Temple and Empire

With the passage of the first millennium, the Jerusalem temple community was significantly impacted by the arrival of foreign empires: first the Neo-Babylonian, then the Persian and finally Ptolemaic and Seleucid. In April 2023, I co-convened (with Rotem Avneri Meir) a two-day conference at Harvard in which leading scholars reviewed two key pieces of evidence that relate to the first decades of Seleucid rule in Jerusalem; namely, the edicts of Antiochus III preserved in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities. The proceedings, which have been published as a special issue of the Journal of Ancient Judaism, highlight the importance of comparative methodologies for situating the decrees within Seleucid administrative practices, on the one hand, and biblical and Second Temple writings, on the other. Such comparative approaches enable us to use the decrees to illuminate the political and religious status of Jerusalem, the Jews, and Judaism in the Hellenistic world.

My article “Purity, Cult, and Empire: Antiochus III’s Proclamation Concerning the Temple and City in Jerusalem” offers new insights on the second decree of Antiochus that forbids foreigners from entering the temple, and non-sacrificial animals from entering Jerusalem, by comparing it with comparative materials from Greece, biblical and Second Temple writings, and archaeological remains from Hellenistic Jerusalem.

Beyond this, “Ritual Textualization in the Priestly Traditions of the Hebrew Bible and Late Babylonian Priestly Literature” ( co-authored with Céline Debourse), explores how the pressures of empire inspired comparable processes of ritual textualization in Persian-period Jerusalem and Late Babylonian temple communities in Uruk and Babylon. We provide the first detailed comparison of the Priestly rituals texts of the Pentateuch and the Late Babylonian temple ritual texts, highlighting several distinctive features they shared in common. These similarities support the theory that the textualization of ritual in the Priestly traditions was inspired by similar historical dynamics to those that informed the textualization of ritual in the Late Babylonian materials; namely, the cultic disruption caused by foreign imperial interference and temple destruction, and the resultant challenges of rebuilding the temple in the absence of a local king with a stake in the cultic restoration.