List of Abbreviations
AASOR Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research
AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary
ADPV Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins
AIL Ancient Israel and Its Literature
ALASP Abhandlungen zur Literatur Alt-Syrien-Palästinas und Mesopotamiens
ANEM Ancient Near East Monographs
Ant. Jewish Antiquities
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
ATANT Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments
ATD Das Alte Testament Deutsch
AYBRL Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BETL Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium
Bib Biblica
BJS Brown Judaic Studies
BKAT "Biblischer Kommentar, Altes Testament"
BWANT Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten (und Neuen) Testament
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
CAH Cambridge Ancient History
CANE Civilizations of the Ancient Near East
CBET Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology
CBOTS Coniectanea Biblica: Old Testament Series
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CHANE Culture and History of the Ancient Near East
CM Cuneiform Monographs
COS Context of Scripture
DB Bisitun Inscription (Darius)
DMb Trilingual inscription from Pasargadae (Darius)
List of Abbreviations
DMc Elamite and Akkadian inscription from Pasargadae (Darius)
DMOA Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui
DNa Trilingual inscription from Naqsh-i Rustam (Darius)
DPf Elamite inscription from Persepolis (Darius)
DSaa Akkadian inscription from Susa (Darius)
DSe Trilingual inscription from Susa (Darius)
DSf Trilingual inscription from Susa (Darius)
DSz Elamite inscription from Susa (Darius)
EI Eretz-Israel
ETS Erfurter theologische Studien
FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament
FOTL Forms of Old Testament Literature
FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments
HBAI Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel
HS Hebrew Studies
HSM Harvard Semitic Monographs
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HThKAT Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
JANES Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Society
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JARCE Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JHS Journal of Hebrew Scriptures
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JNSL Journal of Northwest Semitic Language
JSJSup Supplements to Journal for the Study of Judaism
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
J.W. Jewish War
KAI Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften
KAT Kommentar zum Alten Testament
LAOS Leipziger altorientalistische Studien
LCL Loeb Classical Library
LHBOT The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
MOS Mittheilungen aus den Orientalischen Sammlungen
NABU Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires
List of Abbreviations
NEA Near Eastern Archaeology
NEchtB Neue Echter Bibel
NICOT New International Commentary on the Old Testament
OAC Orientis Antiqui Collectio
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OEANE Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East
OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta
OtSt Oudtestamentische Studiën
PEQ Palestinian Exploration Quarterly
RA Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale
RIMA "The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods"
RINAP Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period
SAA State Archives of Assyria
SAAB State Archives of Assyria Bulletin
SBLABS SBL Archaeology and Biblical Studies
SBLMS SBL Monograph Series
SBLWAW SBL Writings from the Ancient World
SCS Septuagint and Cognate Studies
SSN Studia Semitica Neerlandica
StOr Studia Orientalia
SymS Symposium Series
TA Tel Aviv
TAD Textbook of Aramaic documents from Ancient Egypt
TSAJ Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum
UF Ugarit-Forschungen
VAB Vorderasiatische Bibliothek
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplement series
WAWSup Writings from the Ancient World Supplement
WBC Word Biblical Commentary
WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament
WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
ZABR Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDMG Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft
ZDPV Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins
Introduction to Temple Renovation in the Ancient Near East and Beyond
On September 20, 1999, Pope John Paul II presided over the inauguration of the newly restored façade of St. Peter’s basilica. After a twenty-minute display of fireworks, the pope addressed the crowd gathered in the square with brief remarks in which he thanked the engineers, architects, marble workers, stonecutters, plasterers, blacksmiths, and other workers who had contributed to the renovation. He expressed a special gratitude for the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), the Italian oil and gas company that paid for the $6 million renovation and provided some of its own workers at no additional cost. As some reporters noted, it was a fitting contribution from the company whose gasoline and diesel fuel were the principal sources of the grime that had come to coat the façade.
