THE BLOODY THIRD TEMPLE
A Nightmare Scenario
No, not ‘bloody’ in the English swearword sense, like ‘damned’. I mean ‘bloody’ as literally covered with blood. A fair description of the rites of animal sacrifice in the second Jerusalem Temple, built by the murderous King Herod – he who tried to kill the child Jesus. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes that once at the Passover festival 250.000 lambs were offered to God. Maybe an exaggeration. Still, no doubt that that ‘House of God’ was a huge slaughterhouse, where Hebrew priests waded up their knees in blood.
The Second Temple was razed by the Romans in AD 70, in punishment for a bloody rebellion. Today some Israelis want to build a Third Temple. Extremists? Yes, but polls suggest they enjoy wide popular support. These fundamentalist Jews appeal to rabbinical texts like the Talmud Sanhedrin, which invokes divine commands like ‘exterminate the descendants of Amalek’, a.k.a. the Arabs, and ‘build a Temple’. Hatred of ‘Amalek’ is also enjoined in the OT Book of Deuteronomy. Archaic, outdated diatribes? Not really because Israel’s PM Netanyahu last year urged his goons to treat the people of Gaza ‘like Amalek’. Bloodlust?
Building a Third Temple would not be a bloodless, architectural affair. Its site is supposed to be the Temple Mount, where the Islamic Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque are located. You can figure the worldwide Muslim blowback to any Zionist mischief. Putting it down by aerial bombardment, like Netanyahu and his poodle Trump are doing in Iran, would be a bit risky for the bloody bad guys...
Christianity rejects any kind of primitive animal sacrifice. The OT examples foreshadow the ultimate, final and exhaustive sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, made for the sins of humanity through voluntary shedding of his own blood. As the Letter to the Hebrews says, ‘he entered once for all in to the Holy Place, taking with him not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption’.
Another set of people who would be horrified at the erection of a Third Temple are the animal rights/animal lovers lot. They do put up with the breeding and killing of animals for food consumption (vegetarianism having less than universal appeal). An entirely different matter would be sacrificing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of living beings to God. If animals could speak, they would protest. In his ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, John Keats imagines the heifer sculpted in the wonderful Parthenon marbles ‘lowing at the sky’. As if asking the Greek gods: ‘What have I done? What do I have to die?’
Of course, a Marxist (like my former self) might scornfully observe that the old Temple wasn’t simply a matter of religion but at bottom one of economics. The life of ancient Jerusalem was sustained by the daily, massive slaughter of beasts at the shrine. It was a flourishing pilgrimage trade, driving demand for livestock and guaranteeing a bustling market for merchants. So, not the case of Israel’s tribal deity, Yahwe’, ensuring the city’s prosperity but money. Was then Christianity anti-capitalistic? I wish.
To be fair to Judaism: in the Zohar, the mystical Bible of the kabbalists, you read that the messianic or Third Temple will be built not by men but by very hands of the Almighty. The reason that the first and second temple were destroyed is because they were constructed by human hands, not by the Divinity. Further, many Orthodox kabalistic Rabbis, like the famous Yoel Teitelbaum, radically opposed Jewish nationalism and imperialism. The late Rabbi Emmanuel Levyne, whose father died in Auschwitz, even wrote that the Palestinian people are Messiah-like, they suffer for bearing the faults of the world. ‘God incarnates himself in Palestinians. ‘God is with them and in them’, he daringly contended. (Note that there will be no Temple in the new, pure Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation. Believers will directly contemplate the very face of God. No need of intermediaries.)
Apart from slaughtering animals, the Jewish priests sometime fought in wars. A big difference from Christian priests. You can’t be ordained if you have shed human blood. So glad I never did and I am now a consecrated servant of God!
Revd Frank Julian Gelli