The Early Reception of the Book of Isaiah by Kristin De Troyer Barbara Schmitz

Author:Kristin De Troyer, Barbara Schmitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

In Late Second Temple Judaism, the temple is the rallying point for the Jews and offers a physical location for prayer and reverence. As such, the observation that, “The Jerusalem temple was revered by the vast majority of Jews in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora as the one legitimate sanctuary as required by the commandments of the Torah” is surely no overstatement.184 At the same time, different communities focused on different aspects of the sanctuary in the context of recording their own self-understanding. In the didactic tale of the heroine Judith, the temple is very much a physical location and the destruction of the First Temple provides the backdrop against which it becomes of the utmost significance to ensure the sanctity and longevity of the restored sanctuary. Judith’s extraordinary intervention as an inspired leader and a judge comes about out of concerns for the temple.

In the book of Tobit, the temple again serves an historical function in the assertion of identity. For Tobit’s community, apostasy from the temple led to exile, but faithfulness to the sanctuary by individuals like Tobit and others leads to their personal salvation and the hope for the more general deliverance of all the Jews in diaspora. However, in the context of the story, because the temple is a physical location that reflects the deity’s larger purposes for history and creation, the account closes with attention to the eschatological temple. From the future temple in which Tobit believes and which the prophets predicted stems the intervention of the deity in world, ushering in the eschaton. The restoration of creation entails the in-gathering of the exiles, a separation between the wicked and the faithful, the conversion of the Gentiles, the radiation of the deity’s presence on a peaceful earth, and the transformation of all of creation. Tobit’s vision of the eschatological temple ultimately entails the reconciliation of dispersed Jews and creation to God.

Finally, in the Septuagint story of Esther, references to the temple point towards a new understanding of the community as the temple of God, whereby the praise of pious individuals attests to the might, rulership, and presence of the deity of the Jews to the nations. LXX Esther, thus, hints at the thought that develops at Qumran and in the New Testament with regards to the equivalence of faithful people and the temple.

All three of the Jewish fictional hero tales utilize the temple to make a broader point about the presence and purposes of the deity in the midst of the lived experiences of Jews under pressure, if not also persecution. The temple drives home the point that, for the Jews, God alone is king, even when the ancestral land and a dispersed people live under earthly kings.

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