Jewish History in Six Chapters (Second Temple Period) #1 - Collected Talks of David Solomon #110

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[Music] [Applause] going to start now which is a six part overview of the whole of jewish history and this series is being sponsored by chabad south africa on the one hand and also by uh dominion shul uh in melbourne the school of love that everyone knows and but i welcome everyone who is joining us whether our in-house audience this evening or uh you uh at home or wherever you might be watching uh through the uh live stream so in this six part series i'm going to take us all the way through jewish history i'm not going to introduce too much now because there's a lot of material to get through but i want to make a couple of preparatory remarks i want to just say a couple of things at the beginning the first is as i'm sure is going to be obvious to some of you that number one if you follow this series carefully and you listen to everything i say it's a big claim but i'll go with it you'll come out with basically a masters level education in jewish history we're going to cover a lot of material we're not so much concerned with dates and things although that's important but we want to understand the mechanics of jewish history why things happen when they happen how jewish history itself is embedded in world history generally so that's the first thing i need you to understand the second is that everything we're going to talk about in this series are just headlines in fact there are headlines shepard headlines every door you open in jewish history will take you into a whole journey of discovery what i'm telling you now is basically what you would need to know if you were sitting at a fancy dinner party and the subject of jewish history came up in any period what the minimum is you would need to know to understand what is being spoken about or if you open a book and it's discussing any period of jewish history what is the minimal information on a framework level that you would need to know would make sense of that material and i think it's a very very useful guide i'm going to show you now the basic framework that we're going to use and those of you who've seen me speak before will know that i love this that is jewish history and in an overall sense jewish history is uh well uh actually before i before i show you why that line is jewish history i generally preempt with this remark as well because as some of you may have seen uh a talk i've given a few times called the whole of jewish history in one hour where we try and condense it even further and i make this remark at the beginning of that talk and i'm going to make it again now is that for many people for many sages and authorities the study of jewish history is important on two fundamental levels one is it's a mitzvah dioraita which means it's a positive commandment from the torah to learn the history of the jewish people zachary olam says the torah remember the days of the world benue understand the years of every generation so that we can see the evolving and the revelation of the entire continuum of the jewish people in the world and what it's for and where it's leading the world the other reason the study of jewish history is extremely important is because especially today is because it reaches to the and we're going to talk about this a little later tonight is that it reaches the very very heart of that very obscure concept that we talk about called jewish identity and understanding where you came from and understanding what it means to be part of this phenomenal continuum is the key to understanding one's place in the world being jewish and running around saying oh i'm jewish i'm jewish i'm so proud to be jewish but not knowing anything about jewish history is like being in a ship and not only not where it's not only not knowing where it's going but you don't even know that that ship is on an ocean but that ship is on an ocean and that ship is going somewhere and it came from somewhere and that's what jewish history is really trying to enable the topic of jewish history trying to enable us to understand so the framework i'm going to be discussing in this next six weeks deals with this enormous body of knowledge and trying to bring it down so that we can uh come to terms with it and understand its framework the framework that i'm using was not made by me it is a framework that emerges naturally from jewish history for quite interesting mystical reasons that we won't go into now but i'm also and i don't want to shock anyone here but i'm going to be using the secular dating system once again for two reasons one is that people are very familiar with that and the other is because it's very convenient for us because this we can call minus 2000 that's 2000 bce and we can call this not minus we can just call this 2000 which is approximately where we are now and therefore we would call that zero there was no year zero but theoretically we're going to call that the zero minus one thousand minus five hundred we can fill in some 500 blocks here so we're gonna call that one thousand fifteen hundred and five hundred all right so what we have here is jewish history divided up into five discrete 500 year blocks that's 500 years that's a long period of time if you think about 500 years ago you're already talking about the early 1500s and think about how the world has changed since that time so 500 years as a block but on this particular map of jewish history it doesn't look like a lot because jewish history has been going on for a long time and 4 000 years is not a biscuit now in the course of these six weeks i don't know which color to take so i've taken them all in the course of this six weeks we're going to be looking for the most part at discrete 500 year blocks and i'm going to be starting today with this one here this is so nobody gets confused we are going to zoom in on the period from approximately minus 500 that's 500 bce to the year 0. what's then gonna happen is we're going to do subsequently the remain 400 for 500 year periods up until today and then we're going to go back and we're going to look at this entire period in the last talk because this entire period here everything here is the bible now it doesn't mean that the bible is not historical but it does exist in a slightly different framework in relation to uh the objective history of of the jewish people and and their emergence into the world this is a system i've done a few times bear with me it won't be confusing but we're going to start tonight i'm going to wipe this off the board now and we are going to zoom in on the first period we're going to look at today minus 500 to zero but just bear in mind that we're going to go forward and then we're going to come back and we're going to do the talaq at the end because really where we're going to start off tonight is really the end of the bible and i'm going to zoom in by the way if anybody in the in-house audience has any questions then uh maybe save them till the end or if they're questions of immediate comprehension then please let me know yep i know that uh you at home can't see just how many people i have here there's several hundred and they're they're all spread around uh this enormous hall because of uh social distancing but we'll we'll do our best all right very good very good always always always someone now uh i'm zooming in i'm zooming in does everybody follow what i'm doing so far yep don't get as confused as i am just stay with the program we're going to call this minus 500 i'm going to call this zero we're going to divide this up into centuries minus four minus three minus two minus one and every 500 year block of jewish history has a name and the name of this particular period of jewish history not once again not made up by me but called within whichever discourse of jewish history you're in whether you are in a religious discussion whether you're sitting around with academics everyone knows this period by the same name and i'm going to write it on the board and i'm going to transliterate it put your hand up if you know the words i'm about to write on the board perfect it's known as by it shaney what's the meaning of the word buy it house cheney means second so we know this as the second house or as more commonly referred to because house means the house of god of course the second temple period now the second temple period is a very very complex period and scholars have been crawling all over it for a long time and some people find it so complicated they even