Did the Temple Menorah Come Back to Jerusalem?
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Footnotes
Steven Fine, “The Temple Menorah—Where Is It?” BAR, 31:04.
Oren Gutfeld, “The Emperor’s New Church on Main Street, Jerusalem,” BAR, 39:06.
Ronny Reich, “‘God Knows Their Names’—Mass Christian Grave Revealed in Jerusalem,” BAR, 22:02.
Endnotes
John Osborne, “The Jerusalem Temple Treasure and the Church of Cosma e Damiano in Rome,” Papers of the British School at Rome 76 (2008), pp. 173–181, 335.
Prokopios [= Procopius], The Wars of Justinian, trans. by Henry B. Dewing, introduction and notes by Anthony Kaldellis (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014), 5.12.42.
Yochanan Lewy, “The Fate of the Temple Implements After the Destruction of the Second Temple,” Studies in Jewish Hellenism (Jerusalem: Institute Bialik, 1960), pp. 255–258 [Hebrew], argues for the historicity of Procopius’s account. R. Boustan, “The Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple at Rome and Constantinople: Jewish Counter Geography in a Christianizing Empire,” in G. Gardner and K. Osterloh, eds., Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 327–372, disregards any historicity in Procopius’s stories.
Hagi Amitzur, “Justinian’s Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem,” in M. Poorthuis and Ch. Safrai, eds., The Centrality of Jerusalem (The Netherlands: Pharos Publishing House, 1996), pp. 160–175. See also Lewy, “The Fate of the Temple Implements,” pp. 256–257.
John C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 121–129.
Samuel Krauss, Studien zur byzantinisch-jüdischen Geschichte (Leipzig: Buchhandlung Gustav Fock, 1914), p. 106, n. 3. If that were the case, then the “Messiah of the lineage of Joseph” would be said to bring Temple vessels from Justinian’s palace to Jerusalem. This is exactly what Procopius said, minus the messianic element. Ra’anan Boustan has suggested that the Roman emperor was intended to be Emperor Julian (the Apostate) who ruled 361–363 C.E. and planned to restore the Temple in Jerusalem. Boustan, “The Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple,” p. 365, n. 108.
Reeves, Trajectories, p. 47; Martha Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel,” in David Stern and Mark Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 67–90.
Gideon Avni, “The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 C.E.)—An Archaeological Assessment,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (2010), pp. 35–48.
Although this find was noted briefly in Jerusalem Revealed, Archaeology in the Holy City 1968–1974, published by the Israel Exploration Society, its full publication was accomplished by Eilat Mazar in 2003. Eilat Mazar, “Archaeology and Stratigraphy of the ‘House of the Menorot,’” in Eilat Mazar et al., eds., The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem 1968–1978 Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Vol. II, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods, Qedem Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology 43 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003), pp. 163–186.
Leon Yarden, The Tree of Light: A Study of the Menorah, the Seven-Branched Lampstand (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), fig. 93.
Jodi Magness, “Archaeological Evidence for the Sassanian Persian Invasion of Jerusalem,” in Kenneth G. Holum and Hayim Lapin, eds., Shaping the Middle East: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in an Age of Transition 400–800 C.E. (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2011), pp. 85–98.
2 Baruch 6:8. 2 Baruch is set in 587 B.C.E., the time of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, but there is little doubt that it addressed the concerns of Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple.