Horrifying as the idea may be to a modern sensibility, the temple was a slaughterhouse. As in all temples of its time, the center of its ritual was sacrifice, and sacrifice meant blood. In Hebrew, the altar is the mizbe'ach—literally, the place of slaughter—and the temple itself was called Beit HaZebach: the House of Slaughter. Nobody believed in euphemisms in those days.
Sacrifice was an attempt to placate the implacable: the divine. There were no kind gods such as Jesus would become. The Greek gods especially were unpredictable, wrathful, and vengeful. They acted on apparent impulse, toying with humans. There was no appeasing them; you could only offer, and hope.
The Jerusalem priests operated as priests did throughout the Mediterranean at the time. They cut the animals' throats, caught the blood in silver bowls, poured the blood onto the ground around the altar, then pulled out the entrails and set aside choice cuts for their own tables. Doves and other birds were used whole, but only the thigh piece of a lamb or a calf was given to the altar, wrapped in a length of entrail, encased in a double layer of fat, and sprinkled with incense. When it was cast onto the altar fire, the fat and incense sent crackling sparks flying high in loud display. Smoke rose high over the gold leaf and white marble walls, billowing not just from the sacrifice itself, but from the flames that flared up each time the priests added a special salt called maaleh ashan—"smoke-raiser"—to make the sacrifice look all the more impressive.
It was unending. There was the tamid, the continual offering, or Yahweh's daily food, twice a day; the whole-burnt offering, known in Greek as the holocaust; any number of peace offerings, sin offerings, thanks offerings, guilt offerings, and purification offerings; offerings twice daily for the Roman emperor—a continual insult to purists like the Pharisees and the Essenes; and of course thousands of pilgrims' offerings each day during festival times.
For peasant villagers, these were sacrifices in more than one sense. They were major financial sacrifices as well as ritual ones. A lamb was out of the question; only the rich could afford to purchase a flawless lamb for the altar fire. But even buying an unblemished dove from one of the dove sellers in the temple bazaar cost everything you had. And as though to add insult to the financial injury, what you offered was taken in silence, apart from the crackle of sparks and flames. Prayer was not part of the ritual, since there was nothing personal about it. Yahweh was beyond the personal.
If all this sounds like it belongs to another world, it's worth remembering that ritual sacrifice still continues. Not human sacrifice—the story of Abraham and Isaac was meant to mark the end of that era—but animal sacrifice. In Moslem tradition, a sheep is slaughtered by each family for Id el-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice of Ishmael (for Moslem tradition says that it was Ishmael who was nearly sacrificed by Abraham, not Isaac). Two and a half million sheep, cows, and goats are sacrificed each year for Id el-Adha in Turkey alone, with one third of the meat going to the needy. One visitor described "whole families searching for the perfect sacrificial sheep or cow, much like an American family's outing to select the perfect Christmas tree."
Lest Jews and Christians be inclined to feel somehow superior in this regard, consider that Christianity is based on the last great ritual act of human sacrifice—Jesus—and that Jews still celebrate the Passover seder with the shank bone of the Paschal lamb, whose blood was smeared on their ancestors' doorposts so that the angel of death would "pass over" their houses when it came to strike down the first-born of Egypt. We are much closer than many might think to the Middle East of two and three thousand years ago.
The hushed, dignified places we now call temples, cathedrals, and places of worship only became that way much later. As with sacrifice, so in every other manner, the Jerusalem temple was of its time. The huge compound housed a vast array of activity: local and national government, law courts, beggars, livestock auctions, healers, teachers, scribes, bath-houses, fortune-tellers, amulet writers, astrologists, food stalls, water sellers, tamarindi sellers pouring the pomegranate juice from the big urns on their backs into little silver cups. And soldiers, of course, keeping watch from the rooftops and the Antonia fortress alongside the temple. And money changers to transform whatever form of money you had into the one coin accepted in the temple, the shekel. And as in any Middle Eastern souk today, alleys full of tourist stores, places for fleecing pilgrims of their unaccustomed coins with enticingly colorful kitsch.