get a little scared and confused by it but they don't have to because what we're going to do tonight is we're going to really break it down and understand what is happening and how that entire period is embedded generally in what's going on around it and how those things can sometimes help us to explain uh what's going on within it because it is this period perhaps more than any other in jewish history which formulates that which we come to know as judaism as we know it and perhaps even more critically as jewish identity as we know it and we're going to look at why that is so first of all we start here what what what begins this period of the second temple what is actually kicking that off well as you may have heard second temple implies that there was a first temple and that first temple got destroyed and it was destroyed by destroyed who destroyed the first temple huh yeah so he was there it was destroyed by well under the bukhari was destroyed by the babylonians who were this great big power in the in the region they were a superpower of the day the babylonians had taken the concept of civilization even further than the neo assyrians that they had displaced and they were they were the business but they basically collapsed overnight because they were defeated very quickly by the persians by persia and under the great leader cyrus the great and as we've discussed cyrus kind of changed the nature of conquest so it wasn't going to be just like the assyrians or the babylonians would have done where they come to your country and they schmeichel you they destroy you and they take everyone away and they destroy everything and they repopulate it and so on when the persians took over the vast babylonian empire they said we are going to allow people autonomous rule within our empire system we're going to set up local governors and so on and people can basically stay where they are and in fact we're even going to allow nations that were displaced by the babylonians to return to their native lands and to rebuild their cultural and religious institutions and amongst those people that cyrus made the proclamation about were the jewish people whose primary place in exile at the moment was uh babylon and now persia so we decided to come back well a number of us decided to come back and you need to understand what it would be like yep to uh i mean it's shocking you'll see it really is to to be in a gener imagine being in a generation where you had the opportunity to live in the land of israel in some kind of independent jewish state not that it was a completely independent jewish state then because it was actually under the rubric of the persian empire but imagine being able to go and live in the land of israel and fulfill the commandments of the land of israel and the promise of the jewish people in the land of israel and not go that would be astonishing these people a lot of people found that they had comfortable jobs in persia and babylon they had kids at good schools they had nice homes yeah they had some good gashaft going on there and they just weren't yet ready or prepared to go back as um enthusiastic zionists to rebuild the land of israel and uh rebuild the temple but there was a core of people that did about 40 000 or so came back uh just really prior to this period there's the there's the cyrus decree and they come back in around -5 38 and they come back here and they come back here under the leadership of two very unique individuals one of whom of course is not yet not yet zerubba vel zuru baval ben shaltiel and jo hoshua ben johozadak these two individuals one of whom was the grandson of the last king or kind of the second last king and the other was the grandson of the last gohan gadol of the last high priest and as well as that as well as coming back and that really is the generation of the return that is the generation that was stunned by this proclamation of cyrus who would have thought that uh and a conqueror would proclaim that the jews could go back we were like we were dreaming we couldn't believe this incredible miracle and we came back and we were assisted in that by the last of the prophets there were still naveem there were still prophets the whole of the first temple had been this kind of try struggle between the kingship and the priesthood and the prof prophetic institution we had two last prophets and those last prophets that were with us were who oh good you see if my in-house audience knows the answers all the answers then there's no reason for me to be standing here for them to be sitting here but of course these last two prophets who existed in this generation who were assisting zaruba villain and yehoshua were hagai and zacharia there is of course one more malachi he's about to come uh very soon all right and what they were doing was that they were encouraging very much uh johoshua and zarubavel to rebuild the temple it was a politically fraught situation there was a question as to whether zarubavel would attempt to not only rebuild the temple but to restore the kingship the persians had appointed him they knew knew the land of judea as yuhud madinta and he was going to be the governor and he was a jewish governor that was coming from the exile in babylon but it was fairly clear that they did not want him restoring the kingship but there was some discussion of that but he never did it remained the kingship was not restored for the second temple now the whole point about the second temple is once we get it up and running because it was a very very modest structure to begin with so we're gonna we're going to build it here round about minus 500 we're going to draw a little temple there there's our temple and that means that the whole of the second temple period is now kicking off it wasn't as magnificent as the first to start with it was going to end up being very magnificent but it wasn't to start with but we kick it up there and we start the second temple [Music] yes well this is a complicated business i've just been asked about where this sits in relation to the events as recorded in the megillat estere in relation to purim you have to understand that every time i give a talk like that i dread that question and i'd read it because um the picture given to us by hazal by the sages of israel when they discuss when the purim story happens is not clear whether it happens before the rebuilding of the temple after the rebuilding of the temple and the picture we get from those scholars who are trying to match the biblical story of esther with events that they know about in the persian empire is also not clear but we believe that if the story of esther happened anyone who's read the book of esther knows if you're jewish knows that story is true because it has an enduring and eternal truth to it and it is something very mystical about that but we're not i mean that and we're not entirely sure when it happens i'll i'll probably possibly around about around about that time is the best that we can i'll do a little human touch in there to indicate that but we're not entire if i if we have to be very very honest with ourselves objectively historically we're not entirely sure when it was and i think that's part of the brilliance of the book of esther remember um so in other words esther is hidden it's hidden in and not only uh in terms of the the names and the story but it's hidden from us historically this is the hand of god in history at a level that is not yet revealed to us exactly what the details were but we're moving on there are actually four sub phases we need to understand that there are four subsets to the second temple we're going to discuss those four and it's all about who's in control and at the end of the day although we have our own autonomous temple up and running at the end of the day who's in charge the persians and the persian well the persian phase of the second temple period and it's important to know who's in charge is going to go up to about here but it's going to contain some very very interesting things that i'm just going to discuss because we can't spend too long on each period but we're going to call this the persian period starts modestly but it grows in complexity when we come back it's not just a temple that we have to rebuild we have to rebuild an entire society we have to rebuild an economy we have to rebuild all our central cultural and religious institutions we're still kind of editing the last kind of writings that have been received to us from the prophets from the tanakh and so on it's a very complex period but i want to talk about