History of the Jews (21 page)

Herod was not so foolish as to make the Jews of the diaspora the sole recipients of his largesse. He was the benefactor of many multi-racial cities throughout the eastern part of the empire. He backed and financed all the institutions of Greek culture, not least the stadium, for he was an enthusiastic sportsman—a reckless hunter and horseman, a keen javelin-thrower and archer, a fervent spectator. By his money, his powers of organization and his energy, he single-handedly rescued the Olympic Games from decay and ensured they were held regularly and in honourable pomp—thus making his name revered in many small Greek islands and cities, which gave him the title of life-president. For civic and cultural purposes he gave large sums to Athens, Lycia, Pergamum and Sparta. He rebuilt the Temple of Apollo in Rhodes. He re-walled Byblos, built a forum in Tyre and another in Beirut, gave Laodicea an aqueduct, built theatres in Sidon and Damascus, gave gymnasia to Ptolomais and Tripoli and provided a fountain and baths in Ascalon. In Antioch, then the largest city in the Near East, he paved the main street, 2.5 miles long, providing colonnades the whole length to shelter its citizens from the rain, and finished this great work in polished marble. There were Jews living in nearly all these places and they basked in the reflected glory of their munificent brother-Yahwist.

Herod tried to pursue this generous and universalist policy in Palestine itself, embracing outcast or heterodox elements in his pan-Judaism. Samaria, the city John Hyrcanus had levelled and flooded, was rebuilt with his aid, and named Sebaste after the Greek name for his patron Augustus. He gave it a temple, walls and towers, and a colonnaded street. He built another temple, of Egyptian granite, at Baniyas on the coast. Also on the coast, on the site of Straton’s Tower, he created a massive new city of Caesarea. According to Josephus, this involved designing an artificial harbour, ‘bigger than the Piraeus’ in Greece, which Herod’s engineers enclosed by planting ‘in 20 fathoms of water, blocks of stone which were mostly 50 feet long, ten broad and nine deep, sometimes even bigger’. This was the foundation of a giant breakwater 200 feet wide. The city, of 200 acres, had a theatre, market place and government building, all of limestone, with a fine amphitheatre where splendid games were held every four years. There, Herod set up a gigantic figure of Caesar not inferior, according to Josephus, to the Olympian Zeus, one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This became the natural Roman administrative capital for Judaea when Herod’s empire broke up at his death. Dotted
about Palestine were Herod’s fortresses and palaces. These included the Antonia (citadel works) in Jerusalem, erected on top of the Hasmonean fort of Baris, built by Jonathan the Maccabee; but, in true Herodian fashion, the new fort was bigger, stronger and more sumptuous. Others were the Herodium, Cypros near Jericho, called after his mother, Machaerus on the east side of the Dead Sea, and his villa-fortress cut out of the rock at Masada, with its spectacular view over the wilderness.

For Herod, building the Antonia fortress in Jerusalem was part of a political, almost a geopolitical, purpose. When he had first taken the city, in 37
BC
, with the power of the legions, he had only with great difficulty persuaded his Roman allies not to expel all its inhabitants and pull it down, for they already took the view that it was an ungovernable place. Herod proposed to internationalize the city, to bring in new Jewry to redress the failings of the old, and to make the city the capital not just of Judaea but of the whole Jewish race. He saw the diaspora Jews as more enlightened than the Palestinians, more receptive to Greek and Roman ideas, and more likely to encourage forms of worship in Jerusalem compatible with the modern world. He appointed diaspora Jews to public offices in the capital and he wanted to bolster their authority by encouraging other diaspora Jews to come there regularly. In theory the Law demanded that Jews make pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year, for Passover, the Feast of Weeks and Tabernacles.
⁶⁶
Herod decided to encourage this practice, especially from the diaspora, by providing Jerusalem with all the facilities of a modern Romano-Greek city and above all by rebuilding the Temple itself as a monument-spectacle worth coming to see. Herod was not merely a notable philanthropist; he was also an inspired propagandist and a great showman.