Why be surprised at the existence of a bazaar on the temple grounds? Temples then were centers of life rather than worship. Many still are today. Think of a temple complex like the Senso-ji complex in Tokyo, where you thread your way through a long gauntlet of stalls selling not just herbs, amulets, and prayers, but expensive silks, cheap rayon, ivory combs, plastic barrettes, traditional dolls, electronic games, fresh-grilled rice cakes, cold cans of black coffee, leather purses, woven bags, nylon umbrellas, paper parasols, all in every color you could ever imagine and then some, the Japanese love of the tchotchke run riot. Then you suddenly emerge into daylight and there is the temple itself, imposingly graceful. In front of it is a huge grate with gaping maws to catch the coins you are supposed to throw in, and a giant stone incense vat with people crowded around it—young girls in absurdly high platform shoes, somber-suited businessmen, smart women in Prada suits, young men in baseball shirts, old women in the Japanese equivalent of babushkas, all fanning the healing smoke over their heads, shoulders, arms, chests, backs, wherever the ailment is.
There is nothing quiet or hushed about such temples. They teem with life, and the life itself is testament to the vitality of faith.
The old Nazarene men on pilgrimage had seen more people than they'd ever imagined existed. To peasants from a village of two or three hundred people, a crowd of one thousand would have seemed vast, let alone the tens of thousands who thronged the narrow alleys of Jerusalem in festival times. Think of a peasant farmer from northern Afghanistan, one with no access to television or videos, placed suddenly on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Who could have imagined buildings that high, or all that traffic, or those strange goods in the stores? The noise, the buzz of the city, its never-ending hum and jostling and sheer peopled-ness? The elegant men and women, like creatures from another planet, with soft hands and unlined faces, plump satiated bellies, garments of silk and impossibly soft wool?
The people thronging the alleys of Jerusalem in pilgrimage time talked in so many dialects of Aramaic that the Nazarenes could barely understand every second word. There were some with skin so dark you could barely see them at night, and others with faces so pale they seemed to light up the night.
The old men tried to explain the strange feel of coins in their hands and the dealings of the money changers, who made incomprehensible calculations as they changed the Roman currency with its graven image of the emperor Augustus, a man who dared to call himself a god, into temple shekels. And the villagers shook their heads in wonder at the very idea of transforming food and herbs into pieces of bronze and silver instead of their simpler, more direct way of barter.
They stared into the firelight, mesmerized, as the elders talked about the nights in Jerusalem. So much light, they said, you couldn't even see the stars. Oil lamps everywhere, as though there were enough olives in the world to banish not just darkness but the night itself. The whole of the temple glowing from within, lit not just with single-flame lamps like the villagers used but with whole candelabra, hundreds of lamps hanging on a single chain.
And with every gasp, every stunned exclamation of awe and disbelief, the villagers were reacting exactly as Herod had intended, for he had rebuilt the Jerusalem temple less as a testament to divine power than as a showcase for his own.
Herod's temple was, as historian and sociologist Richard Horsley puts it, "a monumental institution of religio-political propaganda." One of the most ambitious construction projects in the world at the time, it made the previous temples on the site seem like rustic shrines by comparison. Perhaps in fact they were.
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sp; Built in the grand Hellenistic-Roman style, the temple complex—courtyards, cloisters, colonnades—was raised up on a high platform. At the center, towering high above all else, its marble glistening white in the Mideast sun, its gold leaf flashing like fire, was the sanctuary containing the holy of holies, the home of Yahweh. Only the high priest could enter there, through massive cypress doors covered by a giant gold vine with clusters of grapes the size of a man, and then only on the most sacred day of the year, Yom Kippur. Most could venture no further than the courtyard in front of the altar, which was simply a huge limestone slab. This was the original peak of the mountain. It was the same slab of stone where Abraham had laid Isaac/Ishmael for the slaughter, and which nearly seven centuries later would be the point from which Mohammed ascended on his night visit to heaven.