something now for one minute if you are the sort of person that is likely to get easily confused then i need you to block your ears now and i'll tell you or i'll signal now when you can come back and listen this is a footnote but it's a footnote that i want to say because otherwise people hear what i say and then they look at material and they go ah how come this and how come that so why don't i just obliterate those r from the start and tell you this we have a problem in jewish chronology we have a problem if you open up some textbooks they will tell you most textbooks in fact that are certainly based on academic perspectives and what the world generally regards as the objective historical reality of the jewish people you will see that the temple the first temple was destroyed in minus 586 bce and that therefore the second temple was up and running uh here and well it it kind of initially got dedicated roundabout uh well it got up and running around about 70 years later so by the time we get to 500 we already have the temple excuse me but if you open up some uh other textbooks particularly ones that are coming from a more for want of a better word from perspective you will see that those dates are completely out that in fact they want us to understand that everything on this timeline is actually pushed forward by a hundred and sixty years based on uh i mean rush and we're not going to go into that now which tells us about the various durations of the temples so what they want us to understand is that the first temple was not destroyed in 586 bce but in 426 bce i'm not going to and therefore you know the the second temple wasn't rebuilt until the -350s this is a very very difficult perspective from the point of view of the secular chronology because uh we know that the battle between the persians and sparta already happens at marathon in the year minus 490 we know that by the time they get to the you know the the the 420s the babylonians are dust we know and based on much chronology and so on and i've done research into this to try and find out uh which it is i'm not going to make a determination now but i just want to highlight it i'm using the secular chronology but don't think that i'm unaware that there is an alternative chronology and if people can prove that that alternative chronology is the more correct one then i'm more than excited uh to begin to adopt it but for now we're using the secular chronology in case people are sitting there going um you know what are you talking about who is this now they probably wouldn't say it like that during this century the minus 400 in other words the fifth century bce we start to see the arrival of two very very unique and important individuals one of whom of course is nehemiah who comes and reestablishes basically the centralized religious and political institution or cultural institutions that need to have he rebuilds the walls of jerusalem and he establishes the order of the service in the temple gets things organized because it had got a bit chaotic in the following generations and he followed not long after by the very well-known ezra who comes from babylon from the exile in babylon max aliyah in the middle of the 5th century bce and ezra's impact on jewish history is virtually incalculable because ezra amongst many many other things that he does is he establishes the textual tradition of the torah as the central focus of jewish spirituality and here i'm here i want to talk for a minute about ezra because people are israel they don't really realize just how profound uh his contribution is because it's not just in the establishment of the torah and so on in the reading of the torah and the study of the torah because now we no longer have prophecy now we only really have the torah itself as a mode of as in its various modes of interpretation and understanding that are really there to guide us but ezra establishes something very profound about jewish identity we are not like other people says israel this is going to be really critical later on even in this talk we are not like other people we have a unique continuum in the world we are more than just an ethnicity we are an ethnicity but we are something more we are a spiritual discourse we have a god we have a torah we are a people and we have a land and we're not like other nations but at the same time we're not just a spiritual discourse either this continuum was given to a physical ethnic continuum in the world and it's that unique combination of physical presence and physical continuity together with what you might call religion or a spiritual discourse unique to that people that sets the jewish people apart and lies at the heart of jewish identity that is ezra's profound contribution and that's why it makes sense that it is ezra who comes along and finds that a lot of the guys that have been left in the land of israel during the babylonian exile and the destruction and so on and the rebuilding have shock horror because you can't even imagine a generation like this have married out you know there was a shortage of women and they have married local girls and it is ezra basically i mean it's a bit more complex but the basis of it is is that israel it is ezra who introduces really into jewish continuity the idea that marrying out is not acceptable he really puts a stop to into marriage he makes these guys divorce their wives it's no longer going to be an acceptable practice jewish men need to marry jewish women which means once again underlining the importance of identity as both ethnicity and as religious discourse amongst the jewish people but i need to move on from this first phase but there are some foundational points i want to make so if i can just spend one more minute on the persians because then it will understand us uh help us to understand going forward and uh for this i've actually got to tell you something that it's not easy to say and that is and this is going to come as a shock to some of you and this is this is this is the one where some of you will actually be pressing the the click off button and running out of the room screaming up he courses and so on but uh i need i need to make this point because if you don't understand this it's difficult to understand some aspects of jewish history and that's this judaism was not always as it is now some things became evolved throughout jewish history there are some core and foundational ideas that propel us forward but the institutions of judaism and the way things are carried out there has been tremendous flux throughout history and there have even been periods we haven't exactly known what we're doing for example after the destruction of the first temple and there's an exile what are people doing there's no such thing as schools yet there's no temple and we're over here we don't even know if god can hear us in exile i mean this is one of the great things of uh sephiroth and so on we don't even know if god can hear us but what are we supposed to do are we supposed to set up some kind of you know building or institutions are we supposed to offer sacrifices are we not supposed to offer sacrifices do we pray do we not pray something's terribly wrong with the way things have gone over here that's clear from the picture that the tanaka the bible portrayed towards this house but we really don't know so one of the great examples of that is actually sitting inside the fifth century in the persian empire because what a lot of people don't realize is that we didn't just have one temple there was one temple in jerusalem and there was another temple and here i'm going to introduce you to a very important concept which is the map i'm going to be coming back to this map throughout this series so it's worth seeing it right what's that it is indeed the mediterranean if you don't believe me go there for those of you who are confused that's the water all right and we can see that uh easily see that's the mediterranean because that's italy greece turkey there's the land of israel there's egypt there's north africa yep here's babylon and persia and so on sorry yeah so there is a temple here on an island in the nile called elephantani which was established by a jewish colony who by the time you get to the fifth century have established their own temple they're making their own sacrifices to the god of israel it doesn't i don't need to tell you of course that the rabbis oh not the rabbis there are no rabbis yet really but the priests who are running the show in the temple in jerusalem are not happy about this uh this alternative temple going on