semiopen

Thanks Andrew.

The Leviticus large animal burnt offerings clearly required the presence of the sacrificer, this featured the offerer laying of the hand on its head, as well as him performing the actual slaughter.

The bird offering is slaughtered and burned by the priest, but the actual absence of the offerer is very interesting. I would have thought that the placement of these offerings in Leviticus implies that the offerer was present for both, but on looking at this maybe not.

The meal offering, in Leviticus 2 is an even cheaper alternative.

andrewcriddle

It is not being suggested that the sacrifice should have been brought from the pilgrim's home town. The idea is that the sacrifice is purchased a mile say from the Temple and then transported by the pilgrim to the Temple.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

Bruce Chilton (whose ideas Steven Carr has criticized in recent threads) suggested this kind of arrangement.

It is supported by debates in the Babylonian Talmud about sacrifice in the last decades of the second Temple. Although I am tempted by this idea I am very very dubious about using these late rabbinic texts as evidence for the 1st century CE.

Andrew Criddle

rcscwc

Also shows how quickly he could start a riot.

semiopen

I find this quite convincing, although I'm not familiar with what the sages say.

There is no way that people kept pigeons around just to offer them occassionally as a sacrifice. There is a requirement to sacrifice birds after the birth of male child, etc. Otherwise it's supposed to be a big animal like a sheep or goat.

I asked my rabbi about this (the mechanics of the bird sacrifice) and he seemed confused.

Is there any hard evidence for a temple tax?

Steven Carr

Knock over tables loaded with money and you will distract attention from your teaching.

Except in the Gospels where the crowds listened to Jesus teaching and were amazed by somebody saying that they were being fleeced.Perhaps they had not realised that the prices were higher than they should have been.

Solo

You said elsewhere:
Evidently, your thesis does not agree with itself.

Jiri

DCHindley

Here is a comment from a Christian web site dedicated to archeology of the bible. It is, as best as I can tell, accurate:

Every year, a Jewish man, 20 years old and older, paid a voluntary half shekel Temple tax to the Jerusalem Temple. This tax, instituted by Moses (Ex 30:11–16), was paid in either the Tyrian shekel (for himself and another person) or half-shekel (for only himself) during the Second Temple period (Mishnah Bekhoroth 8:7; Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 11a).

The shekel, with the laureate head of Melqarth-Herakles (a pagan deity) on the obverse and an eagle (a graven image) on the reverse, averaged 14.2 gm in weight and contained at least 94 per cent silver. These coins were minted in Tyre between 126/125 BC and 19/18 BC. After the Roman government closed the Tyre mint, these coins continued to be minted at an unknown mint, probably in or near Jerusalem, from 18/17 BC until AD 69/70. The Jewish coin makers continued to strike coins with the image of Melqarth-Herakles and the eagle. This was contrary to the clear teachings of the Word of God (Ex 20:3, 4: Dt. 4:16–18; 5:8). Yet the rabbis declared that the Tyrian shekels were the only legal currency that was acceptable in the Temple (Hendin 2001:420–29; 2002:46, 47). The rabbis decided that the commandment to give the half-shekel Temple tax, with its proper weight and purity, was more important than the prohibition of who or what image was on the coin.
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post...Jerusalem.aspx

Here is more by Yakov Meshorer, Studies in Honor of Leo Mildenburg, Numismatics, Art History, Archaeology, Wetteren, 1984, pp.171-180.
http://israelvisit.co.il/beged-ivri/...s/meshorer.htm

DCH

semiopen

Thanks DC, this is also clear but I wonder if that would have been sufficient to support the temple. The temple also was supposed to be the only place where meat was slaughtered, although it is not clear whether there is a biblical basis for turning this monopoly into a source of income.

I've been curious about the shekel ever since the Islamic April Fool's joke some months ago about the coins of Joseph.

Consider the 20 pieces of silver the brothers of Joseph paid to the Ishmaelites. Sometimes they say this is shekels, but the bible says 20 pieces of silver. Genesis 37:28, b'esrim kasef 20 silver.

Arnoldo's friend Kitchen has evidently proven that's what a somewhat effeminate male slave was going for in those days... no word on what the price of a camel was. This seems pretty vague, I guess when you were buying something you'd use small pieces and when selling somewthing you'd want big pieces.

renassault

This inane criticism fails to acknowledge that it was not the "moneychangers" ripping people off that set off Jesus, but the greed and lack of respect for doing it in the Temple as the Gospels say, similarly to other disrespectful actions such as when Nehemiah found an unclean person living in the Temple, kicked him out, then forbade the selling and buying during the Sabbath to the point of threatening traders, and finally when the insults to the commandments in the Torah had become too many, resorted to beating those who had married foreign, pagan wives (Nehemiah 13; very typical of the Jews who barely 50 years ago had had their nation restored and was barely being rebuilt).

As far as your comment about doves being cheaper than bulls, this would have been realized not long after Moses or whoever you believe penned Leviticus, so the redaction would probably have been so close to the time of composition that the most likely scenario is that the author of Leviticus foresaw the expensive bulls himself (doves not being unclean as per Genesis 6 - the Flood and Noah's sacrifices; shows it wasn't an ad hoc "authorization" of the sacrifice of birds).