The bottom of the steps leading to the altar was as far as the old men from Nazareth had gotten as they handed over their sacrificial birds to the priests' servants. But that too was part of the grand design. To keep your distance is an indication of awe and respect; approach too close, and a mere mortal can suffer the wrath of a god disturbed.
Even the priests were remote. You could only glimpse them as they went about their grim work on the altar, or as they swept by on their way to the temple from their mansions on the facing hillside, and then what struck you most was the sunlight reflecting off their gem-encrusted breastplates. They lived like kings in those mansions, people said—like Herod himself—with servants and slaves, their own private guards, and the many wives that only the rich could afford. For to be one of the priestly elite was to be an aristocrat. And to be an aristocrat was to "share" in the immense wealth of the temple.
Corruption was endemic to the system, even on the most minor level. The dove-selling concession, for example, was reserved for relatives of the high priest, Annas, whose son-in-law Caiaphas would soon replace him; like most monopolies, it involved graft and extortionate prices. The temple treasury, housed in strongrooms well below ground, was filled with gold given in tribute by foreign kings and statesmen. Much of this ended up in the hands and homes of the high priesthood, and much more was squirreled away out of the country—to relatives in the Judean communities of Alexandria, Antioch, or Babylon—in case the masses ever got so unruly as to force the aristocracy to flee. Swiss banks today fulfill the same purpose.
The high priests and their families were right to be worried. Who knew what could happen during festival times? They were a chance to let off steam. Pilgrims would do what people have always done when far from home in an anonymous setting: they drank, they partied, and sometimes, well-fueled, they rioted.
Not religious behavior? Not by modern western standards, perhaps, but in most other places and times, religious rites and festivals do not come with the kind of pious solemnity we tend to associate with "church." African and Asian traditions have a far earthier sense of celebration. Services are loud and joyful: a feast day is truly a feast, a festival truly festive. And such behavior is truly in the religious tradition.
The ancient Greeks sought ecstasy in drink and drugs, dancing and singing, seeking out the intoxicating joy of encountering the holy. The word "enthusiasm," we forget, comes from the Greek entheos: being filled with God, en-Godded. And Jerusalem in festival times was full of such enthusiasts.
Teachers and healers, self-proclaimed messiahs with an inside lock on salvation, magicians and preachers, wise men and madmen, all gathered in the temple's vast Court of the Israelites, which was very like the large open courts of major Mideastern mosques today. This is where teachers met with groups of their students or disciples, sitting in circles and discussing the questions we now differentiate into philosophy and theology, though in those days, the two were essentially the same. Their disciples addressed them as rav-i—"my great one" or "my master," an honorific form of address that would imply no specific religious training until centuries later. Eventually, it would become "rabbi" in English.
These were the Pharisees, the precursors of rabbinic Judaism. They were not the villains they would be made out to be later by the gospel writers, but idealists whose philosophy was very close to that of Jesus, to the degree that some scholars assert that Jesus himself was a Pharisee. Certainly his teachings and beliefs mirror those of legendary first-century Pharisee sages like Hillel, sometimes practically word for word.
Such teachers were often strongly opposed to the corruption of the Judean tradition in the Hellenistic temple, as imams in Saudi Arabia might be today to what they see as state corruption of Islamic tradition. Within the temple precincts, they preached against what it had become: the religio-political propaganda machine. This isn't the true temple, they said. This is an ethical travesty, a tribute from the half-Jew Herod to his Roman employers. This is a foreign abomination run by the high priesthood, the Sadducees, in the service of Rome and of Herod, Rome's servant and puppet.
As they talked, crowds gathered, scattering at the first sign of soldiers moving toward them unless there was one preacher who was especially potent, especially filled with God, and then his rapture would fill his listeners and they'd be moved to confrontation. A melee could develop into a riot within minutes, and a riot into a minor massacre. The survivors would be dragged off in chains, never to be seen again. Or worse, as happened to forty students and their teachers the year Herod was dying, to be burned alive after they had surged out of the temple court to the main gate of the temple and torn down the huge golden eagle that Herod had ordered placed there as a symbol of Roman dominion.