He set about his programme for Jerusalem, the world’s most suspicious and edgy city, with system and forethought. The building of the Antonia gave him its physical mastery, and he strengthened his grip by erecting three powerful towers, the Phasael (later known as the ‘Tower of David’), the Hippicus and the Mariamne (completed before he murdered his wife). Having done this, he felt it safe to build a theatre and an amphitheatre, though these were judiciously placed outside the Temple area. Then, in 22
BC
, he summoned a national assembly and announced his lifework: the rebuilding of the Temple, on a magnificent scale, exceeding even the glory of Solomon’s. The next two years were spent assembling and training a force of 10,000 workmen and 1,000 supervisory priests, who also worked as builder-craftsmen in the forbidden areas. These elaborate preparations were
necessary to reassure the Jerusalem Jews that the destructive operation of tearing down the old Temple was the prelude to erecting a new and finer one.
⁶⁷
Herod took extraordinary care not to offend the religious scruples of the rigorists: for instance, for the altar and its ramp, unhewn stones were used so that they would be untouched by iron. The creation of the Temple as a functional place of sacrifice took only eighteen months, during which time elaborate curtaining screened the sanctuary from profane gaze. But the vast building as a whole needed forty-six years to complete and craftsmen were still finishing the decorations not long before the Romans tore the whole thing down in 70
AD
, leaving not one stone upon another.

We have descriptions of Herod’s Temple in Josephus’
Antiquities of the Jews
and his
Jewish Wars
,
⁶⁸
and in the Talmudic tractates
Middot, Tamid
and
Yoma
. These are supplemented by recent archaeology. To achieve the grandiose effects he desired, Herod doubled the area of the Temple Mount by building huge supporting walls and filling in the gaps with rubble. Around the vast forecourt thus created he erected porticos, and linked it all to the upper city by bridges. The sanctuary, at one end of the platform, was much higher and wider than Solomon’s (100 as opposed to 60 cubits), but since Herod was not of a priestly family and could not therefore enter even the inner court, he spent little on the interior, and the Holy of Holies, though lined in gold, was bare. Instead, cash was spent profusely on the exterior, gates, fittings and decorations being covered in gold and silver plate. Josephus says the stone was ‘exceptionally white’, and the glitter of the stone and the gleam of the gold—reflected many miles away in the bright sun—was what made the Temple so striking to travellers seeing it from afar for the first time.

The prodigious platform, 35 acres in area and a mile in circumference, was more than twice the height as seen today from the bottom of the valley, for the lower courses of the great stone blocks are covered in the rubbish of centuries. Josephus says that some of these blocks were ‘45 cubits in length, 10 in height and 6 in breadth’, finished by imported craftsmen to an unusually high standard. The top 40 feet of the platform covered vaulted corridors and above them, on the platform itself, were the cloisters, with hundreds of Corinthian pillars 27 feet high and so thick, says Josephus, that three men with arms extended could hardly encompass them. So high was the edifice, he says, that if you looked down from the cloisters you felt giddy.

Pilgrims from all over Palestine and the diaspora, converging on the city in hundreds of thousands for the great feasts, ascended the platform from the city by a vast staircase and the main bridge. The
outer courtyard, within the walls, was open to everyone, and in its gates and cloisters money-changers swopped coins from all over the world for the ‘Holy Shekels’ used to pay Temple fees—it was these who attracted Jesus’ fury—and doves were sold for sacrifices. Within this, a wall and gate with stone-carved warnings in Greek and Latin, forbidding non-Jews to proceed any further on pain of death, enclosed the Court of the Women, with special corners for Nazarites and lepers, and within this was the Court of the Israelites for male Jews. Each of the inner courts was raised up, and entered by steps, and a higher flight of steps led up to the sacrificial area or Court of the Priests, and the sanctuary within it.

Many thousands of priests, Levites, scribes and pious Jews worked in and around the Temple area. The priests were responsible for the rituals and ceremonies, the Levites were the choristers, musicians, cleaners and engineers. They were divided into twenty-four watches or shifts, and during the frantic activity of the big feasts were reinforced by men of priestly or Levitical birth from all over Palestine and the diaspora. The primary priestly duty was the care of the sanctuary. The Jews had taken from the Egyptians the notion of the perpetual altar-fire, and this meant keeping alight and constantly filling the many sanctuary lamps. Also from Egypt came the custom of regular incensing of the darkest and most secret parts. The Temple consumed 600 pounds of costly incense a year, made from a secret recipe by the priestly Avtina family, whose womenfolk were banned from using scent to avoid accusations of corruption. It was in fact made from ground-up sea-shells, Sodom salt, a special cyclamen, myrrh (camphor gum resin), frankincense (terebinth gum resin), cinnamon, cassiam, spikenard, saffron, gum balm and a mysterious substance called maalah ashan, which made the smoke rise impressively.

