the Zealots and from those who rallied to their revolution, which had brought down the wrath of Rome. Only such distance from Zealotry, which the Jews in the thick of combat had to experience as betrayal, enabled their survival as Jews. Thus, in 68 or 69, as the Romans were closing in on Jerusalem and the Temple, a Pharisaic party led by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai petitioned