in elephantine but we even have still correspondence between them and so on it's a fascinating picture for those who want to go into it uh those are the those are the issues we're gonna i'll write that elephantany for those who are interested but you see one of the reasons that supports the whole alternative chronology idea not that i'm saying that it's specifically correct but one of the things that supports it is the idea that some historians call the persian pew to the second temple the quiet period it's a quiet period because we don't apart from the things i've mentioned we don't know a lot more we do know that ezra and nehemiah had established some institutions of local governance it's during this period that we start to see in various forms the beginning of what's going to become the what the the knesset the bigness of the big parliament or the yerusia as the greeks of the great rose the greeks might have called it or uh the sanhedrin as the name eventually became known so there are autonomous structures being established we know that we're basically paying taxes and tributes to persia we're saluting their flag every morning but they more or less leave us alone for most of the period it's known as a quiet period however everything is about to change and in fact it does change because as you know put your hands up if you know why everything changes around minus 3 30. well because of a young man that decides that he's going to conquer the world and he does he basically conquers everything alexander the great from greece all the way through to india and the known world by the way is always wherever jews are living so he conquers everything in over the course of about 10 years a series of stunning victories including us so he conquers everything basically from here all the way to here but he conquers us as well and here's the really really important point to understand about alexander's conquest first of all he schmeizes the persians so this he puts an end effectively to the persian empire as we knew it for the time being for the time being it's going to come back and i need to spend a minute on alexander because sometimes it's a point that not many people understand the impact of because alexander it's not just about military conquests we say this again and again alexandra alexander brought with him alexander the great brought with him an ideology into the world the famous ideology of hellenism and i have explained hellenism a number of times but i'm going to do it again in just a very very reduced version in about a minute and you all know what i'm going to talk about i'm going to talk about what happens when a hellenistic man wakes up in the morning following mendel what happens when a hellenistic man wakes up in the morning what's the first thing he does look at that that's fantastic look at these arms these abs this body there's nothing this body can't do it can run it can swim it can jump oh what's that well who's thinking those amazing thoughts what's this incredible precise rational instrument in my head called my mind whoa mind body the two together there's nothing i can't achieve man is the central value of all things and when a jewish person when a jewish man wakes up in the morning he says mordani he doesn't bother looking at his body it's pathetic and jewish people have never gone according to what they can see last the values of truth and beauty and harmony that the greeks valued the people of israel have always gone according to what we have heard israel and what are we hearing what are we listening to we're ultimately listening to that inner voice inside us that tells us the difference between right and wrong between good and evil concepts that the greeks didn't really originally have in fact it has been said that they gave us art and we gave them guilt but the fertile cross-fertilization of hebraic and hellenic culture really creates the whole of the western world that's going to follow in the next couple of millennia and what's really critical to understand about that about alexandria and hellenism and that ideology and this is super important this is super important that for the greeks they didn't really care where you came from or what ethnicity you belong to if you think like us you are one of us the whole of hellenic culture is the idea of a conceptual view of the world that is what they are trying to share and what they are trying in some cases even to coerce that is why this is such a profound clash because it clashes between the idea of ezra that the jewish people is a unique body in the world ethnically and spiritually and the hellenic idea that everybody can be part of the same team you just have to see the world in a certain way and that certain way is whatever the greeks tell you it's meant to be now it won't come as a shock to you to hear that uh alexander died and uh he died fairly young as so often happens to men who try to conquer the world and when he died his empire was basically divided up amongst the his primary generals who we know is the diadochi and i'm going to draw this map again so i can show it to you uh even more clearly after alexander so everybody's okay we've got the persian period the persian period the quiet person period with a few things happening suddenly alexander's in town conquers us and alexander is okay with us but the diadochi are a bit different and basically we have the land of israel we have the mediterranean here here's here's the land of israel and amongst his generals there are basically well there are a number of generals but the two that concern us is a general called ptolemy spelled petolomy who said ah i'll have that thank you very much and starts the ptolemaic dynasty predominantly in egypt and another general called celiusis who said ah i think i'll have that thank you very much and starts the cellucid dynasty so each of these two entities named after the generals that be who of alexander who began them after his death when they were ripping apart his conquests these are two hellenic dynasties they're not strictly speaking greek because they're here but they are greek speaking and greek culture they are hellenic and as i've said before in the ancient world it was very very trendy to be hellenic these guys are trying to out lean each other and for much of this century we are a basketball between these two dynasties that's really important to understand no less than five wars and we are the buffer state between the two but beyond that something else emerges in this period right here as a direct result of this culture clash between the hellenic and the hebraic and that of course is the translation of the torah into greek that is a classic hellenic project to take someone's most valued cultural asset and put it on a table and dissect it like a cat and just translate into greek because they wanted to know what it was now some people think that's very useful but i'm amongst those who think that at the end of the day that was probably tragic because once you translate the torah you move away and you deviate from the true revelation of the torah in the language of hebrew and we have paid for that translation many times with blood ever since there's a famous story about the translation that actually belongs to the letter of aristeas which is a pseudographic letter from a century later but it tells us that 70 great rabbis came to egypt and they and ptolemy ii put them all in separate rooms and they miraculously all came up with the same translation and of course my father used to say that uh that is not a miracle what would be a miracle is if you put 70 rabbis in the same room and they came up with the same translation that would be the miracle however uh that's a classic example of a hellenic project the translation of the torah which we call the septuagint the targum shivim the targum of seventy that happens here however back and forth back and forth between these two dynasties and eventually we end up in the control of the cellucid dynasty who is ruled by the time you get to here it is ruled by a guy called antiochus iii and it's very very difficult to find a ruler in the ancient world who would be as similar as antiochus iii to donald trump um now that is an essay in itself and we could go into that in great detail those of you who want to look at antiochus iii as a figure i can do so and see if i'm right or wrong but i think i'm right and like donald trump antiochus iii was a great supporter of the jewish people he made all sorts of decrees in support of judaism he not only for non-jews in relation to jerusalem