Then there were the normal sacrifices, two lambs at dawn each day and another two at sunset, with thirteen priests needed for each. Ordinary male Jews could not enter the sanctuary, of course, but its doors were kept open during the service so they could see. Each service ended with a ritual drinking of wine, the reading of scripture, and the singing of hymns and psalms. The choristers were accompanied by an orchestra of a double-pipe, twelve-stringed harp, ten-stringed lyre, and bronze cymbals, while both the silver trumpet and the
shofar
or ram’s horn emitted blasts to mark stages in the liturgy. The sacrifice-rituals struck visitors as exotic, even barbarous, for most strangers came at feast-times when the quantities of sacrifices were enormous. At such times, the inner Temple was an awesome place—the screams and bellows of terrified cattle, blending with ritual cries and chants
and tremendous blasts of horn and trumpet, and blood everywhere. The author of the Letter of Aristeas, an Alexandrine Jew who attended as a pilgrim, says he saw 700 priests performing the sacrifices, working in silence but handling the heavy carcasses with professional skill and putting them on exactly the right part of the altar.

Because of the huge number of animals, the slaughter, bloodying and carving up of the carcasses had to be done quickly; and to get rid of the copious quantities of blood, the platform was not solid but hollow, a gigantic cleansing system. It contained thirty-four cisterns, the largest, or Great Sea, holding over two million gallons. In winter, they stored the rainfall and in summer additional supplies were brought by aqueduct from the Pool of Siloam to the south. Innumerable pipes conveyed the water up to the platform surface, and a multitude of drains carried off the torrents of blood. Aristeas wrote: ‘There are many openings for water at the base of the altar, invisible to all except those making the sacrifices, so that all the blood is collected in great quantities and washed away in the twinkling of an eye.’

The Temple was a struggling mass of people at festival time, and the gates had to be opened from midnight onwards. Only the high-priest could enter the Holy of Holies, once a year on the Day of Atonement, but for festivals its curtain was rolled up so that male Jewish pilgrims, peering through the sanctuary gates, could see inside it, and the holy vessels were brought out for inspection. Each pilgrim offered at least one individual sacrifice—hence the vast number of animals—and this privilege was open to gentiles also. Herod’s Temple was world-famous and greatly esteemed, according to Josephus, and important gentiles offered sacrifices for pious reasons as well as to conciliate Jewish opinion. In 15
BC
, for instance, Herod’s friend Marcus Agrippa made the grand gesture of offering a hecatomb (100 beasts).
⁶⁹

The Temple was prodigiously wealthy, at any rate in between times of pillage. Foreign kings and statesmen from Artaxerxes to the Emperor Augustus presented it with vast quantities of golden vessels which were stored in special strong-rooms in its bowels. Jews from all over the diaspora poured money and plate into it, rather as they now contribute to Israel, and Josephus says that it became ‘the general treasury of all Jewish wealth’. Hyrcanus, head of the rich tax-collecting Tobiad family, for instance, ‘deposited there the entire wealth of their house’.
⁷⁰
But the main regular source of income was a half-shekel tax on all male Jews over twenty years of age.

Herod was exceptionally generous to the Temple, for he paid for the entire new building work out of his own pocket. By downgrading the importance of the high-priest, who was a hated Sadducee, Herod
automatically raised in importance his deputy, the
segan
, a Pharisee, who got control over all the regular Temple functions and ensured that even the Sadducee high-priests performed the liturgy in a Pharisaical manner. Since Herod was on reasonable terms with the Pharisees, he avoided conflict between the Temple and his government, as a rule. But this alliance broke down in his last months. As part of his decorative scheme, he set up a golden eagle over the main Temple entrance. The diaspora Jews were quite happy about this, but the pious Jews of the capital, Pharisees included, objected strongly, and a group of Torah students climbed up and smashed it to pieces. Herod was already sick, in his palace near Jericho, but he acted with characteristic energy and ruthlessness. The high-priest was removed from office. The students were identified, arrested, dragged down in chains to Jericho, tried in the Roman theatre there, and burned alive. With the smoke of this sacrifice to his wounded generosity and self-esteem still rising, Herod was taken by litter to the hot springs at Callirrhoe, where he died in spring 4
BC
.