Land and Temple

Field Sacralization and the Agrarian Priesthood of Second Temple Judaism

Benjamin D. Gordon

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110421163
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología judía

This exploration of the Judean priesthood's role in agricultural cultivation demonstrates that the institutional reach of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE–70 CE) went far beyond the confines of its houses of worship, while exposing an unfamiliar aspect of sacred place-making in the ancient Jewish experience. Temples of the ancient world regularly held assets in land, often naming a patron deity as landowner and affording the land sanctity protections. Such arrangements can provide essential background to the Hebrew Bible's assertion that God is the owner of the land of Israel. They can also shed light on references in early Jewish literature to the sacred landholdings of the priesthood or the temple.

Chapter 1 Introduction

The temple has for its revenues not only portions of land, but also other possessions of much greater extent and importance, which will never be destroyed or diminished.

—Philo of Alexandria, Spec. Laws 1.76

One should not engage in business dealings with consecrated property or the property of the poor.

—Rabbi Akiva, m. Šeqalim 4:3

This book explores how the Judean priesthood was involved in land ownership and agricultural cultivation in the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE). It is informed by studies of other temple organizations from the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, and by references throughout early Jewish literature to consecrated plots of land. The primary source material suggests that in addition to consecrations meant as earmarked gifts for priests or the temple, Judeans were consecrating land to secure loans issued from the holy treasuries, for example, or as a means of inhibiting a rightful claimant from gaining access to property. This aspect of early Judaism’s institutional reach far beyond the confines of its houses of worship underscores its similarity to the religious organizations of the ancient world. It also reveals yet another aspect of place-making in the ancient Judean experience—how generic, undifferentiated outdoor space could be sacralized, and how that sacralization can inform our understanding of Second Temple Judaism’s primary religious organizations of priesthood and temple.

The Judean priesthood is said in Ezra-Nehemiah to have total 4,289 in number (Ezra 2:36 – 42; Neh 7:39 – 45, 11:10 – 22, 12:1 – 26), giving some indication of its size around the fifth century BCE. The Hasmonean destruction of the Yahwistic shrine at Mt. Gerizim in the final decades of the second century BCE left the Jerusalem temple as the sole locus for the worship of the deity in greater Judea and it anticipated the precipitous growth of the institution in the first centuries BCE and CE. Meanwhile, another Yahwistic temple was founded in the second century BCE at Leontopolis in Egypt by a breakaway group of Judean priests of the Oniad family. The massive physical expansion of the Jerusalem sacred precinct by King Herod beginning in 20 BCE, a project which included the total rebuilding of the temple itself, resulted in a precinct with a circumference of nearly 1 mile, dwarfing that of all others in the ancient world. According to Josephus, a staggering number of 2,700,000 male pilgrims came to Jerusalem in the Passover of 66 CE (War 6.425), surely an exaggeration but one that gives the sense of the magnitude of this eastern pilgrimage city nevertheless. The economy of Jerusalem benefitted tremendously from the influx of pilgrims to the city on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot.¹

Josephus has the priesthood numbering 20,000 men in his day (C. Ap. 2.108). This was an esteemed class whose members enjoyed prominent roles in the civil and judicial spheres of life, serving not only as the officers of the cult but also as judges, scribes, taxmen, and bureaucrats.² The high priest of Jerusalem had become the de facto ruler of Judea in the late fourth century BCE, and would assume that role again in the reign of the Hasmonean priest-kings from the mid-second century to the rise of Herod in 37 BCE.³ Archaeological inquiry at late Second Temple period sites has demonstrated the extent to which priestly purity requirements were widely practiced throughout Judean society.⁴ Motifs emerging on Late Antique synagogue decoration and in liturgical poems have attested to the position of honor enjoyed by priests in Jewish communities centuries after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.⁵

The Judean priesthood was a hereditary, kinship-based organization, with altar service rotating among different clans of priests.⁶ These clans, which according to the book of Chronicles were 24 in number (1 Chr 24:1 – 18), may have not always cooperated so peacefully with one another. Josephus remarks that certain chief priests sent slaves to the threshing floors to take tithes due to other priests, with the result being that some priests starved to death (Ant. 20.179 – 81). In another remark Josephus condemns the high priest Ananias for the misappropriation of tithes (Ant. 20.205 – 6), while Philo explains the impoverishment of certain priests as a result of the neglect of the populace to give the proper offerings (Spec. Laws 1.154). This suggests a loose or ineffectual system of central administration in Jerusalem for the collection of holy dues. In its fragmentation into clans, the priesthood may have resembled the multidivisional-type or M-form firm that Robert Ekelund et al. see as characteristic of the medieval church.⁷ The church had a central office that controlled financial allocation and engaged in strategy and long-term planning; its divisions consisted of bishoprics and monasteries, themselves multitiered organizations, which controlled individual dioceses, while abbots headed monasteries. The general office received revenues from these quasi-firms and redirected them among its various divisions. In the case of the Judean priesthood of the Second Temple period, systemic flaws in the redistributive system may have plagued the organization.

