Authority and Sacred Space: Concepts of the Jerusalem Temple in Aristeas, Wisdom, and Josephus

In 2012, the official number for visitors to the Western (Wailing) Wall, the last remaining section of Herod’s Temple, was 10.5 million. Even allowing for the rise in religious tourism around the world in recent decades, these figures are more than usually high, telling us of a continuing fascination with the Temple in Jerusalem and all that it did, and does, signify for the faithful, for those who still wish to remem-ber, and the simply curious.
The first Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, but according to the Book of Ezra, it was rebuilt between 538 and 515 BCE, and was the central focus of the theological, legal and literary flowering that was II Temple Judaism. Its destruction, by Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, during the first Jewish War (70 CE) sent a wave of shock throughout the Jewish Diaspora. Further misfortunes followed, when it was discovered that Emperor Hadrian proposed rebuilding a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple Mound and renaming the city Aelia Capitolina, leading to the third, and final, Jewish revolt, the Bar Kokhba Rebellion (132-136CE). Hadrian utterly crushed the revolt and all Jews were banned from entering the city, except for the day of Tisha B’av when they were allowed to mourn the destruction of the nation and the Temple.
This paper attempts to understand what it was that made the veneration of the Temple space so enduring through all Jerusalem’s bitter history. What authority did the Temple exercise over Judaism and different movements within Judaism, and what sacredness did it embody, even when that sanctity was repeatedly violated?
The paper will attempt to answer these questions through the writings of three particular authors of the Diaspora: the author of the Letter of Aristeas, writing in Alexandria, probably in the middle of the 2nd century BCE; the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, also writing in Alexandria, but in the very different time and climate of the Roman occupation of Egypt (post 32 BCE): and finally, Josephus, the historian, who had fought in the first Jewish War and later became a pensioner of Emperor Vespasian and his sons, living in Rome until the turn of the first century CE.