sotto voce

From whence does this idea arise?

DCHindley

Note the "if." Norman Habel identifies six land ideologies in the Jewish scriptures, meaning no one is universally endorsed. Either you own it (like we do today) or you lease/rent it (as was the norm then). Between the owner (say, the king or even God) and the renter (the peasant), there may be persons or institutions to which it may be granted, at the will of the king. The rent or tithe you pay is a substitute for a direct tax on produce, as it all ends up in the hands of the ruling elite (you to the landlord, then the landlord to the state as property taxes).

I did suggest that the Jewish temple had land granted to it by the kings of Persia, a grant that was likely confirmed by the Greeks, then the Hasmoneans, then the Romans, then Herod the Great, then Archelaeus, then the Romans directly.

Herod himself never asked for or received the honor of minting silver coins under his own name, even though other client kings did and were granted this privilege. Herod did, however, arranged to have a mint produce silver coins used to pay temple tax, under the guise of the mint at Tyre, which went out of production around 17 BCE. In other words, he sacrificed the glory of minting silver in his own name for the sake of preserving a means of survival for the temple cultus.

I said "most" of the land in Judea, and elsewhere estimated it at about 50%, subtracting out royal estates already carved out of the temple lands by the Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans and the Romans. It is the way of rulers that they get to keep the best tracts of land for themselves (the royal estates) as these are leased to peasants in order to generate the income that grease the wheels of state.

But temple lands had a tendancy to be confiscated, especially under the Ptolemaic Greeks, until there is just enough left to support the Priesthood and the cultus. The Persians probably granted land to the temple only in the Satrapy of Yahud (Judea), but likely not all of it, just a portion. Later rulers would have taken away or added land to its endowment over time. The Hasmoneans may have extended temple lands into Samaria and Galilee as they expended their power base by force, perhaps as a way to prompt emigration, but there is no direct evidence for this.

Assuming expansions, the Romans may have pared it back when they took Jerusalem in 63 BCE. They retained the High Priest and the temple apparatus with drastically reduced powers, subjecting them to Roman Procurators (the real power brokers). The procurator of Judea, Idumea & Samaria was at first Herod's father Antipater, with Herod as procurator of Galilee. Later, when Herod the Great was appointed king of the combined regions of Judea, Idumea, Samaria, and Galilee, for his considerable help in repulsing the Parthian invasion of Palestine, he made the building of the finest temple in the world, at his own expense, his gift to the temple, possibly as a concession for not granting additional land to the temple.

Sure it is speculative, but so is supposing that land ownership was then as we experience it today, with courthouses holding local records since land taxes tends to be paid to local authorities. Not so then.

DCH

Maklelan

We have lots of contracts, letters, and other texts from the turn of the era that indicate the priestly aristocracy lent money against land. The Mishna and some of those contracts show that wealthy Jews manipulated Mosaic law to allow for taking over property if debts were not payed off in time. Hecateaus states that Moses allotted extra land to priests so they were well off enough to focus on priestly duties. This is universally understood as a rationalization of the inordinate amount of land controlled by the priesthood during the Second Temple Period. Josephus, Life 15 explains that the priesthood took over the collection of the tithes originally allocated to the Levites. There was still inequality among the priests, though, and in Antiquities 20.8.8 we read that the high priests under Agrippa forcibly took the tithes that were due the priests. All this would have been consolidated in the temple, which acted as a sort of central Jewish bank. Josephus describes the temple as containing the entire riches of the Jews in Jewish War 6.5.2 (I quote from the Whiston translation out of convenience, not preference):

Notice what Josephus has to say about genealogies in Against Apion 1.7:

It should be noted that the mentioned invasions of Antiochus, Pompey, Varus, and "our own times" (66–70CE) all coincide with the plundering (or utter destruction) of the Jerusalem temple (Varus didn't himself do it, but Galileans and Idumeans did while he was en route). The close association with the priests, the temple, and its administration makes it pretty much certain that these records were kept there in the temple itself.

sotto voce

Quite. This does not mean that records were concentrated in the Temple, which had no facility for storing them anyway.

This fragile supposition really seems to have run its course, if not beyond.

sotto voce

Noted. Surely there is nothing in what followed that sentence that need be true?

Maklelan

Did you not read the part where Josephus describes the wealthy building their own rooms in the temple structure to store their riches? Where do you think all those treasures were kept? In Jewish War 5.5.1–7 Josephus describes numerous rooms, cloisters, and even homes built into the temple structure. The notion that there was no place for genealogies is simply wrong.

The only fragile suppositions are coming from your end. Tell me, how much of Josephus have you read? How much of Philo? How much of Eusebius? How many of the Dead Sea Scrolls have you read? I'm not talking about little quotes here and there you've found on websites addressing specific ideologies, I'm talking about sitting down and reading through the primary texts.

sotto voce

No. Around it. Treasure is not records, anyway.

Maklelan

You don't appear to have read the texts.

Josephus has stated that in the four attacks on Jerusalem that plundered the temple, the genealogical records of the priests were lost and had to be redone. If those priesthood records were not stored in the temple, the economic and administrative center of the city, where, exactly, do you conclude they were stored, and what evidence can you produce for that conclusion?

Also, would you mind answering my question about the texts you've read?

sotto voce

Easy to type, that.

So they weren't lost. Joseph was not a priest, anyway.

Maklelan

And your response, "No. Around it." misrepresents the texts I cited and amounts to nothing more than "nu-uh."

They weren't all lost, since not every last copy was kept in Jerusalem. If you read the text you would have seen that they derived the genealogies from the individual priests' own private genealogies. They were reconstituted by living priests and whatever records could be found.

Josephus was indeed a priest. Here is the very beginning of Josephus' Life:

This is why I'm asking if you've read these texts. You don't seem to know much about them. You also don't seem to be reading the ones I am quoting.