Second Temple Period

Before the exile, Israelites and Judahites wrote in Old Hebrew script. During the Second Temple period, Aramaic script slowly replaces Old Hebrew to the extent that the rabbis even disqualify a Torah scroll written in Old Hebrew.

​Even before the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora successfully created Judaic systems that provided them with identity, purpose, new ways of thinking, and alternative points of access to the divine, independent of the Temple rituals in far-off Jerusalem.

The Shavuot rebellion and consequent burning of the Temples’ porticoes during the time of Augustus Caesar made no impression on subsequent Jewish historiography, despite the later humiliating defeat of the rebellion’s suppressor, Varus, in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Another lost memory of Shavuot is the all-night vegetarian feast, prayer, and Torah study of the Therapeutae, an egalitarian ascetic Jewish community in Egypt.

By the 1^st century C.E., observance of Torah laws is abundantly evident in Judean society. But how far back does this widespread observance go?

Several stories describe how the rabbis of the Second Temple period would force priests to prepare the ashes in the lower state of purity, tevul yom (immersed in water before sunset), and once even discarded ashes prepared in the stringent state of purity, meʿorav shemesh (after sunset), to demonstrate the law is not in accordance with the Sadducees. The Qumran halakhic text, 4QMMT, gives us the perspective of the other side of the debate.

Written while the Second Temple was standing, and the Yom Kippur sacrificial service still performed, Ben Sira’s poem traces the history of the world through Simon son of Johanan, the High Priest in his time, thus expressing the cosmic importance of the Temple and its priesthood. The poem appears to be the antecedent or literary inspiration of the Yom Kippur Seder Avodah’s framing liturgy.

The real reason Persia’s King Darius II sent a letter to the governor of Egypt that Judean soldiers in Elephantine should keep the festival of Matzot.

Fishbone remains discovered in eight different excavations in Jerusalem, from the Iron age to the early Islamic period, give us a sense of what fish the locals ate, and from where they were imported.

A Post-Destruction model of Jewish Identity: Reading and studying Torah as if our life depended on it.

And the Re-imagining of the Harvest Festival in the Wake of the Babylonian Exile

Bringing wood for the altar was an important celebration in Second Temple times. To ground this practice in the Torah, Nehemiah (10:35) describes it as a Torah law, while the Temple Scroll (11Q19) and the Reworked Pentateuch (4Q365) include it in their biblical festival calendar.

An overview of Persian history starting from Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Media (549 B.C.E.) until Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia (334-329 B.C.E.), including related biblical references and Jewish texts.

One of the main themes in the Book of Esther is the death of Haman, the descendent of Agag, last king of Amalek, at the hands of Mordecai and Esther, Benjaminites from the family of King Saul. Is this just a coincidence?