Some notes on Gary Rendsburg

And now for some random notes on Gary Rendsburg’s early afternoon presentation, “The Psalms as Hymns in the Temple of Jerusalem — at Passover and Throughout the Year”:

He started off — and this pleased me very much — with comparisons to the Egyptian temple of Edfu, offering several wonderful images of that very large structure.

Then he contrasted what we know about Egyptian temple liturgy, which abounded in singers and hymns, to the view of the temple at Jerusalem as a “sanctuary of silence” propounded most famously by the late Yehezkel Kaufmann and furthered by Israel Knohl.  According to this view, the priests carried out their program of ritual sacrifice more or less in complete silence.

He thinks this view mistaken, and he spent much of the rest of his presentation talking about the prayers and supplications (and so forth) that seem pretty clearly to have occurred in the temple.  The temple was a place of prayer — certainly in the Second Temple period (essentially the six centuries between 530 BC and 70 AD) — not merely a site of sacrifice, though “priestly” sources emphasized the latter, not the former.