and the sanctity of the temple and the inviolability of the land of israel and so on but even for jews themselves uh antiochus iii said that jews living uh in the salish empire needed to be faithful to jewish laws and so on so he was a big supporter he sent sacrifices and gifts to the temple and so on big ruler but while he's running around being antiochus iii here there is a growing entity a growing entity that is just starting to take its place on the world stage and that of course is rome and rome's sphere of influence is expanding and they actually end up fighting a war against antiochus the third in the silly sid empire in order to stop his influence as a result of that he had to pay massive reparations he lost that war including giving his own son as a hostage to the romans it explains what the psychology of someone like antiochus iv his son when you think about the issues that he had because he'd basically been given by his father to the romans as a hostage but antiochus iv does eventually come to the throne in fact his father antiochus iii was killed while raiding a temple to find the funds to pay the romans even though he himself believed as many people in the ancient world believed that temples were inviolable nevertheless he found himself in iran and he thought no one's going to notice if i if i raid a temple in northern iran but unfortunately it cost him his life so the parallels anyway antiochus the fourth comes and antiochus iv uses an argument that we're going to see a little bit more of often in jewish history where it is along the lines of ah ah the jews yes i roll rule over a whole lot of jews and they've got a temple and so on um i don't have a problem with jews per se some of my best friends are jews i have a problem with jewish spirituality i have a problem with their worship of god i have a problem with their ritual of circumcision i have a problem with their observance of the sabbath i have a problem with their dietary law i have a problem with everything about it because they're just trying to set themselves up as a particular people and the greeks don't look at the world that way you need to think like us you need to get in the gymnasium and work on your bod you need to be walking around talking philosophy you need to deconstruct things and frankly i'm going to not eradicate the jews i'm actually going to eradicate judaism so in a series of decrees he attempts to do that at the same time that he's doing that more and more jews are getting caught up in the politically correct thinking of the times which was hellenic so you get guys who are reversing their circumcisions and they're running around in the nude in the gymnasium and they are getting involved in philosophical ideas that are less than kosher and so on and it gets to the point where they're saying well we have this temple what difference does it make if we offer um sacrifices to the god of israel why don't we just call the god of israel zeus olympus and frankly what difference does it make that we're sacrificing uh you know cows and sheep males will sacrifice pigs pig's perfectly good animal so we get to a point where we're actually sacrificed well not we but they are actually jews who are hellenic have taken over the temple and are sacrificing pigs to zeus olympus in the temple itself and as you can imagine there are one or two harradium who don't like that so the rebellion of course starts and this really inaugurates the whole of the next phase so the greeks are going to go up to here which begins with alexander and it's going to go up to here because of course in the 160s in the middle of the second century bce we of course have the maccabean revolt and the whole story that's a terrible that is a terrible menorah i gotta tell you and the whole uh of the maccabean revolt and the story of hanukkah because and i have as i said at the beginning these are only headlines uh as some of you will know i've done an entire series on just the maccabean revolts and their battles and so on and anyone who studies that history will be able to tell you that there's no doubt about it the defeat of the celiacide empire by yehuda makabi by the hazmanian family was nothing short of absolutely supernatural miraculous that that is that is the true miracle of hanukkah the lighting the candles and so on that's very nice but the real miracle is the uh military miracle by a small guerrilla force against what was effectively a military superpower yeah uh it would be like you know the united states being defeated by dominion sure now well we don't just commemorate the lights when we say alanis we're really commemorative sorry it's not comparable though your question is excellent your question is excellent obviously not within the scope of what i'm going to go into now we embody we embody the miraculous in the candles there's no question about it but uh ghazal and everyone is telling you that the that the real miracle is really in the uh in the military thing the more you go into it the more you can see that i fully understand that the mitzvah of hanukkah and the gemaran shabbos on my hanukkah and so on goes into the all the candles it's very important but the uh since we're dealing with history and also it's it's also the message taken from hanukkah the indomitable spirit of the jewish people that will fight for the truth of the idea of god in the world against anything that tries to crush it is the enduring message and miracle of hanukkah uh it would be difficult to say that what was a nice party trick of the candles and we're still doing two over 2000 years later is interesting but the it's living with the message of hanukkah and that's why that is why it was so profoundly at the basis of what is going to happen over the next 100 years this miraculous situation that turned into so this is that's the persian this is what we call it's called the greek but really it's hellenic is what we really should uh call it we're under the control of the helene's and this is the in completely independent eventually has manian kingdom many of you will already know of the idea of the hasmonean entity lasts for 100 years i've said this before but i will also say this again i don't want to shock anybody or upset anybody but you know that hanukkah with the cat with the candles and with everything and all that lovely stuff is really only the warm fluffy pr exercise of the hasmoneans i mean overall what we're going to see in the hasmonean dynasty is a unmitigated train wreck in slow motion uh it starts really really well it starts very exciting you see if the story of the by trishan of the first temple was about kings really the story of uh the second temple is really about priests and we're gonna now we're really seeing the whole idea of what the state of israel would look like if it was run by very very religious priests kohanim who controlled the temple but it starts the hasmanians were a priestly family and it starts beautifully it starts with yehuda macabre who's like a kind of george washington figure and he he's going around he's winning all these amazing battles but he already dies only three years two or three years after the dedication of the temple and of course you know how the succession works so it's uh it's uh it's judah and then he is succeeded by his brother jonathan and jonathan is succeeded by his brother shimon and that's basically the first 30 years of the hasmonean entity and as it progresses more and more the hasmonean republic is gaining more and more independence a lot of people don't realize this but one of the reasons that enabled because it's not like the sentences just went away they kept coming for a while but one of the reasons why that has money and entity was able to stay intact is because they had treaties with rome rome this new growing power recognized yehuda makavi and the hasmonean entity in the senate of rome and had a treaty with them but that alone wasn't going to enable them to stand up on their own they had to fight battles and they had to forget their independence but by the time you get to around 130 minus 130 the hazmanian entity is more or less completely independent they have no one really ruling over them they have treaties with allies but they are independent and by the time you get to by around wireless 130 euro in the next generation of the hasmonean leadership and that of course is embodied in the enormously influential and impactful figure in judaism of not yet you know this but you just don't realize this is who i'm referring to we know him well when i say we i mean we is a big term