Temple Library of Jerusalem
The Jerusalem Temple Library was a Second Temple facility that ended when the city was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. "In the archives of the temple the priests collected holy writings, historical and legal texts, genealogies, chronicles and liturgical literature."
Literary testimony
In the 2nd century BC The Temple of Jerusalem had unique copies of sacred writings that could be borrowed to make copies ( 2 Maccabees 2: 13-15). In addition to the Pentateuch , the content of this temple library is likely to have included the history books and the psalms , all in normative text form, a preliminary form of the later Masoretic text .
Josephus mentions several times that copies of the Pentateuch were kept in the temple. He also claims to have researched the documents for his personal family tree in the Temple Archives in Jerusalem, which gains credibility because his family tree has some blemishes.
The Mishnah recalls that each year the high priest had to stay awake on the night before the day of Atonement and listen to him read from the books of Job , Ezra , the Chronicles, and the Book of Daniel . This nightly reading took place in the house of the Aḇṭinos, on the south side of the priestly court. "If he got sleepy, the young priests snapped their middle finger in front of him and said to him: My Lord High Priest, get up and drive away (sleep by taking a walk) on the stone pavement!"
The Mishnah repeatedly mentions the "Book of the Temple Court", a standard copy of the Holy Scriptures that was kept there: On a half-holiday, damaged letters in sacred texts were not allowed to be rewritten, "not even in the Book of the Temple Court." "All (holy) Books litter the hands, except for the Temple Court book. "
Prehistory: the archive in the First Temple
In the Old Testament there is a tradition that writings were deposited in the Jerusalem temple before the exile. The story of the finding of the Torah in the temple ( 2 Kings 22: 8) assumes that there was some kind of archive. Such temple archives are also known from the environment of Israel; they contained only a few writings, all of them unique.
The Temple Library and the Court Library in Jerusalem
The depositing of texts in the Second Temple (e.g. Nehemiah memorial) is likely as early as the Persian period , but the library itself is a phenomenon of Hellenism . The books mentioned in the sources were available as scrolls because the Codex was only adopted later.
Public libraries were part of the appearance of a Hellenistic city. They had certain structural features: "high niches in the walls with bookshelves (Latin armaria ) and reading rooms or pillared halls." Therefore, Yizhar Hirschfeld assumes that both Herod's palace and the Herodian temple had such a prestigious facility. The multi-year activity of the polymath Nikolaos of Damascus in Jerusalem presupposes that extensive (Greek) book stocks were available on site. Therefore Martin Hengel assumes the existence of a representative royal library of Herod next to the temple library. In addition, there may have been private libraries in the city.
School operation
In the Hellenistic period (probably even earlier) there were a large number of schools in the vicinity of the temple. Writing, reading and the knowledge of normative texts were taught here. This did not necessarily require its own buildings, only teachers who gathered a group of students around them. Classes were held on the temple grounds or in Teacher's private rooms.
Book production
Books could also be purchased in the vicinity of the temple, for example from the pilgrims who came here from all over the diaspora . Whether this parchment production and writing activity was carried out on a large scale in Qumran , as Hartmut Stegemann said, or at least in Jerusalem, remains to be seen.
Relocation of the Temple Library to Dead Sea caves
This is a minority opinion in Qumran research. Even Karl Heinrich Rengstorf had in 1960 put forward the hypothesis that the temple library of Jerusalem had been evacuated before the Roman siege. The text finds from the Dead Sea caves are the remaining remnants of this book collection. In a modified form, this thesis was advocated by Norman Golb in the 1990s: the Qumran book collection only came together in the course of the evacuation from various Jerusalem libraries. The objection is that the transport of the scrolls from Jerusalem to the caves would have required an entire caravan, which is neither reported in the sources, nor is it likely in the civil war situation that existed before the Romans arrived in Jerusalem.
End of the temple library
According to Josephus, the Zealots burned the temple archives right at the beginning of the uprising because the land distribution documented therein contradicted their social and religious goals. Archival material and literature were probably kept in different places.
The scrolls still on the temple grounds were probably destroyed in the fire of the temple, but not all: Josephus writes that "the law" was carried around as the last object on display on the triumphal procession of Titus and then deposited with the captured Jewish temple implements in the temple of the goddess of peace (Bellum VII 150.162).
In his biography, Josephus mentions, among other graces that Titus granted him immediately after the conquest of Jerusalem, that he had received "holy books" from the booty (Vita 418).
literature
- Martin Hengel : "Interpretation of Scripture" and "Incarnation" in the time of the Second Temple . In: Martin Hengel, Hermut Löhr (ed.): Scripture interpretation in ancient Judaism and in early Christianity ( WUNT 73), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1994, pp. 1–71.
- Martin Hengel: Jerusalem as a Jewish and Hellenistic city . In: Bernd Funck (Ed.): Hellenism. Contributions to the study of acculturation and political order in the states of the Hellenistic age , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1996, pp. 269–306.
- Hermann Michael Niemann : No end to book-making in Israel and Judah (Koh 12:12) - When did it start? In: Bibel und Kirche 3/1998, pp. 127–134.
- Karl Heinrich Rengstorf: Ḫirbet Qumrân and the library from the Dead Sea . Stuttgart 1960
- Norman Golb: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Hamburg 1994 ISBN 3-455-11024-X
- Meir Bar-Ilan: Schribes and Books in the Late Second Commonwealth and the Rabbinic Period . In: Martin Mulder (Ed.): Mikra. Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity , Assen 1988, pp. 21-38. (not evaluated)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oliver Gussmann: The priestly understanding of Flavius Josephus . Tübingen 2008, p. 213 .
- ↑ Hermann Michael Niemann: No end to book making in Israel and Juda . S. 133 .
- ↑ Martin Hengel: Scripture interpretation and script development . S. 6-7 .
- ↑ Oliver Gussmann: The priestly understanding of Flavius Josephus . S. 213 .
- ↑ Oliver Gussmann: The priestly understanding of Flavius Josephus . S. 211-213 .
- ↑ Mishna Joma I, 5-6 . In: Dietrich Correns (ed.): The Mishna . Wiesbaden 2005, p. 221 .
- ↑ Mishna Joma I, 7 . In: Dietrich Correns (ed.): The Mishna . S. 221 .
- ↑ Mishnah Moed katan III, 4 . In: Dietrich Correns (ed.): The Mishna . S. 282 .
- ↑ Mishnah Kelim XV, 6 . In: Dietrich Correns (ed.): The Mishna . S. 797 .
- ^ Hermann Michael Niemann: No end to book making . S. 127 .
- ↑ Konrad Schmid: scribed traditional literature . Tübingen 2011: “Most of the libraries in the Ancient Near East were selected libraries with a modest collection of texts. For the temple library of Edfu, for example, 35 titles have been recorded. These libraries were not open to the public, but reserved for temple and school operations ... "
- ↑ Jan Christian Gertz: Basic information Old Testament . Göttingen 2006, p. 520 .
- ↑ Yizhar Hirschfeld: Qumran. The whole truth . Munich 2006, p. 85 .
- ↑ Yizhar Hirschfeld: Qumran . S. 85-86 .
- ↑ Martin Hengel: Jerusalem as a Jewish and Hellenistic city . S. 295 .
- ↑ Konrad Schmid: scribed traditional literature . S. 48 .
- ↑ Martin Hengel: The Zealots . 3. Edition. Tübingen 2011, p. 138 .