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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

From sacrifice to study

Date

70CE

70 CE to c. two centuries after 70 CEapproximate date

Without the Temple and, after Bar Kochba, without hope of rebuilding it, Jews replaced sacrifice with prayer and study, anticipating a change that would reach the whole Roman world.

Religious historyRabbinic literatureArt and culture31.7772°N 35.2350°E
50 BCE
50 CE
100 CE
Between Caesar and God: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

21 statements

01Grief

Little was written in the century after the destruction, but that little conveys desolation; the author of 2 Baruch can barely conceive of life without the Temple. The loss was concrete: without sacrifices there was no way to do what the Torah commanded to atone for sin or give thanks to God. The priesthood, the elite of the first century, lost its function, and the end of pilgrimage threatened the bond between diaspora and homeland. To some it must have seemed the end of everything. Apocalypses were another way to resist without confronting. 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, probably written in the late first or early second century CE, put into the mouths of figures from the time of the First Temple's fall reflections on the fall of the Second. They explain the destruction as punishment for Israel's sin, yet announce the ruin of God's enemies and the people's restoration, and assure that the Temple's essence survives, either in the Ark hidden underground or in a heavenly sanctuary. Authorial fantasy, yes, but perhaps a sign of a clandestine culture that nursed dreams of revenge disguised as biblical stories.

02What endured

01

Even so, Jewish religious life survived. Many still hoped for the Temple's return, but forms of devotion without sacrifice gradually emerged. Some already existed and had never depended on the Temple, such as circumcision, the Sabbath and the dietary rules. The synagogue, well rooted in Palestine and the diaspora, housed public Torah reading, prayer and donations. The next two centuries are poorly documented, but everything suggests it was then that lasting alternatives, practicable anywhere, took hold.

06

How to explain this adaptability? The authors are not sure, but they point to changes before 70. Some Jews had already turned away from the Temple and its priests, like the Dead Sea community, which, having broken with Jerusalem, prayed instead of sacrificing. They may not have meant to replace the cult, but they created options that many others would take up after the destruction.

07

Antiochus's persecution and the Maccabean revolt had already led some Jews to question the priests' legitimacy, and the meddling of Herod and Rome in appointments made matters worse. Meanwhile other leaders appeared, such as wonder-workers, prophets and sages, who owed their authority not to lineage or the Temple but to supernatural gifts or to interpretation. The Teacher of Righteousness was one, back in the Hellenistic period; Jesus was another, under Rome. When the Temple fell, there were people who could lead without it.

03A broader change

02

Perhaps the decisive turn was not 70 alone, but 70 together with Bar Kochba. It was probably the second war, by turning Jerusalem into a pagan city, that closed the door on a rebuilding like the one that had followed the loss of the First Temple. With so few sources, the authors admit they are 'more or less guessing'.

08

What happened to the Jews foreshadowed a trend across the Roman world: the retreat of temple religion. In the second and third centuries, pagan thinkers such as Lucian of Samosata and Porphyry already treated sacrifice as ignorant devotion; at the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire abolished public sacrifices. Temples were abandoned, destroyed or turned into churches and, later, mosques. Authority passed from priests to philosophers, monks and spiritual teachers, and reading sacred texts became a central way of seeking God.

09

The authors admit the causes are not well understood. Christianity was the most evident driver, but not the only one. The codex, ancestor of the book, cheaper and more portable than the scroll, may have given scripture new weight, not only among Christians but also among the Manicheans, followers of the prophet Mani. And religion itself changed, with more stress on inner transformation, care for others and communities bound by faith rather than by blood or hometown.

03

On the Jews, the loss of the Temple imposed these changes earlier than on other peoples, and against their will. In retrospect, however, it prepared them for the templeless world then being born: study of scripture took the place of sacrifice as the central religious act, and other authorities overshadowed the priest.

04The rabbi

10

From this arose the rabbi, a new figure: neither priest nor prophet, but a teacher whose authority rested on mastery of the Torah and on piety. Perhaps heirs of the Pharisees or of other Second Temple groups, these sages formed a network of teachers and disciples. They studied the Temple and its rites minutely, but their hallmark was treating study, not the cult, as the chief means of relating to God.

11

Josephus had already concluded that revolting against Rome was folly; after Bar Kochba, Jewish thinkers seem to have reached a similar conclusion. Rabbinic literature, the main Jewish literary source from 200 to 650 CE, holds diverse opinions: some sages praise Rome and work with it (Judah the Patriarch is said to have been close to the emperor), while others denounce its oppression. On the whole, though, it steps back from open confrontation, keeps its distance from Bar Kochba and sharply limits the cases in which martyrdom is justified.

