RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 61Jews, or Judaeans, marched to Caesarea and threatened the Roman governor
with an uprising unless he punished the perpetrator of this outrage against
God and the Law; the soldier was beheaded (War 2.228–31 =Ant20.113–7).
Similarly, Josephus says that during the revolt against Rome, his enemies in
Tiberias were able to rouse opposition to him simply by displaying a Torah
scroll, implying that it was this (i.e., the laws of the Jews, that which most made
them what they were) that Josephus was planning to betray (Life 134).
These stories are not necessarily reported accurately. And even if accurate,
they do not necessarily represent the views of all the Jews of Palestine. Yet the
clear continuity of Josephus’s stories with the ideology of 1 Maccabees and
pseudo-Aristeas, with their striking (indeed, from the modern Western per-
spective, bizarre) fetishization of what was after all a book, demonstrates that
the stories are not merely expressions of Josephus’s own views. They necessar-
ily reflect the significance of what the book was thought to represent for some
part, at least, of ancient Jewish society.
For the symbolic significance of the Jerusalem Temple there is likewise a
massofevidenceofwhichitisunnecessarytoprovideadetailedaccount.One
of the most conspicuous traces I have already mentioned—the willingness of
thousands of Galilean and Idumaean peasants and brigands at the time of the
revolt against Rome to follo wtheir leaders to Jerusalem, try to seize the Tem-
ple, and face what they must have known were the almost certain alternatives
of death or enslavement. The importance of the temple in Jewish revolution-
ary ideology is demonstrated also by the prominence of imagery related to it
on the silver sheqels of the Great Revolt; temple imagery is still more im-
portant on the coinage of the Bar Kokhba revolt.^31 Earlier, apparent Roman
impiety toward the Temple aroused the same sort of mass opposition as (in-
deed, often more intense opposition than) the desecration of the La wjust
mentioned.^32 Similarly poignant anecdotes are obviously less readily available
about peacefultimes. The undeniableimportance of discourse aboutthe tem-
ple in surviving ancient Jewish literature may be thought to demonstrate the
concerns of the literature’s presumably limited audience, not those of the
inhabitants of Jewish Palestine in general; even so, some of the writings betray
a certain anxiety about the status of the Temple and its priests. The belliger-
ency of their support probably hints at the intensity of others’ opposition and
may also reflect concerns about the legitimacy of a temple that even its build-
ers regarded as a substitution for the Solomonic structure.^33 Furthermore, the
(^31) See Meshorer,Ancient Jewish Coinage, 2: 96–165.
(^32) This is clearest in the case of the reaction to the Emperor Gaius’s command to place a
statue of Zeus in the Temple: War 2.184–203/Ant18.240–308.
(^33) 2 Macc, for instance, often seems to be responding to claims that the temple was not entirely
legitimate and its Hasmonean priesthood problematic: see Goldstein,II Maccabees, pp. 18–19.
However,hissuggestionthattheworkisanti-Hasmoneanisbaseless.Anxietyaboutthepriesthood
is discussed by M. Himmelfarb, “A Kingdom of Priests: The Democratization of the Priesthood