Passion, Vitality, and Foment. The Dynamics of Second Temple Judaism

A Response by Ralph W. Klein

Monday, November 24, 2003

The Festschrift under discussion bids us pay attention to the voices of postexilic, Second Temple Jerusalem. As Walter Harrelson reminds us, “The Jewish community has rarely undervalued this period and its literature. Until recently, the Christian community has rarely failed to do so.” The resurgence of Jewish and especially Christian scholars’ interest in this field owes a great deal to the unique voice of our honoree. I would like to honor that uniqueness tonight. During the last four or five years, as I have worked on the New Interpreter’s Bible and the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, I would occasionally receive a phone call from one of my editors, that would begin, “Ralph, this is Walter Harrelson.” If he would have said, “Ralph, this is George Bush,” or “Ralph, this is the Ayatollah Khomeini,” I would have known exactly what to say, “Hello, Walter.”

Walter’s unique voice has often called for a corrective to the caricatures of this period or to the inattention to this period provided by seminary curricula. The literature of this period calls for a maintenance of the balance between particularism and universalism, or, to put it differently, to take up the responsibilities of particularism in a universal vision. As Paul Hanson reminded us some years ago, we Jews and Christians are “the people called,” called by a God who says, Blessed be Egypt, my people, Blessed be Assyria, the work of my hands, and Blessed be Israel, my heritage.

St. Paul once referred to the Corinthians as his letters of recommendation (2 Cor 3:2-3). That surely applies to the ten epistles written by Walter’s students in this volume. Jon Berquist, who is to be congratulated for his own recent appointment as senior religion editor at Westminster John Knox, reminds us that religion, then and now, is also a matter of sociology, economics, and politics. For some seventy years Jews in Babylon and Jerusalem remained faithful to their heritage without a temple, and the eventual construction of the Second Temple was a win-win situation for folks in the colony of Yehud as well as their imperial overlords. The Persian empire paid for the construction of the temple, that would become a place for sacrificial worship for Jews, a base of operations for political administration (Nehemiah 13), and a storage place for grain for the Persian army, that would soon be on its way to recapture Egypt. 521 BCE was the year in which preparations began for feeding the Persian army in its two year march from Mesopotamia to the land of the Nile; in the same year Yehud started temple construction. The slow decline of Persia, begun already during the reign of Xerxes, cut off resources for the Jerusalem temple, and Malachi at once urged the laity to contribute first class animals for temple sacrifice and chastised the priests for their too-easy willingness to accept animals of second class status just to get income. Priests and laity were held accountable to Torah; and the priesthood was soon seen as not the only way to follow God through the Torah. Life in early Second Temple times was life on the pluralistic edge. Politically, one tried to profit from participation in the empire while also experiencing the oppression of the imperial power and the daily impact of its suzerainty. Culturally one was on the edge too, caught between the contrasting ideologies and economic systems of Israelite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman cultures. One is tempted to draw analogies to the challenges to fidelity today as one is caught up in our own pluralisms, but to remind ourselves that we in synagogue and church may compare ourselves to the community in Yehud, but with this crucial exception: We are the imperial power. I still remember a student sermon of thirty-five years ago on Isaiah 14, that called attention to the cheers there that went up in that chapter originally for the fall of Assyria, and also reminded us that now, for a majority of people in the world today, the United States is Assyria.

John Endres has done much planting, sowing and reaping in the scholarly field I call home, and his article calls attention to joyful worship in the Second Temple period, reflected in stories about past events, when David brought the ark to Jerusalem, when Solomon dedicated the temple, and when Jehoshaphat faced a threat from armed forces to his east. The king’s prayer and fasting evidence a strong expression of human soul-searching and complete surrender to God. One might easily add other liturgical occasions of joy in Chronicles, such as Josiah’s Passover. The book of Kings had reported that event in three verses; the Chronicler expands the description six fold. If Kings celebrated this event as the crowning achievement of Josiah’s centralization of the cult, the Chronicler’s expansion of the story strives to show what would make Passover celebration authentic and meaningful for his own day. The Levites who once carried the ark have graduated to major roles in the liturgical performance but have also been assigned the duty of instructing people in the Torah. The king contributed 33,000 animals, the chief officers of the temple 2,900 animals, and the chiefs of the Levites 5,500 animals. Liturgical correctness was joined to lavish generosity as marks of Second temple worship. The seven last words of the people of God—we’ve never done it that way before—are clearly no modern discovery. Twelve times in his Passover account the Chronicler appeals to the authority of Moses, David, Solomon, and Josiah himself in his passion for the vitality and foment of the changed worship of his day.

Finally, as Walter Harrelson reminds us so fervently, mother Zion in the literature of this period welcomes all worshipers and requires no special utensils or offerings to be brought along. She offers the ultimate critique of communities that set up barriers to keep out the “undesirable.” Mother Zion is simply ready to receive her children because they are her children.

Walter: ad multos annos!