but we though in here yes in history he's known as john hericanus and or otherwise known also as yochanan yochanan the high priest and he was completely independent total authoritarian ruler and um he didn't call himself king he would have referred to himself as an ethnic but he was both the absolute ruler of the jewish people king in all but name and he was also the high priest sorry yeah he minted the coins of himself well they're all so they already started minting coins from shimon from his father and uh jochen and hirokonos is not only minting coins he's conquering places and with the great benefit of historical hindsight he may have made some mistakes i i don't want to be the one who judges that it's not my role to judge historical figures i wasn't there not in this incarnation at least and i wasn't and and who are we we don't know the circumstances but it does seem like some of the things he did were policy decisions that weren't necessarily that smart one of which will seem smart at the time but didn't have didn't work out well and the most famous of those of course is round about here round about here yochanan herekiness roundabout here is his conquest of a nation that is living uh to the south east of israel called the edumens now the edumans have been around for a while this is their new incarnation they used to be called edom in the bible they have a continuum going back uh right to uh biblical times and they are conquered by yokhan and hinkunus and when he conquers them he says oh well what am i going to do with this people that i've conquered yep if i don't do anything i'm going to have some demographic issues so he takes them the entire nation and he forcibly converts them to judaism this idea that judaism has never been into forced conversions is simply not true yochanan hercules circumcised all the males and through the entire nation in the jordan river as a mikvah and said you're now jewish to understand that and to understand historical situations would be to understand that that would be exactly as though the state of israel today after its conquest of what's become known as the west bank after the conquest of yehuda and chamron in 1967 had taken the entire palestinian population and said to them you're now jewish and forcibly converted them to judaism which some may not think is such a bad idea it still might be a good idea but we'll get back to that maybe uh much later after we've turned off now but that was to have bad karma unfortunately and we're going to look at that in a moment now i do need to say one other side note to all of this while this is going on because there's a very very important facet of the jewish world that is starting to take shape that we can't ignore going forward and it's this it is round about this time or during this period or just prior to this period maybe starting under the leadership of yonatan and shimon of the previous generation but certainly coming to the fore during the time of jochen and henkinus that two different visions of judaism are emerging one of which is emerging from a very allude elite group of priests who were saying that judaism is really all about the badam mikdash it's really all about the temple it's about the sacrifices it's about the priests it's about what's going on in the temple in jerusalem yes everyone's important but the priests are really the main story and when it comes to the spiritual discourse of the jewish people and the priests are the essence of what it is all about going forward and the other was and they and they of course took on a famous brand's name which we know as the sadducees or the stukem but we'll use the english term from the house of zadok they claimed heritage all the way back to salaka high priest in davidic times and so on however an alternate vision was arising as well and that is a vision of judaism that had the torah that had been implanted in the second temple by ezra as the basis of jewish spirituality which by now had acquired a very very impressive body of precedent and common law and interpretation and and and it's not too big it's not too big a heresy to say this as a result of the encounter of the oral torah with the with greek culture that that oral torah was now starting to undergo forms of systematization that it was starting to be organized as a distinct body of knowledge that could be studied and immersed in and so on it was not just something organically lived but it was a body of intellectual ideas as well as well as ideas of interpretation of the torah as well as things starting to be written down and so on the people responsible for uh the transmission of the oral torah and those ideas and its hermeneutics and its mode of interpretation went on who were basically a meritocracy not an elitist priesthood but a meritocracy for those who wanted to rise within that system and they took on the brand name of the purushim or the this horrible word pharisees in english which has just been made ugly by the new testament but we know them as the sophrim meaning the scribes or the prashim those who separated themselves because they were observing the oral torah traditions regarding purity and so on but we can also simplify it by just calling them the rabbis and these two distinct discourses were starting to compete and for most of up until say late into jochen and hericanus's career the hasmanian leaders were siding for the most part with the scribal classes not so much even though they were priests politically they wanted to be careful that they were in accord with those who were transmitting the torah traditions because they still realized that at the end of the day the torah was their legitimacy but once we get late into jochen and hercules career we start to see a shift within the hasmonean leadership towards the sadducees away from pharisaic factions this is very very complex subject within la second temple history and we can't go into it too much but what you need to be aware of is that that is a framework going forward that all leaders of the jewish people were negotiating with in the late second temple period and it wasn't sure which one was correct we know now that uh that temple got destroyed so we know which idea eventually won out in the continuum of jewish history very big very strong very powerful leader ruler but he died and he was succeeded by his son yehuda who we also know is yehuda aristobulus now yehuda aristobulus was really the first to call himself king he said i don't have the inhibitions that dad had i'm high priest and i'm king i'm ruling this as the high priest this is a cohenocracy a priestocracy and i'm going to rule it and like many other despots he put anyone whose position or status might challenge his authority he locked them up including his mother and his brothers in fact he starved his mother to death in prison don't do that that has very bad karma because after a year he died a very agonizing death and his wife a woman that we know as shlom zion she comes along and she frees his brother from prison and marries him they didn't have any children and she married him as a lever at marriage his name was alex or alexander or alexander yanai as we know him now the rabbis the purushim were completely scandalized by that why don't we have leverage marriage don't we have ye boom in the torah exactly not just any kohen he was a kohen gadol there's no way that he was going to be allowed to marry deliver it wife or you know his sister-in-law gohan gadol can only marry a widow and can't marry a boom so therefore nevertheless the sadducees were okay with it because by this time alexander yalai was sided with the uh sadducees so it wasn't going to be an issue for him so we have jochen and hillary basically followed by alexander yanai although we do have an intervening year of yehuda aristobulus but alexander yalai is going to go for the next nearly 30 years and he is annie just i mean i have said this before but maybe it's the only way to really understand alexander yalai is to think him of in terms of ariel sharon on crack because he was conquering everything he really turned the land of israel into kind of this regional superpower and he was he conquered this he conquered that and he was like who knew how history would go for all he knew the judean empire or the judean kingdom might become a judean empire might go on to be one of the great empires of the world no one knew that and alexander yellow certainly didn't know that wasn't how it was going to turn out he was acting as though he was a proper jewish conqueror however in the course of