The Sadducees and the Pharisees were the two main denominations, as it were, of Jewishness at the time, but not the only ones. In Samaria, between Jerusalem and the Galilee, the Samaritans zealously guarded their own separate Yahwistic traditions, while the Essenes, shut away in their desert stronghold beside the Dead Sea, dreamed of apocalypse and planned to reclaim and repurify the temple. Between these and other factions, to be Jewish two thousand years ago was to be even more fractured and politically divided than to be Israeli today.
Maryam was Jewish, of course, but not by any modern definition. She was not, as the curator of an Israeli museum exhibit on ancient goddesses dismissively called her, "a nice Jewish girl." She did not say blessings over candles and challah bread on Friday evenings. She did not sit modestly in the women's gallery in the synagogue while her menfolk bobbed up and down below, wrapped in prayer shawls. All these traditions had still to come into being. Only priests wore prayer shawls. And there were not yet any synagogues in the way we now think of them. The Greek word synagogue was used for a village or town meeting place, not a place of worship. In first-century Palestine, Herod's great temple was the only official place for that.
The Judaism we know today, rabbinic Judaism, did not yet exist. In fact, religion itself did not exist as we now understand it. Ask Maryam what religion she was, and she'd have stared at you in incomprehension. There was no such category. What we now think of in the west as the separate spheres of religion, politics, ethnicity, and culture were so deeply intertwined that there was no distinction between them.
A Jew—Yehudi in both Aramaic and Hebrew—was literally someone from Judea, Yehuda. Judean-ness was an ethnic and national identity, and the Jerusalem temple, with its recognition of Yahweh as the ultimate god, was the cement binding that identity.
Seen from the perspective of today's Middle East, this is quite familiar. In Israel, identity cards have a category for am, or ethnic nationality. The word "Jew" is written for Israeli Jews, "Arab" for Israeli Arabs, whether Christian or Moslem. Thanks to the power of the religious political parties, there is no distinction in law between Jewish ethnicity and Jewish religion, making Israel a far more typical Middle Eastern country than most Israelis care to admit. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia maintain that under Islamic law, there can be no separation of religion and state. Their ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam is their politics, and their rhetoric against the ruling House of Saud o
r against the Egyptian president sounds very like the rhetoric used in Jerusalem two millennia ago against the Sadducee high priesthood and Herod. More perhaps than anywhere else in the world, religion is still inextricably intertwined with nationalism in the Middle East.
Maryam, however, was a Jew neither in the modern sense of Judaism nor in the ancient sense of being a Judean. She was a Galilean, and Judea and Galilee had a long history of mutual antagonism, reaching back over nine hundred years to their existence as separate kingdoms.
The northern kingdom of Israel had covered all of Galilee and was the richer. It had more rainfall and better agricultural land, and was also closer to the main trade routes of the Silk Road, which is doubtless why it fell first to foreign occupation, being conquered by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C. The southern kingdom of Judea maintained a precarious independence for another two hundred years before falling to the Babylonians. Its prophets blamed the north's downfall on idolatry—and on a woman. As Eve led to the fall from Eden, they claimed, so too Queen Jezebel and her Baalite priests led to the fall of the kingdom of Israel. But in fact the reasons were as geopolitical as they are today. When you live at a crossroads, you can expect to be crossed by many people.
In the twentieth century alone, Palestinians tick off the succession of occupiers on their fingers: Turks, British, Jordanians, Israelis. Ancient Judeans and Galileans counted off a millennium of occupiers: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Parthians, and Romans. The Galileans, however, added one more to that list: Judeans.
Galilee was conquered by the Judeans in 128 B.C. Specifically, by Judah the Maccabee's grandson John Hyrcanus, scion of the Asamoneans, known in Greek and subsequently in English as the Hasmoneans. They had seized power in Judea nearly fifty years earlier in a revolt against the Greco-Syrian Seleucid occupiers, claiming that they were restoring Judea to a purer state, free of Hellenic influence. For the first time in more than five hundred years, there was an independent Judean kingdom. But a familiar pattern developed: what began as a praiseworthy freedom movement devolved into a power-hungry land grab.
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