My primary interest in this inauguration, however, lies in another aspect of John Paul’s remarks, namely his evocation of the basilica’s past as a way of setting forth a vision of its present and future. This renovation, like all renovations, is ostensibly about the future; specifically, the new façade was one of the last preparations before the start of the Jubilee Year that would lead the Catholic Church into the new millennium. And yet throughout his brief address, the pope appealed to the basilica’s past. For example, in his speech he celebrated that the façade has been restored to the “original splendour” of Carlo Maderno’s design.1 Later, in the face of criticism that restorers had 1. The address is found here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1999/ september/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_30091999_basilica-inauguration.html.
unjustifiably added new colors to the façade,2 official news reports reiterated that the renovation was based on Maderno’s “original plans” and “original design.”3 In his official address John Paul II stated that this recovery of St. Peter’s original splendor provided a link between the basilica’s past, present, and future, in that Jubilee Year visitors “will be able to relive the experiences of pilgrims past who were enthralled by the magnificent and solid structures of this imposing basilica.” Finally, the pope recommended that the restoration project was an opportunity for the faithful to undertake “a courageous review” of their own lives. In this way he used the recovery of St. Peter’s architectural past to invite pilgrims into an examination of their personal histories and perhaps experience a spiritual renewal parallel to the restoration of the basilica.
I begin with this account of the St. Peter’s restoration because it represents a contemporary example of a genre that is the subject of this book, namely, reports of temple renovation, which are attested in a variety of ancient Near Eastern sources, including the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps it is a stretch to compare the renovation of St. Peter’s to these ancient accounts, but reading them together, I was struck by their shared elements, such as the attention paid to the kinds of workers who contributed to the project and also to the sources of the project’s funding. Even more significant, I think, is the way the ancient accounts of temple renovation, like John Paul’s address, display a Janus-like perspective (i.e., they look back into a temple’s past in ways that illuminate our understanding of the present). Far from a neutral rehearsal of temple history, the accounts of temple renovation evoke a selective history: particular pasts that are remembered to serve present interests. In the ancient examples we will study in this book, those interests are often related to royal ideology, rather than the spiritual renewal to which John Paul II aspires. Though we will find some attempts to establish continuity with religious history, along the lines of the spiritual kinship the pope hoped to establish between pilgrims past and present at St. Peter’s, more often the ancient Near Eastern kings use temple renovation as an instrument of royal propaganda.
Ancient Near Eastern kings were hardly unique in this approach to temple renovation. Staying in Rome but moving back in time to antiquity, we can note the attention that the emperor Augustus gives to temple renovations in
2. Richard Boudreaux, “Restoration Brings Color to St. Peter’s Basilica,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1999.
3. Raymond De Souza, “At St. Peter’s Basilica the 2000 Countdown Begins with a Bang,” National Catholic Register, October 10–16, 1999.
Introduction to Temple Renovation 3
his funerary inscription, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, in which he recounts (in the first person) his life and achievements:
I restored the Capitoline temple and theatre of Pompey, incurring great expense for both buildings, without inscribing my name anywhere on them. . . . I restored eighty-two temples of the gods in the city as consul for the sixth time [28 bc], in accordance with a resolution of the senate, and I neglected none which needed repair at this time. (20.1, 4)4
Unlike the new buildings Augustus lists in the preceding Chapter 19, these renovations are appeals to the great Roman past, which he claims to be restoring. Although a full analysis of this passage is beyond the scope of this project, Alison Cooley’s commentary on the text is instructive. She writes that “it was, therefore, an integral part of Augustus’s claim to be setting Roman society to rights that he should depict himself as upholder of traditional Roman religious practices. His ‘restoration’ of Roman religion involved repairing and maintaining cult buildings.”5 Especially significant in this regard is his work on the Capitoline temple, the only one of the eighty-plus renovated temples that he cites by name. “The Capitoline hill was central to Roman identity. It was the city’s stronghold and religious centre, and believed to be one of the earliest areas to be inhabited under Romulus.”6 The temple atop the hill was likewise essential: “Although vowed and built by the Tarquinian dynasty, the temple was reputedly dedicated in the first year of the Republic, 509 bc, and came to symbolize the new political order at Rome.”7
To be sure, Augustus gives plenty of attention to temples that he had newly built, perhaps even taking credit for founding temples he had in fact restored,8 but the key point for our purposes is the difference in rhetoric between temple founding and renovation. Whereas the former seeks to establish Augustus as the originator of new cultic institutions, the latter attempts to ground his rule in the foundations of Roman religion. His renovation of
4. Alison E. Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 80–81.
5. Ibid., 194.
6. Ibid., 188.
7. Ibid., 191–92.
8. Ibid., 182.
the Capitoline temple, in particular, established continuity between his rule and some of Rome’s most ancient religious traditions, including an appeal to its republican past, even as he consolidated his imperial power. The examples of temple renovation from Augustus’s Res Gestae demonstrate their symbolic power, especially in service of royal propaganda, and also their difference from the rhetoric of newly founded temples.
