244 A History of Judaism
well- behaved, so that, especially when sacrificing, we may act in sober
moderation. And at the sacrifices we must first offer prayers for the com-
mon welfare, and then for ourselves; for we were born for communal
fellowship, and the person who sets greater store by this than by his own
personal concerns would be especially pleasing to God.Nothing in this paean of praise for the Temple hints at the fact, which
will have been as blatant to his readers as to him, that it had been
destroyed a quarter of a century earlier.^4
Josephus was wrong in his expectation that the Jerusalem Temple
would be rebuilt. Once it was in ruins, Vespasian and Titus invested too
much political capital in propaganda about the defeat of the Jews as
justification for their seizure of imperial power in Rome to permit any
suggestion that its destruction should be regretted, let alone that a new
building should arise in its place. The dedication of the Jews who had
defended the sanctuary during the siege, and the defensive advantages
of the site, discouraged their immediate successors from permitting
rebuilding. The founding by Hadrian of the Roman colony of Aelia
Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem in 130 ce put paid to the possibility
of a new Jewish Temple for the remaining centuries of Roman rule. An
abortive attempt by the pagan emperor Julian to rebuild the Temple in
364 ce in order to annoy Christians was prevented by Julian’s prema-
ture death on campaign. The Temple Mount lay desolate until the late
seventh century ce, when the Umayyad caliph Abd al- Malik constructed
on the site the magnificent Islamic shrine of the Dome of the Rock
which still stands there today.^5
It is however probable that Josephus was not alone among Jews in
expecting the rebuilding of the Temple. A hundred years after him, the
compiler of the Mishnah in c. 200 ce included discussion of the detailed
practice of Temple worship – not just the set feasts (Sabbath, the pilgrim
festivals, the Day of Atonement) but the general treatment of ‘hallowed
things’ (animal- offerings, meal- offerings, sacrilege) and the dimensions
of the Temple building and its constituent parts. At least some non- Jews,
for whom worship with sacrifice, libations and other offerings was
among the most normal characteristics of Judaism, seem to have shared
the assumption that in due course the Jerusalem Temple would again
house crowds of pilgrims. Late in the third century, 200 years after the
destruction, the pagan orator Menander of Laodicea (in Asia Minor)
was still pointing to the pilgrim festivals in Jerusalem as the most
impressive example of mass pilgrimage. He noted that ‘the glory of [a