“Experiencing the Temple at Passover”

Dan Bahat, an Israeli archaeologist who has long had important responsibilities for work in Jerusalem, began his presentation  this morning with a series of images of proposed reconstructions of the temple of Herod and the overall structure of the Temple Mount, coupled with images of what the area actually looks like today.

Despite being a Jew, Bahat says that he likes to think of Jesus in connection with the temple.  Why?  Because most of what we have from the ancient world about the temple is legal material and the writings of the elite.  In the New Testament, though, in the cases of Jesus and his disciples, we have accounts of the dazzling, indeed overwhelming, impression made by the massive temple of Jerusalem upon simple Jews coming to the city from very small Galilean towns such as Nazareth, Capernaum, and Bethsaida.  (An illustrative point from Jim Charlesworth’s presentation earlier today:  The largest menhir at Stonehenge is thirty tons.  The largest stone in the Great Pyramid at Giza is probably fifty tons.  The largest stone in the Herodian structure is five hundred and seventy tons.)

We cannot, he says, imagine how important, how central, the temple was.  It wasn’t merely the religious focus of Jews worldwide, but their economic, political, social focus, as well.  He relates a tradition — vastly exaggerated, of course — saying that when the gates of the temple were opened, the sound of their turning on their hinges could be heard all the way downward and eastward in Jericho.  And when incense was burned in the temple, the scent was carried to Jericho, at which the herds of goats sneezed.  When the new moon was sighted from the temple, signal bonfires were kindled on the adjacent Mount of Olives and the news was spread across Israel within minutes by a system of subordinate signal fires.  (The claim is also made that the news reached the entirety of the Jewish diaspora within hours, though that’s difficult for me to imagine, given the nature of ancient communications.)

An interesting point for tourists to Jerusalem:  Bahat believes that he can demonstrate that the very young Jesus reasoned with the rabbis in the temple on the steps that descend from the southern end of today’s Temple Mount.  (See them at the bottom of the photo above.)