One last example from yet another era and also from a different region will suffice to demonstrate the symbolic significance of temple renovation across cultures. The Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan underwent a series of expansions that have been correlated to the successive kingships. Johanna Broda’s analysis of the pyramid temple states that “during the reign of Aztec rulers from Acamapichtli (1375 to 1395) to Motecuhzoma II (1502 to 1520), the Great Pyramid was rebuilt seven times while its façade was remodeled six more times.”9 Although the time and place of this temple lie well beyond our field of study, it offers further evidence of temple renovation as an expression of royal ideology. The successive renovations of the Templo Mayor, for example, were actually a series of expansions, as each ruler superimposed his new structure atop previous pyramids.10 These architectural expansions paralleled the territorial expansion achieved by each new ruler, such that “the Templo Mayor was a symbol of political power and expressed an ideology of an expanding warrior state.”11
Thus the Templo Mayor highlights again the particular way that temple renovation can express royal ideology. Rather than found new temples and project their reign as a new beginning, the Aztec rulers instead built on the work of past rulers. Their preservation of past pyramids underscores the continuity from one ruler to the next. Such continuity symbolized stability at the core of the empire that counterbalanced the continual expansion of the periphery. In this way the expanding temple “became the symbol of political integrity of the Aztec empire, while the successive enlargements of the huge temple pyramid glorified the expansion of this state.”12
9. Broda, “Templo Mayor as Ritual Space,” in The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan: Center and Periphery in the Aztec World (ed. J. Broda, D. Carrasco, and E. Moctezuma; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 67.
10. Unless you count the Spanish destruction of the temple in 1521 and subsequent construction of a cathedral on its site; see Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 82.
11. Broda, “Templo Mayor as Ritual Space,” 69.
12. Ibid., 66.
All of these renovations of sacred buildings represent a category of spatial hermeneutics that Lindsay Jones has defined as “Propitiation: Building as Offering.” With this language he refers to the role that sacred architecture can play in “cultivating, maintaining, or restoring some sort of favorable inclination or condition of harmony.”13 The renovations of Augustus and the Aztec rulers, more precisely, are examples of “strategic, irregular rebuilding,” which “are correlated . . . with transitions in political leadership” and “are linked especially to the commemoration of temporal authority.”14 Sometimes these renovations “announce emphatically both the end of one era and the fresh and legitimate beginning of another,” while at other times they “formalize and legitimate a transfer of authority.”15 A key word in Jones’s definition of this category is “commemoration,” that is, the way that temple renovation, whether it marks continuity or discontinuity, is oriented toward the past.
I would even go so far as to describe temple renovation as a kind of historiography. An oft-repeated definition of historiography is Johan Huizinga’s statement that “history is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.”16 Because a temple enshrines the sensibilities and ideologies of the past, the renovation of a temple involves confrontation with, and the modification of, that past according to the sensibilities and ideologies of the present. Temple renovation is quite literally a reconstruction of the past. How a king in the ancient Near East goes about renovating a temple reveals his view of the past as represented by that temple. The decisions to keep certain features, to change others, and to demolish still others are all part of the king’s process of rendering the past to himself and his subjects. The examination of this process of reconstruction is the subject of this book.
Fortunately, the historiographical significance of temple renovation does not depend solely on archaeological evidence of architectural changes, but is reinforced by the attention it receives in actual historiographical documents. Temple renovation is a common trope in royal inscriptions from the ancient
13. Jones, Hermeneutical Calisthenics: A Morphology of Ritual-Architectural Priorities (vol. 2 of The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison; 2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 237.
14. Ibid., 249.
15. Ibid.
16. It is cited, for example, in John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 1; and J. J. Finkelstein, “Mesopotamian Historiography,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 462.
Near East and in the historical books of the Hebrew Bible. These texts express in literary form the rendering of the past that was begun in the renovation itself, and they bring our discussion more in line with more conventional approaches to historiography, which emphasize written documents.17 Thus temple renovation as an ancient historiography proceeds on two intertwined paths: there is the actual renovation carried out by the king, which may or may not be reconstructed from archaeological evidence, and there is the account of the temple renovation, by which the king uses the achievement to promote his royal ideology. The present study will focus on the latter and will argue that temple renovations are a vehicle for ancient Near Eastern kings to align their reign with a selective history. It is a history that the kings themselves have constructed by the continuities or discontinuities they establish in their renovation reports.
