worship 57
wrong to offer sacrifices in local temples or at local altars, believing
instead that such cult should take place only in the place which had
been divinely ordained: as Josephus put it, ‘One temple of the one God –
for like is always attracted to like.’ This unification of the Temple
worship had been hard won and remained under threat even up to 70
ce. The Jews of Elephantine in Egypt, who made sacrifices in their own
temple in the fifth century bce, wrote to the Jerusalem authorities
requesting authorization to rebuild their temple after it had been
destroyed through the machinations of local Egyptians. It is significant
that they felt it necessary to ask permission, but they clearly saw no rea-
son to be apologetic about their local shrine. The biblical books of
Kings record the strategy adopted in the time of the Temple of Solomon
by Jeroboam, the first ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, to
strengthen his kingdom by persuading the people to worship two golden
calves, one set up in Bethel and another in Dan, in order to remove the
need for them to worship at the Jerusalem Temple. That there was
indeed a temple cult at Dan in the Iron Age has been confirmed by
excavation, as we have seen, and finds of altars, often made of carved
stones with a rectangular flat top and a pointed ‘horn’ in each of its
four corners, in many sites of the first half of the first millennium bce
suggest that the centralization of sacrifice did not come naturally –
unsurprisingly, in view of the ubiquity of local sacrificial cults in all
other religions with whom worshippers of the Jewish God came into
contact.^27
Propaganda for the Jerusalem Temple as the only valid place on earth
for the offering of sacrifices to the Lord was all the more intense because
of earlier opposition to centralization, and nowhere more so than in the
pious literature which recorded the purification of the Temple in the
160s bce by Judah Maccabee after it had been desecrated by Antiochus
Epiphanes (see above). The victory was celebrated on 25 Kislev ‘for
eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the festival of booths’ (that
is, Sukkot), so that ‘carrying ivy- wreathed wands and beautiful branches
and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to him
who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place’. This
description of the origins of the festival of Hanukkah is found in the
Second Book of Maccabees, composed at the latest within a century of
the events it describes. The book is prefaced by a letter from ‘the Jews in
Jerusalem and those in the land of Judaea, to their Jewish kindred in
Egypt’, urging them to ‘keep the festival of booths in the month of
Kislev’.