Classical Antiquity
Persian, Hellenistic, Hasmonean, and Roman rule. Two temples destroyed; rabbinic Judaism takes shape.
Biblical Narrative
On the banks of the river Kevar, with the Temple in ashes far away, the prophet Yechezkel saw a wheel within a wheel and the glory of the Lord that had once dwelt in the Holy of Holies hovering above the rivers of exile. The God of Israel had not stayed behind in Yerushalayim. He had gone with His people. In a strange land, on rooftops above the canals of Bavel, the elders gathered and wept. By the waters of that exile they hung their harps on the willows; but they also began, slowly, to write down what had been remembered only in the priesthood and the prophet's mouth — and a Book began to take shape.
Then Cyrus, king of Paras, conquered Bavel and proclaimed: whosoever there is among you of all His people — the Lord his God be with him — let him go up. They went up: Zerubavel of the line of David, Yehoshua the High Priest, and a remnant who remembered Tziyon. They laid the foundation of the Second Temple, and the old men who had seen the first wept aloud, while the young men shouted for joy, and the people could not tell the weeping from the rejoicing. Ezra the scribe came up later with the Torah in his hand and read it from a wooden pulpit before all the people, and Nechemyah rebuilt the walls in fifty-two days against the mockery of Sanvalat.
Greek armies came; Greek learning came; and Greek altars were set up in the very Temple. A priest named Mattityahu refused, killed the king's officer at Modi'in, and his five sons led a revolt that should have failed. They drove out the Seleucids, cleansed the Temple, and a single cruse of pure oil burned for eight days when it should have lasted one. Hasmonean princes ruled for a century — until two of them quarreled and called Rome in to arbitrate, and Rome did not leave.
Then the days darkened toward the end. Sects multiplied — Pharisees and Sadducees, Essenes by the Dead Sea copying scrolls, Zealots in the hills sharpening daggers. In 70 CE, four years into a doomed revolt, Roman legions breached the walls and burned the Second Temple to its foundations. Sixty-five years later Bar Kokhva rose, and was crushed; the very name Yehuda was struck from the map and replaced with Syria Palaestina. But in the small town of Yavneh, in the years just after the burning, a circle of sages led by Yochanan ben Zakkai sat down to do something new. They began to build a Judaism that could survive without a Temple, without a land, without a king — a Judaism of the book, the synagogue, and the school. The Mishna was being born.
Give me Yavneh and its sages.Yochanan ben Zakkai, attributed — the request that re-founded Jewish life after 70 CE
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Persian-period Yehud was small — perhaps 30,000 souls in an area of a few hundred square kilometers around Jerusalem — but it was, paradoxically, the laboratory in which biblical Judaism took its mature shape. The destruction of the Temple forced a shift from cult to text. Bullae, coins, and the Elephantine papyri (an Aramaic archive of a Jewish military colony in Egypt, c. 5th century BCE) document a network of Yahweh-worshipping communities scattered across the Persian empire, in regular contact with Jerusalem. The Pentateuch in something close to its present form, the Deuteronomistic history, and most of the prophetic books were edited and canonized in this period.
Hellenism arrived with Alexander in 332 BCE and never left. Greek became the lingua franca of educated Jews in Alexandria, where in the 3rd century BCE the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek made Jewish scripture available to the Mediterranean world for the first time. Jewish theological thinking, embedded in Greek philosophical categories by writers like Philo of Alexandria, would shape both rabbinic Judaism and emerging Christianity. Maccabean coins, Hasmonean fortifications at Masada and the Herodion, and the spectacular ruins of Herod's Second Temple expansion (the retaining walls still standing as the Western Wall and Robinson's Arch) survive as the architecture of an aggressive Jewish revivalism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves above Khirbet Qumran, are the great gift of this Age to modern scholarship. About 900 manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — biblical, sectarian, and pseudepigraphic — push the textual history of the Hebrew Bible back a thousand years before the medieval Masoretic codices. They show us a Judaism that was not yet rabbinic and not yet Christian: a fervent, apocalyptic, priestly current convinced that history was about to climax in a final battle of the sons of light against the sons of darkness.
The Roman destruction of 70 CE, recorded in pitiless detail by the eyewitness historian Flavius Josephus, ended Temple Judaism. What replaced it was something the world had not seen before: a religious civilization based not on a sanctuary but on a portable canon, on a class of teachers (the rabbis) replacing priests, on the synagogue replacing the Temple, on study replacing sacrifice. The earliest stratum of the Mishna was redacted around 200 CE. Christianity, born in this same century out of the same Jewish matrix, took the imperial road; rabbinic Judaism took the academy road. Both would dominate the centuries to come.
Two religions came out of the ruins of the Second Temple, and the world has been argued over by them ever since.Geza Vermes (paraphrased)