This book builds on the recent attention that scholars of the Hebrew Bible and its cognate literature have given to the concept of sacred space in general and the role of the temple(s) in particular.18 This attention has led to studies from a variety of disciplines on numerous aspects of temple life from its founding to its destruction. Certainly, a landmark contribution to the study of temples—one that has played no small role in my development of the present book—is Victor Hurowitz’s 1992 volume I Have Built You an Exalted House. 19 Two of Hurowitz’s arguments have been especially influential, and both are expressed in the following quote:
The building account served primarily and above all as a literary topos suitable for glorifying kings, and, by analogy, divine kings as well. . . .
17. Cf. J. J. M. Roberts’s definition of historiography as “a literary phenomenon involving the recording and analysis, explicit or implicit, of past events” (“Myth ‘versus’ History,” CBQ 38 [1976]: 3 n. 15).
18. Some examples of this trend include: John Day, ed., Temple and Worship in Ancient Israel: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar (rev. ed.; LHBOT 422; New York: T & T Clark, 2007); Ehrhard Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the Levant (2.–1. Mill. b.c.e.) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014); E. Frood and R. Raja, eds., Redefining the Sacred: Religious Architecture and Text in the Near East and Egypt, 1000 bc–ad 300 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); L. M. Morales, ed., Cult and Cosmos: Tilting toward a Temple-Centered Theology (Leuven: Peeters, 2014); Kai Kaniuth et al., eds., Tempel im Alten Orient (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013); Peter R. Bedford, Temple Restoration in Early Achaemenid Judah (Leiden: Brill, 2001). My own contribution to this trend is Tel Dan in Its Northern Cultic Context (SBLABS 20; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013).
19. Hurowitz, I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in Light of Mesopotamian and Northwest Semitic Writings (JSOTSup 115; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992)
It is reasonable to surmise that the “building account,” as a recognized, fixed and well-defined literary form, passed from one culture to another along with and through the same channels as other elements of royal ideology.20
First, Hurowitz’s work demonstrates that accounts of temple building constitute a genre that is attested across the ancient Near East. The consistency of the genre’s constitutive elements in various contexts indicates a common cultural heritage and invites comparison of biblical accounts to Mesopotamian examples of the genre. Second, Hurowitz emphasizes that the building accounts were hardly neutral reports, but reflect the religious and ideological interests of their authors. In most cases, these interests can be traced back to the kings who sponsored the (re)building itself and the scribal class that wrote about the (re)construction. Both of Hurowitz’s points have been guiding principles in my study of building accounts from ancient Israel and the Near East.
Where I differ from Hurowitz is in my particular focus on the renovation of temples, as a distinctive subset of building accounts in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern sources. Founding and renovating temples are interrelated efforts, to be sure, but they are not identical. The difference between them is apparent in the Mesopotamian accounts of temple (re)construction. In Assyrian royal inscriptions, for example, most temple building involves not the founding of new temples but the renovation of preexisting ones. In these inscriptions, kings give a detailed history of the temple’s origin, its dilapidation, and previous renovations, all of which provide the background for the present restoration. Often they instruct later kings to undertake similar restoration in the future and, when they do so, to remember the efforts of the present king. In this way these renovations look to the past as much as—perhaps more than—they look to the future.
This orientation toward the past has been noticed also in biblical depictions of the Jerusalem temple. Mark S. Smith, for example, has suggested that the pre-deuteronomistic (dtr) material of 1 Kings 6–7 expresses “an 8thcentury nostalgic perception of the power achieved under Solomon” and was meant to “evoke the Jerusalem temple of an earlier time.”21 Such nostalgia, he argues, shows that “the presentation of the past was already hostage to the
20. Ibid., 313.
21. Smith, “In Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6–7): Between Text and Archaeology,” in Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (ed. S. Gitin, J. Wright, and J. Dessel; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 281.
concerns of the present and hopes for the future.”22 Some might protest that this reading of 1 Kings 6–7 argues against the distinction drawn here, since those chapters are an account of temple founding rather than renovation, but Peter Dubovský has recently shown that 1 Kings 6–8 is composed of several redaction layers that correspond to various renovations of the temple.23 His conclusion that “the final form of 1 Kgs 6–8 telescopes texts stemming from different phases of the temple of Jerusalem into one narrative” means that although this text purports an account of temple founding, it is in fact a palimpsest of successive renovations.24 Moreover, Dubovský’s interpretation of 1 Kings 6–8 situates the nostalgia Smith has identified in the redactional history of the chapters. The import of their work for the present study is their demonstration that temple renovation in the Hebrew Bible, as in other ancient Near Eastern sources, was oriented toward the past. Rebuilding was a chance for kings to establish their reign in continuity with the past history of the temple.