his reign during this period here in the course of his reign uh we see a very very tragic civil war happening the situation between the sadducees and the pharisees had become so great uh that and the sa and the pharisaic factions the prashim the rabbis had much more contact and were much more in touch with the you know just the common people uh one famous uh story that's recorded in a number of different places is the idea that alexander yanai went to the temple on sukkot he tried to abolish the simchat better show the water libation ceremony which is pure oral torah tradition he said we're not doing that that's not within what the the priests are on about and the people said no we want to do it it's our favorite thing in the whole world and he said no we're not doing it and they all thousands of people pelted him with their etrogs and he turned around and slaughtered the crowd and then went on a rampage where over the course of a number of years he crucified basically all of the intellectual class of the rabbis except for his own brother-in-law shimon benchetta schloncion's brother and so on terrible terrible time for the scribal class but eventually alexander yanai had died he was killed in on one of his campaigns and his wife shlomtzyong took over and so what's a nice color for her to stand out schlomtzy and as i've often said you know shlomsi on hamalka queen salome some call her her entire career and her entire outlook kind of makes us think that sometimes jewish people were never meant to have kings were meant to have queens because she was amazing she was such a good ruler she made peace between the sadducees and the pharisees she made peace between all the different classes she calmed things right down nature itself grew big in her reign say the rabbis and uh several symbolic acts that she did such as making the ferris state class attend the funeral of her husband but at the same time stacking the sanhedrin with members of the scribal class and so on so having all of these balanced symbols she ruled effectively for nine or ten years but then unfortunately as soon as she passed away uh in round about uh you know in the mid six minus 60 the situation just imploded after that because her two sons don't get confused don't get confused her two sons uh yohuda aristobulus the second and jochen and hercules the second uh spent the next few years fighting it out as to who was going to be high priest who was going to be ruler and so on and that situation got so bad that by the time here we go i saved this color for now by the time it got to round about minus 64 boom we start the end we see the end the full implosion of the hasmonean independent hasmonean kingdom republic slash kingdom and the beginning of the new entity because in minus 65 64 almost exactly a hundred years since judah maccabee had fought off the cellucids pompous magni arrives in damascus and sees a complete mess going on in the land of judea and decides that it would be very good idea if the romans went in there and restored order in fact he was basically invited to come in we had ended up in a situation when we talk about a civil war between brothers over the temple mount itself when they talk about all the stories of and so on towards the end of the second temple period groundless hatred and all the things that's really the moment many identify where the divine presence has left the temple because we had uh completely imploded in terms of uh this civil war and the unrest and the suffering and the killing that was going on within the jewish people themselves in the land of israel over control of the temple not exactly god's picture for what should be happening and the romans have to come in and sort it out and in -63 approximately in walks uh pompey and he marches into the temple and uh walks into the holy of holies and rips open the curtain walks in and says nothing in here and they go well there you know like invisible god and so on but uh rome is in town and that starts the fourth period and the fourth period is of course the fourth period of the second temple is the roman we're only doing headlines we're only doing headlines now it would be very useful at this stage if we were to talk about when we're not going to talk about because it's a huge subject and we could get into it couldn't we if we were to talk about the background of the roman civil wars um but you know how it goes that basically it ends up in a triumvirate then another triumvirate and eventually you know caesar julius caesar having just conquered gaul then crosses the rubicon in the late in the in in around about -49 and he then controls rome and so on and eventually uh that situation he's killed in the senate and then there's a triumvirate basically uh under the control of octavian who is going to go on to become augustus all of that is roman history and i'm sure you're all aware of it and so on but we need to bear in mind that in the background all of that is happening and starts to explain what's going on during those years after schlomtzy on his death after the romans have already established judea as a province of theirs the country is basically being run by jochen and hercules ii after a whole lot of wars back and forth between those but he survives it and he's made um high priest and basically a kind of a a stickler ruler but he's got some very powerful friends that are helping him do that one of which is a ruler of the edumeans a jewish jewish ruler of the egyptians called antipater and sometimes spelled you know pronounced antipater antipater antipasta you can pronounce that a number of different ways he's basically an injury and strong man but it's his bureaucratic and military know-how that is propping up jochen and his rule but uh antipater has a son also an edumen jew a son called herod and herod is growing in power so that by the time you get to the late 40s or you know and the the 30s of that century going forward uh herod is already deciding that he would like to rule over everything and he actually gets the romans to uh to appoint him king but he has to conquer it and so he manages to conquer it with various military alliances and so on and then sets about being herod and herod's rule is very very unique those of you who are familiar with herod's rule which really happens in this uh 30-40 year period at the end of this 500 years ago leading up to the year zero this is this is this is in fact i won't put herod here we'll put here this is herod's time and herod is an absolutely ruthless despotic ruler he married into the hasmonean family to back up his legitimacy he was a but he killed most of his family uh he was arbitrary he was psycho he was mad but he was also a tremendous builder so he built you know uh caesarea is this new kind of roman capital he built two places called herodium he built masada as i'm sure you're familiar with and of course he set about a brick by brick renovation restoration of the whole of the temple itself to turn it into the most magnificent religious structure in the world which he actually achieved but he was awful and we kept on writing to the roman rulers anyone but herod anyone but herod of course who was herod in the first few years having to uh answer to who was his immediate roman boss who who of the roman triumvirate was in charge of the land of israel it was of course mark anthony and he was in egypt because he's being intimate with cleopatra so herod has to go and get confirmation from him and so on then mark anthony in octavian fight a war and which famously at the battle of actium which mark anthony loses all of this is known to you and then herod has to go to octavian and get once again reappointed as king of the jews and so on and octavian gives that to him and now he's off and running because so long as herod can give the romans the tax quotas that they need and keeps peace and law and order in judea then no roman emperor is going to bother him judea is a big deal for the romans it's important it's the very very important cog and link in the eastern mediterranean because they control egypt they control syria and they need to control the trade routes and the sea navigation routes and everything in the overland routes basically control israel you control the whole of the eastern mediterranean that's never changed so it was important to them and if they had a strong man like herod there that could do that then that worked for rome so long as he could do it but it wasn't a picnic under herod but he did restore the he did restore the temple and he did renovate it and he did that in conjunction