44 A History of Judaism
kings, but it was still a grand building and the precise day of its destruc-
tion ‘in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month, which was the
nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon’, was bitterly
recalled by the prophet Jeremiah. The pillars of bronze were removed,
and the ark of the covenant disappeared (if it had not already been
taken earlier, as some legends claimed). Zerubbabel’s Temple thus lacked
these elements that had been so important in the earlier building, but it
may have included the 5,400 gold and silver vessels which, according to
the book of Ezra, the Persian king Cyrus allowed the returning exiles to
take from Babylon to Judah (although this tradition sits uneasily with
the assertion in the Second Book of Kings that in 597 bce Nebuchad-
nezzar had all the gold vessels from the Temple cut into pieces). Other
references to the building in biblical texts are too allusive and symbolic
to provide any clear notion of the extent to which the Temple of Solo-
mon was replicated. The Jerusalem vision of Zechariah, with its
reference to the ‘Holy Mountain’, is idealized, as is the overblown and
wholly spurious description in the second century bce by the author of
the Letter of Aristeas of the extraordinary fertility of the countryside
surrounding the glorious shrine, but both attest the importance attrib-
uted to the Temple as a building to be revered.^9
Of changes to the building during the five centuries it remained in
use, the best attested is the desecration in 168 bce by Antiochus
Epiphanes, which came close to bringing the history of Judaism to an
abrupt end by transferring worship in the Temple from the Jewish God
to a new divinity (probably Zeus) embodied in a statue which the books
of Maccabees termed the ‘abomination of desolation’. (For a more
detailed discussion of these traumatic events, see Chapter 5.) Jews were
required to offer sacrifices of pigs and other unclean animals at new
altars and sacred precincts set up to other gods. The books of Macca-
bees undoubtedly exaggerate the significance of the role in saving
Judaism played by Mattathias and his sons, not least because they were
written at a time when Mattathias’ descendants were in power in Judaea
and dependent on myths about their heroic deeds against Antiochus as
justification for their control of the high priesthood. But the danger was
real enough – the region is littered with artefacts from local religions
which did not survive past antiquity, and if worship of the Jewish God
in the Jerusalem Temple had ended in the 160s bce rather than nearly
two and a half centuries later, in 70 ce, it is highly unlikely that there
would have been a later history of Judaism (or, for that matter, of Chris-
tianity) to record.