By contrast, when it comes to founding new temples, kings emphasize the novelty of their construction without any reference to earlier kings or temples. The two best examples of this approach in Mesopotamian sources are Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 bce) and Sargon II (722–705 bce), two Assyrian kings who built new capital cities at Calah (modern Nimrud) and DurSharrukin (modern Khorsabad), respectively. Describing the new Temples of Enlil and Ninurta, Ashurnasirpal brags that “temples which had previously not existed . . . I founded” (RIMA 2 A.0.101.30: 53–55). Elsewhere he focuses just on the Temple of Ninurta, which he “constructed in its entirety” and in which he “created with [his cunning] that statue of the god Ninurta which had not existed previously” (RIMA 2 A.0.101.1 ii 132–134). Even this brief comparison demonstrates that, at least in Assyrian royal inscriptions, temple building and rebuilding were distinct endeavors, which served different ideological purposes. To conflate the two is to miss the particular religious and political agendas each is meant to advance.
This is not to say that the renovation or restoration of ancient Near Eastern temples has gone entirely unnoticed. Richard S. Ellis’s work on foundation deposits in Mesopotamian buildings is attentive to the distinction process of
22. Ibid.
23. Dubovský, The Building of the First Temple: A Study in Redactional, Text-Critical and Historical Perspective (FAT 103; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 109–212.
24. Ibid., 209.
Introduction to Temple Renovation 9
renovation,25 and studies of the biblical tabernacle sometimes refer to rituals of restoration.26 A 2010 collection of essays included several on the subject of temple restoration.27 The essay by Claus Ambos is a précis of his book-length study of Mesopotamian building rituals, including rituals of restoration.28 Of special note is the already mentioned monograph by Peter Dubovský, which, like the present work, is interested in temple renovation as a long-standing and important practice in the ancient Near East.29 Dubovský’s work has brought welcome attention to the practice and its depiction in biblical and extrabiblical sources, and although his book and the present study enlist some of the same sources, they are directed toward different conclusions. Whereas Dubovský uses temple renovations in Mesopotamian and dtr traditions (plus Jeremiah and Ezekiel) to establish redactional layers of 1 Kings 6–8 that correspond to periodic renovations of the Jerusalem temple, my analysis of temple renovations is an attempt to show that reports of temple renovation exhibit a similar royal rhetoric that can be identified in a variety of ancient Near Eastern contexts, including the Hebrew Bible. The Neo-Assyrian and dtr sources on which Dubovský draws comprise one of those contexts, but even then, my analysis remains focused on their contribution to dtr royal ideology in general, rather than their use in reconstructing the redactional history of 1 Kings 6–8.
This difference between the foundation and renovation of temples is the basis for the present study, which examines the latter phenomenon in various regions and time periods of the ancient Near East. In each context I will show that temple renovation functions as a royal historiography in the sense that it gives the king an opportunity to reconstruct the past in ways
25. Ellis, Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
26. See Frank H. Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology (JSOTSup 91; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 55; and Mark K. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (AIL 2; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 58–59, 149–57.
27. See Jamie Novotny, “Temple Building in Assyria: Evidence from Royal Inscriptions,” and Hanspeter Schaudig, “The Restoration of Temples in the Neo- and Late Babylonian Periods: A Royal Prerogative as the Setting for Political Argument,” in From the Foundations to the Crenellations: Essays on Temple Building in the Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible (ed. M. Boda and J. Novotny; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2010), 109–39 and 141–64, respectively.
28. See Ambos, “Building Rituals from the First Millennium BC: The Evidence from the Ritual Texts,” in From the Foundations to the Crenellations, 221–37; and idem, Mesopotamische Baurituale aus dem 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Dresden: Islet, 2004).
