56 A History of Judaism
crucifixion of Jesus, ‘spent much time together in the Temple ... And
day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being
saved.’^ But for Jews who lived at a greater distance, physical attendance
at the Temple will inevitably have been much rarer. Many will only have
attended pilgrim festivals, and those from abroad can have attended
even the festivals no more than a few times. Philo, from Alexandria,
seems to have been to Jerusalem only once.
The significance of the Temple was therefore more symbolic than
practical – but no less powerful for that. For the individual hoping that
the rains would come and help the crops to grow, it was comforting to
know that the daily sacrifices were being made on behalf of Israel to
preserve the covenant with God. When the same individual repented of
his sins on the Day of Atonement, with fasting and prayer, it helped to
know that the High Priest was also praying on behalf of Israel as he
performed the ritual of the scapegoat. For many, the connection of indi-
vidual to Temple was reinforced by two payments. For those in the land
of Israel, the payment to priests of tithes on agricultural produce re-
inforced the notion that the priestly service was indeed on their behalf.
And for all Jews, including those in the diaspora, the annual levy of a
half- shekel from all adult male Jews to pay for the regular Temple sac-
rifices gave a symbolic joint ownership of those sacrifices to each of
them. The rule, as elaborated in the Mishnah, was that no individual
could pay more or less than the half- shekel, so that no one could feel the
communal sacrifices somehow served them more than others. The prin-
ciple of shared ownership was derived from the injunction from Moses
to the children of Israel in the desert as recorded in Exodus, that ‘the
rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half-
shekel, when you bring this offering to the Lord to make atonement for
your lives’. The extension of the single payment recorded in the biblical
text to an annual payment seems to have occurred only in the Second
Temple period. It appears from one passage in the Dead Sea scrolls that
this extension encountered some opposition, but the practice was
certainly widespread by the mid- first century bce, before the rebuilding
of the Temple by Herod: the Roman orator Cicero referred in the 60s
bce to the collection of gold made by the Jews of Asia Minor, in the
west of modern Turkey, for transmission to the Temple in Jerusalem
(and the confiscation of this gold by a Roman governor).^26
The magnificence of the Jerusalem Temple in large part derived, of
course, from this influx of wealth from all over the Jewish world. Unlike
followers of other gods, by the first century ce most Jews thought it