and in concert with the rabbis and and the scribes now one last very important fact about the herodian time is that we need to understand in perspective of jewish history is that by the time you get to this point in history the rabbis are starting to develop into distinct schools of thought and the most famous of those early distinct schools of hermeneutic tradition and approach and application the dynamic application of the oral torah was of course the house of hillel and hillel and i know everybody's heard of hillel so i'm assuming that what we're looking at here is a situation where people have heard of things but not necessarily sure where they fit is that hillel is basically a direct contemporary of herod so every time we read about hillel we have to realize that that is what's going on in the background heller herod was not a fan of the rabbis but he realized that that doing things the way the rabbis wanted would have been okay with him doing it meant that he was going to be better able to restore order and keep the peace however when herod had finished rebuild the world when he'd basically done a lot of the work on restoring the temple and building the big platform that we now know is haribayet and so on completely changing the nature of jerusalem and its uh geography and demographics but when he finished that he decided that he would put on the gates of the temple a giant roman eagle because for herod the destiny of the jewish people the continuity of the jewish people the integrity of the jewish people lay in their alliance with and subservience to rome it's absolutely no different from any leader of israel today saying that the most important thing for the continuation of the state of israel is its alliance and subservience to one of the superpowers the united states for example but with herod it's even more so and the rabbis went ah no herod no you've done a beautiful job of restoring the the temple you even got kohanim just coming specially build the holy of holies you did it all nicely but now you're going to put this roman eagle on so of course they took it down and herod's last decree oh second last degree because i think his last decree was that his eldest son should be killed but his uh one of his last decrees was that the people that tore down the roman eagle were found and publicly burnt because for herod that was the greatest heresy was to defy the power and might of rome because he said rome is the power and if the jewish people are not seen to be subservient to rome rome will come and destroy you he wasn't entirely wrong in that but he was wrong in terms of his misplaced understanding of where the true strength of the jewish people lies in their continuum in history so let's just spend the last minute or two just summarizing because by the time we get to the year zero uh herod is dead this far his sons are now fighting for control of the land of israel and its various you know counties for want of a better word you know whether it was udaya or samaria or the galil all of which were seen as a different kind of geographical parts but they were dividing those up between them and the and the temple is still going and the story of what's going to lead up to the temple is part of the 500 years we're going to look at starting next week but i want to make sure that i uh get a couple of important points out before we finish one is that although it looks very complicated and here on this on this uh board i really only got headlines and you know i've only got headlines we can go into much much more detail on any of these points but what i want people who are seeing this material kind of for the first time to understand is that we have four distinct sub periods of the second temple the persian the greek or hellenic remember we're not controlled directly by greece but we are controlled by um hellenic dynasties that uh control us the hasmonean which is a completely independent jewish republic slash kingdom a cohenocracy and finally the romans are in town the roman period which is going to take us from there until the end if you can understand that if you just understand those four sub-periods of the second temple you already are in the top percentile of understanding that period and can really negotiate any information or data that comes along backgrounding what i've talked about tonight or today i didn't mention at the very beginning but i'm going to go to now because i thought of it during the talk that i didn't mention i thought it's a good point i'll i should mention the beginning but i'll come back to it at the end it's a very very interesting point that i i really want to emphasize before we finish and that is this this period here which started our period tonight minus 500 is a very very curious and interesting period in history generally in world history because so many things change in the world around that time particularly spiritually minus 500 is the buddha it's also the time of zoroasta it's also the time of confucius it's also the time of the golden age of greek philosophy and literature so some people have tried to explain why all these different amazing cultural spiritual revolutions are happening all around the world at the same time some people want to argue that i know some cosmic rays heat up the world and shifts people's brains from different perspective or whatever it is and some people just say oh well it's a coincidence or whatever it is they want to say as to why the world was so fundamentally different or changing around the time why we have so many figures of change around that time but the real question that people also ask is well if all that's going on in the world where's the change happening for the jewish people it's not like we don't pride ourselves at being the vanguard of you know spiritual and philosophical thinking where's our great revolution in thought where is our great revolution of ideas and transformation of our spirituality and the reality is the reality is is that that has already happened two centuries earlier in the great transformative revolution of the niveam of the prophets of israel during the period of the late kingdom of judah the idea which the ideas which bring concept such as as as to into the world the idea of mashiach into the world the idea of redemption the idea of hope the idea of progress the idea foundationally is that of social justice and that there is a god in the world who demands social justice and that that god is a god who is behind all political upheavals in the world and all transformations nothing happens uh unless the divine idea is behind it but at the forefront of that having had that revolution having had the exile to pay for it the destruction of the exile to pay for it and to come back and to rebuild the temple gadolia this temple uh said the prophet is going to be greater than the first and we have seen many many ways in which this second temple period brings out the idea of the jewish people in the world because it touches so foundationally and fundamentally upon concepts of jewish identity and so on so if we can understand the four sub-periods and we go up to the year zero uh then we are well placed to launch forward into the uh immensely packed next episode which will be next week i know that it's a lot of material for people to digest i know that i cover a lot of material but we are trying to reduce it and uh hopefully it won't be it's not too beyond people's ability to absorb that it's about the mechanics of history and how it works i thank you all for listening i thank you at home on the other side of the internet i thank our very very special and illustrious uh in-house um audience i give you a club as well and uh sorry the august crowd the crowd of augustus and that uh and also once again to reiterate that this uh was sponsored by uh south africa and dominion shul of of melbourne the shield of love and that i will see as many of you again next week and stay safe [Music] [Music] [Music] you
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Channel: David Solomon
Views: 2,885
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Keywords: David Solomon, Jewish History, Jewish podcast, Jewish learning, Jewish ideas, Temple in Jerusalem, Roman Empire, Hasmonean, Maccabean, Seleucid, Ptolemy, Alexander the Great, Greek Empire, Translation of the Bible, Hillel, Herod, Second Temple, Jerusalem, Judea
Id: zroxe0R-a3g
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Length: 88min 40sec (5320 seconds)
Published: Wed Mar 02 2022
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