29. Dubovský, The Building of the First Temple.
that suit his present interests. In Chapter 2, I will examine Neo-Assyrian accounts of temple renovations, especially those of Esarhaddon, and then turn to comparable examples from the Deuteronomistic History (DH), namely, the renovations undertaken by Jehoash (2 Kgs 12:5–17), Ahaz (2 Kgs 16:10–18), and finally Josiah (2 Kgs 22–23). I will show that both sets of temple renovations employ a similar rhetoric of discontinuity by which Esarhaddon and Josiah use their recent predecessors as foils for their rebuilding efforts. At the same time, both kings employ a rhetoric of continuity to associate their reign with older and more illustrious past traditions.
In Chapter 3, I will turn my attention to the Persian period and compare the temple renovations of Cyrus II, Cambyses II, and Darius I to the reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple after the exile. I will show that, similar to the royal rhetoric of Esarhaddon, these Persian kings use the renovation of temples to distance themselves from recent turmoil and to associate instead with older, more advantageous past traditions. Moreover, the kings depict the renewal of religious architecture as the beginning of a larger program of cultic and/or economic restoration. In turn, this analysis of Persian sources will shed light on our understanding of the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, which serves a similar rhetorical purpose in Ezra 5:7–6:12. For the Jewish elders in this passage, the renovation of the Jerusalem temple is the symbol through which they express religious continuity as well as discontinuity.
Chapter 4 will focus on Jeroboam’s building activities at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs 12:25–33) but will adopt a different approach to this biblical tradition. Having established in Chapters 2 and 3 that temple renovation is widely attested in the ancient Near East as a mode of royal propaganda by which kings marked a break from recent history and established a recovery of older traditions, I will argue that 1 Kings 12:25–33 should be read as another biblical example of this royal rhetoric. In particular, I will make the case that beneath later dtr polemic is an account of Jeroboam’s cultic transformation of Dan and Bethel, which dates to the eighth century bce and marks the political and cultic resurgence in the Northern Kingdom during the reigns of Joash and Jeroboam II.
Chapter 5 will serve as an epilogue in which I propose some possibilities for further research on this topic. Indeed, examples of temple renovation do not stop in the Persian period, but continue into the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Relevant examples include the Maccabean rededication of the Jerusalem temple, Josephus’s account of the Herod’s rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple, and the various references in the Gospels to the temple being destroyed and rebuilt. Lacking the expertise required to develop a full
Introduction to Temple Renovation 11
chapter on these texts but not wanting to ignore their significance, I have chosen to discuss them briefly in an epilogue, which I hope will inspire other scholars more versed in these sources to take up a more serious examination of them through the rhetorical lens I propose throughout this book.
Wherever possible, I will supplement my analysis of the royal ideology expressed in accounts of temple renovation with reference to relevant archaeological data. Although some studies of ancient building accounts have disavowed the significance of the historical realia that lie behind the accounts,30 the archaeological evidence of temple renovation has an indispensable role in not only this study, but any attempt to analyze the ideological import of public buildings. However paltry and fragmentary the material remains of rebuilding may be, they provide a benchmark against which the renovation accounts can be measured. Mark S. Smith underscores the value of archaeological data in his analysis of 1 Kings 6–7, writing that the archaeological approach provides better background for the description of the temple features as iconic and ideological. Even if the temple never existed except as a verbal icon and as ideology, it seems, based on the information available from the archaeological record, that the description of the temple in 1 Kings 6–7 drew on known archaeological phenomena.31
Moreover, comparison of the historical and literary evidence of temple renovation can reveal discrepancies between the two that are instructive for understanding the ideological import of the building accounts. The absence of such comparison, which is sometimes unavoidable because the archaeological evidence is itself absent or mixed, leaves ideological analysis with no grounding in the historical context of the renovation texts.
The correlation of history and ideology is not the only methodological issue that needs to be addressed before we conclude this introductory chapter. Each of the following issues will be discussed within the following chapters, whenever they are relevant, but it will be worthwhile to set forth here some of
30. For example, Clifford Mark McCormick, in his comparison of the Jerusalem temple and Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh as “verbal icons,” writes that “the icon embodies the [Dtr] historian’s own ideology. . . . There is no value in recreating the appearance of the structure as a historical presentation of the temple since it is the creation of the [Dtr] historian” (Palace and Temple: A Study of Architectural and Verbal Icons [BZAW 313; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002], 41).
31. Smith, “In Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6–7): Between Text and Archaeology,” 280–81.