Figure 1. Jerusalem and surroundings in the first century CE. Illustration by Balage Balogh.

It is assumed here that members of religious organizations like the Judean priesthood can be motivated by much more than spiritual interests, such as salvation, but rather had worldly interests like their counterparts outside the organization.⁸ Substantivist or primitivist economic models can be particularly helpful here, in their emphasis on the failings of rational-actor approaches in the study of ancient (or modern) economies.⁹ Cooperation, collective guilt, honor, and social solidarity were key ethical norms in ancient societies like Judea, as well as institutions that guided economic behavior. Also relevant are the insights of New Institutional Economics (NIE), with its focus on the patterns of social interaction—the “institutions”—that govern the relationships of individuals.¹⁰ One study related to Jewish history and rooted in NIE is Avner Greif’s book on the Maghribi traders, an informal organization of Jewish traders active in the Muslim Mediterranean and known from eleventh-century documents in the Cairo Geniza.¹¹ Greif demonstrated the extent to which these traders benefitted from a coalition grounded in a common identity, shared a purpose as an organization, and cultivated beliefs about the organization’s norms. Daniel Master has applied the insights of NIE to Iron Age Levantine economies.¹² Peter Altmann has employed NIE in a comparison of market trade in Babylon with Judea in the Persian period.¹³

It is also a main contention of this book that the Judean priesthood and temple offer an example of how religious organizations could be entrenched in ancient agricultural societies. Another example from the region, which has been more thoroughly discussed, are the ecclesiastical estates of late antiquity.¹⁴ Jacob Ashkenazi and Mordecai Aviam have discussed how monastic farms in western Galilee contributed to the economic growth of nearby villages; monks leased plots of land in rural areas from wealthy landowners, strengthening their social ties with the local aristocracy.¹⁵ One late ancient ecclesiastical estate, which was excavated at Shelomi in western Galilee, produced an array of Mediterranean crops including grain, olives, grapes, and apples.¹⁶ Judean desert monasteries were endowed with gardens and orchards used to enhance the monks’ diets but also for sale in local markets.¹⁷ It is argued here that the role of the early Christian church in market exchange was anticipated by the involvement of Judean priests in the agricultural hinterland.

The book’s focus on the relationship between land and temple in ancient Judaism can contribute to a growing body of scholarship attempting to recharacterize the Judean priesthood.¹⁸ The organization was once seen as a detached, status-obsessed group of urban plutocrats that were given to corruption. Jonathan Klawans has maintained that generations of scholars who have studied the Jerusalem temple—its administration included—have been negatively predisposed to it either because of Christian supersessionism, whereby the death of Jesus is viewed as nullifying the inherently flawed institution of the temple, or because of a Jewish form of supersessionism holding that the synagogue and rabbinical academy were improvements upon the temple.¹⁹ James Watts has argued that the academic field has long been plagued by distaste for theocracy and as a result has fallen short in its treatment of the priesthood and its literature.²⁰ Both projects were preceded by E.P. Sanders, who put forward a forceful critique of scholars that have highlighted too eagerly the moral failings of the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood, and have presented its sources of revenue as an added burden on an overly taxed population in the time of Jesus.²¹ There has also been an attempt in scholarship to reassess the priesthood in a post-70 CE environment, characterizing them as an esteemed class of individuals who continued to enjoy special honors in Jewish communities of the Galilee and elsewhere.²² An analysis of source material envisioning, regulating, or commenting upon the role of land in the Second Temple cult of worship can further our understanding of the ideological disposition of ancient Judeans to that cult.

Moreover, the chapters below explore ways in which sacred place-making was a feature of the lives of ancient Judean farmers—an early episode in what would become a long history of Jewish approaches to land and place. Theoretical discourse has underscored the normative social structures inherent in the construction of place, as well as the way places link an individual to broader social institutions. In the case of sacred buildings, this process can be facilitated through encoded traits such as design features or display elements, which can transform what otherwise would be undifferentiated space into a meaningful communal place. This process can also be influenced by objects, people, activities, and social groupings.²³ Place-making in outdoor space is a similar process but with different social functions. Political borders and property lines are examples of how social institutions can profoundly impact our experience of outdoor space. Other outdoor spaces closely tied to institutions include national parks, historical battlefields, college campuses, and graveyards. Sacralization is a form of place-making too—of protecting a place as holy in some way, whether for its symbolic value, its importance to a society’s sense of itself, or its value to religious organizations.²⁴

The sacralization of outdoor space in the ancient Judean context is usually discussed in the context of ethnic territory. The normative conceptualization of Judean territory as sacred—the “holy land” of the God of Israel—is in keeping with an ancient pattern of marking state territory as under the purview of a patron deity.²⁵ The Hebrew phrase ʾereṣ Yhwh (“the land of Yahweh”), for example, appears...