50 CHAPTER TWOquestion), they would likely have answered that it was the worship of their
one God, in the one Temple of Jerusalem, in accordance with the laws of his
Torah; at any rate, they would have mentioned some part of this ideological
complex in their answers. (“We Jews don’t worship the pagan gods...werest
every seventh day... we abstain from certain foods,” etc.) In ritual, and in
public assemblies, images associated with the Temple or Torah, or rhetorical
evocations of them, or theactual Torah scroll, might function synecdochically
to evoke Judaism as a whole, hence, for example, the (Temple-associated)
menorah so often carved on ancient (especially post-70)C.E. Jewish tomb-
stones, the ceremonial display of a Torah scroll before battle ascribed to Judah
Maccabee, and so on.^3
Some readers may find it odd that this point requires argumentation, while
othersmaybeinclinedtodismissmyclaimoutofhand:howcanthecentrality
of God-Temple-Torah in Jewish self-definition be proved? What about the
Judaean settlements at Elephantine or, more chronologically relevant, at
Leontopolis in Egypt?^4 Or the worshipers of the Most High God settled in the
Cimmerian Bosporus? Did these Jews, too, if that is what they were, live in
symbolic worlds whose central components were the Temple and the Torah?
In response to the first set of objections, I contend that the centrality of
Temple and Torah in ancient Jewish self-definition requires argumentation
because it is not a priori an eternal truth of Jewish identity, uncontingent on
changing social and political conditions. Rather, it was the result of a long
(^3) See 1 Maccabean 3:46–48; this much is clear despite the obscurity of v. 48. The menorah
became a commonplace iconographic marker of Judaism only in the third centuryC.E. and
following; it was only then that Jews began to develop a widely used and distinctively Jewish
pictorial language. This issue is discussed in detail in the following chapters; and see R. Hachlili,
Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology(Leiden: Brill, 1988). However, the menorah may have been
used sporadically earlier to evoke the temple, as for example on the coins of Mattathias Antigonus
(reigned 40–37 ), and on some clay lamps produced in Judaea soon after the Destruction; see
most recently D. Barag, “A Coin of Mattathias Antigonos and the Shape of the Shewbread,”
Qadmoniot105–106 (1994): 43–44 (Hebrew); and for a fuller treatment of the menorah as sym-
bol, see Barag, “Hamenorah kesemel meshihi bitequfah haromit hame’uheret ubitequfah habi-
zantit,”Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, B.I. (Jerusalem: World Union
of Jewish Studies 1986) 59–62.
(^4) In the case of Leontopolis, we think we know from literary sources that the Jewish colony
there was centered on a temple modeled on that of Jerusalem and staffed by Zadokite (i.e.,
legitimate) priests, but the gravestones from Tell el Yahudieh are marked with no Jewish symbols,
and the epitaphs contain no Jewish content whatever. Indeed, the religious content of the longer
epitaphs is derived entirely from the commonplace language of the Hellenistic and Greco-
Roman funerary epigram; only the names of the deceased and the location of the graves mark
them as Jewish. On the temple, see Gideon Bohak,Joseph and Aseneth and the Jewish Temple in
Heliopolis(Atlanta: Scholars, 1996); on the graves, W. Horbury and D. Noy,Jewish Inscriptions
of Graeco-Roman Egypt(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), nos. 29–105. The ex-
planation of this disjunction may be that before the third or fourth centuriesC.E., it rarely seems
to have crossed anyone’s mind that graves need to be marked as Jewish; see below.