12

Tradition or narrative

A rabbinic story, probably legendary but revealing, makes rabbinic culture the heir of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Opposed to the revolt, he supposedly left Jerusalem inside a coffin and put himself, and his tradition, in Roman hands rather than die alongside the rebels.

13

The next chapter deals with rabbinic Judaism. Although it is commonly presented as a response to the fall of the Second Temple, the authors note that it only developed centuries later, probably when many Jews had already learned to live without the Temple.

Context

14

Once the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, Jewish worship came to do without sacrifice or building, for example in synagogue prayer. By the second century the Hasmoneans, Pharisees, Sadducees and the Dead Sea sect were gone; gaining ground were movements without a Temple center: Christianity, born inside Judaism, and rabbinic Judaism.

15

Resistance to Rome probably went on after the first century, but many Jews came to avoid direct confrontation. The authors see in this a key to survival: Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, the most successful movements born after Bar Kochba, both took a nonconfrontational stance, and the longest-lasting communities under Rome were, it seems, those that accommodated its power or those that moved out of its reach.

16

Emigrating was another way out. After Bar Kochba, and with the economic crisis of third-century Palestine, even rabbinic sages seem to have left for Syria, Asia Minor and Babylonia, the last especially attractive because it lay outside the empire. The sages who stayed tried to stem this flight, restricting emigration and extolling life in the Holy Land, without success. One of them even read the Babylonian exile as God's way of shielding the Jews from Roman decrees.

17

Conflicts with Rome, from Pompey to Bar Kochba, transformed Jewish culture. With the Temple destroyed, sacrifice and priesthood had to be replaced; Rome's response to the Diaspora Revolt hastened the fall of great communities like Alexandria's; and after Bar Kochba, the de-Judaization of Jerusalem and Judea buried the dream of rebuilding the Temple and shifted Palestine's Jewish heartland into Galilee. The outcome was a culture very different from that of 100 BCE.

18

Not everything, however, is explained by conflict. The Roman world itself was changing: it split into two halves in the third century, gained a new eastern capital, Constantinople, faced migrations, invasions and economic crises, and gradually became Christian. Historians therefore usually call the span from the third century through the Muslim conquests of the 600s and 700s 'late antiquity', a transition between the pagan empire and the medieval cultures, marked by the growing strength of monotheism.

19

According to Goodman, for most Jews nothing in a synagogue rivaled Temple sacrificial worship; communal prayer was valued, especially far from Jerusalem, yet no one yet thought such prayer might substitute for sacrifice, since Moses' law had not clearly decreed it.

20

For Goodman, Temple-period buildings identified as synagogues (Masada, Herodium, Gamala, etc.) were essentially communal rather than alternative temples: in Tiberias the 'prayer house' also hosted political meetings (Josephus, 67 CE).

21

Flusser notes that the hope of rebuilding Jerusalem changed shape over time, yet it roots in earlier Temple destructions; after 70 CE the view spread that God himself would rebuild city and Temple.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
▮ loading geography

§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • William Horbury, William David Davies and John Sturdy, The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume Three: The Early Roman Period (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

    Reference work on the early Roman period · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 119

  • John Collins and Daniel Harlow, The Eerdman's Dictionary of Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2010).

    Dictionary of early Judaism through the second century CE, with topical bibliography · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 119

  • Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism (London: Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2018).

    Survey history of Judaism (synagogue, Second Temple variety, rabbinate) · recommended in Goodman, p. 69

  • David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period, Vol. 2: The Jewish Sages and Their Literature (Grand Rapids / Jerusalem: Eerdmans / Magnes, 2009).

    Essays on Second Temple sages and literature (halakhah, liturgy, apocalyptic) · recommended in Flusser, p. 16

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 108; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 108inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 108inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 104inspect
  6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 108inspect
  7. 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 108; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109inspect
  8. 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109inspect
  9. 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 109inspect
  10. 10Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 110inspect
  11. 11Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 103inspect
  12. 12Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 103inspect
  13. 13Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 119inspect
  14. 14Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 89inspect
  15. 15Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 104inspect
  16. 16Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 104inspect
  17. 17Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 118inspect
  18. 18Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 119inspect
  19. 19Goodman, p. 70inspect
  20. 20Goodman, p. 69inspect
  21. 21Flusser, p. 48inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.