Until its destruction in 70 ce, the most important religious institution of the Jews was the Jerusalem" class="md-crosslink">Temple in Jerusalem (the Second Temple, erected 538–516 bce). Although services were interrupted for three years by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–164 bce) and although the Roman general Pompey (106–48 bce) desecrated the Temple in 63 bce, Herod lavished great expense in rebuilding it. The high priesthood itself became degraded by the extreme Hellenism of high priests such as Jason and Menelaus, and the institution declined when Herod began the custom of appointing high priests for political and financial considerations. That not only the multitude of Jews but the priesthood itself suffered from sharp divisions is clear from the bitter class warfare that ultimately erupted in 59 ce between the high priests on the one hand and the ordinary priests and the leaders of the populace of Jerusalem on the other.
Although the Temple remained central in Jewish worship, synagogues had already emerged as places for Torah reading and communal prayer and worship during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century bce, if not even earlier. In any case, in the following century Ezra stood upon a pulpit of wood and read from the Torah to the people (Nehemiah). Some scholars maintain that a synagogue existed even within the precincts of the Temple; certainly by the time of Jesus, to judge from the references to Galilean synagogues in the Christian Scriptures, synagogues were common in Palestine. Hence, when the Temple was destroyed in 70, the spiritual vacuum was hardly as great as it had been after the destruction of the First Temple (586 bce).
The chief legislative, judicial, and educational body of the Palestinian Jews during the period of the Second Temple was the Great Sanhedrin (council court), consisting of 71 members, among whom the Sadducees were an important party. The members shared the government with the king during the early years of the Hasmonean dynasty, but, beginning with Herod’s reign, their authority was restricted to religious matters. In addition, there seems to have been a Sanhedrin, set up by the high priest, which served as a court of political council, as well as a kind of grand jury. Religious and cultural life in the Diaspora
During the Hellenistic-Roman period the chief centres of Jewish population outside Palestine were in Syria, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and Egypt, each of which is estimated to have had at least one million Jews. The large Jewish community of Antioch—which, according to Josephus, had been given all the rights of citizenship by the Seleucid founder-king, Seleucus I Nicator (died 280 bce)—attracted a particularly large number of converts to Judaism. In Antioch the apocryphal book of Tobit was probably composed in the 2nd century bce to encourage wayward Diaspora Jews to return to their Judaism. As for the Jews of Asia Minor, whose large numbers were mentioned by Cicero (106–43 bce), their not joining in the Jewish revolts against the Roman emperors Nero (reigned 54–68 ce), Trajan (reigned 98–117), and Hadrian (reigned 117–138) would indicate that they had sunk deep roots into their environment. In Babylonia in the early part of the 1st century ce, two Jewish brothers, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, established an independent minor state; their followers were so meticulous in observing the Sabbath that they assumed that it would not be possible to violate it even in order to save themselves from a Parthian attack. In the early 1st century ce, according to Josephus, the royal house and many of their entourage in the district of Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia were converted to Judaism; some of the Adiabenian Jews distinguished themselves in the revolt against Rome in 66.
The largest and most important Jewish settlement in the Diaspora was in Egypt. There is evidence (papyri) of a Jewish military colony at Elephantine (Yeb), Upper Egypt, as early as the 6th century bce. These papyri reveal the existence of a Jewish temple—which most certainly would be considered heterodox—and some syncretism (mixture) with pagan cults. Alexandria, the most populous and most influential Hellenistic Jewish community in the Diaspora, originated when Alexander the Great assigned a quarter of the city to the Jews. Until about the 3rd century bce the papyri of the Egyptian Jewish community were written in Aramaic; after that, with the exception of the Nash papyrus in Hebrew, all papyri until 400 ce were written in Greek. Similarly, of the 116 Jewish inscriptions from Egypt, all but five are written in Greek. The process of Hellenistic acculturation is thus obvious.
The most important work of the early Hellenistic period—dating, according to tradition, from the 3rd century bce—is the Septuagint, a translation into Greek of the Hebrew Scriptures, including some works not found in the traditional Hebrew canon. The name of the work (from the Latin septuaginta, “70”) derived from the belief that 72 translators, 6 from each of the 12 tribes, worked independently on the entire text and produced identical translations. As revealed in the Letter of Aristeas and the works of Philo and Josephus, the Septuagint was itself regarded by many Hellenized Jews as divinely inspired. The translation shows some knowledge of Palestinian exegesis and the tradition of Halakhah (the Oral Law); but the rabbis themselves, noting that the translation diverged from the Hebrew text, apparently had ambivalent feelings about it, as is evidenced in their alternate praise and condemnation of it, as well as in their belief that another translation of the Scriptures into Greek was needed. The fact that “Torah” was translated as nomos (“law”) and tzedaqa as dikaiosynē (“justice”) indicates how deeply the authors of the Septuagint believed that Judaism could be accurately expressed using Greek concepts.
The fact that the temple at Leontopolis in Egypt was established (c. 145 bce) by a deposed high priest, Onias IV, clearly indicates that it was heterodox; as merely the temple of a military colony, it never really offered a challenge to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is significant that the Palestinian rabbis ruled that a sacrifice intended for the temple of Onias might be offered in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias made little impact upon Egyptian Jewry, as can be seen from the silence about it on the part of Philo, who often mentions the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias, however, continued until it was closed by the Roman emperor Vespasian (reigned 69–79 ce) in 73.
The chief religious institutions of the Egyptian Diaspora were synagogues. As early as the 3rd century bce, there were inscriptions mentioning two proseuchai, or Jewish prayer houses. In Alexandria there were numerous synagogues throughout the city, of which the largest was so famous that it is said in the Talmud that he who has not seen it has never seen the glory of Israel. Egyptian Jewish literature
In Egypt the Jews produced a considerable literature (most of it now lost), intended to inculcate in Greek-speaking Jews a pride in their past and to counteract a sense of inferiority that some of them felt about Jewish cultural achievements. In the field of history, Demetrius near the end of the 3rd century bce wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; perhaps intended to refute an anti-Semitic Egyptian priest and author, it shows considerable concern for chronology. In the 2nd century bce a Jew who used the name Hecataeus wrote On the Jews. Another, Eupolemus (c. 150 bce), like Demetrius, wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; an indication of its apologetic nature may be seen from the fragment asserting that Moses taught the alphabet not only to the Jews but also to the Phoenicians and to the Greeks. Artapanus (c. 100 bce), in his own book On the Jews, went even further in romanticizing Moses—by identifying him with Musaeus, the semi-mythical Greek poet, and Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and culture, by asserting that Moses was the real originator of Egyptian civilization, and by claiming that Moses taught the Egyptians the worship of Apis (the sacred bull) and the ibis (sacred bird). Cleodemus (Malchus), in an attempt to win for the Jews the regard of the Greeks, asserted in his history that two sons of Abraham had joined Heracles in his expedition in Africa and that the Greek hero had married the daughter of one of them. On the other hand, Jason of Cyrene (c. 100 bce) wrote a history, of which 2 Maccabees is a summary, glorifying the Temple and violently attacking the Jewish Hellenizers, but his manner of writing history is typically Hellenistic. In addition, 3 Maccabees (1st century bce) is a work of propaganda intended to counteract those Jews who sought to win citizenship in Alexandria. The Letter of Aristeas, though ascribed to the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308–246 bce), was probably composed by an Alexandrian Jew about 100 bce to defend Judaism and its practices against detractors.