50 A History of Judaism
because, with the gathering of the harvest, it was easier for farmers to
leave their fields. Attendance by pilgrims from Mesopotamia is sug-
gested by a tradition in the Mishnah that prayer for immediate rain was
postponed for fifteen days after Sukkot, to enable Babylonian pilgrims
‘to reach the Euphrates’.^16
The Herodian Temple, with its huge courtyard, was well equipped to
house pilgrims not just from the land of Israel but from the wider dias-
pora, and many seem to have come by the land route from Babylonia
and, aided by the comparative safety of travel under Roman rule, from
Mediterranean communities. Hence the picture in the Acts of the
Apostles of the multiple languages to be heard in Jerusalem at Pente-
cost, where there were ‘devout Jews from every nation under heaven’
living in Jerusalem – ‘Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of
Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia
and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and
visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs’. As
Philo put it earlier in the first century ce, Moses ‘judged that since God
is one, there should be also only one temple’, not consenting ‘to those
who wish to perform the rites in their houses’ but bidding them ‘rise
up from the ends of the earth and come to this temple’:
Countless multitudes from countless cities come, some over land, others
over sea, from east and west and north and south at every feast. They take
the temple for their port as a general haven and safe refuge from the bustle
and great turmoil of life, and there they seek to find calm weather, and
released from the cares whose yoke has been heavy upon them from their
earliest years, to enjoy a brief breathing- space in scenes of genial cheerful-
ness. Thus filled with comfortable hopes they devote the leisure, as is their
bounden duty, to holiness and the honouring of God. Friendships are
formed between those who hitherto knew not each other, and the sacri-
fices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling and constitute
the surest pledge that all are of one mind.^17
Much of the excitement of pilgrimage must have come from being
part of a crowd. A highlight of the festival of Sukkot was the rite of the
Water- Drawing, when water was carried ceremoniously from the Pool
of Siloam to the Temple and poured on to the altar from a golden ewer
simultaneously with the regular wine libation, to the accompaniment of
dancing and music and general rejoicing. The ritual seems to have been
intended as a prayer for rains to fall in the coming winter: ‘Men of piety
and good works used to dance before them with burning torches in