First Temple Period

The defining religious move of the First Temple Period is centralisation, and it was contested throughout. Israelite worship had been conducted at many local high places, by local priesthoods, with the household and the village as its ordinary setting. The temple in Jerusalem, built as a royal sanctuary beside the palace, concentrated sacrifice in one building under a hereditary priesthood and a king's patronage. The reform attributed to Josiah in 622 BCE pushed that to its conclusion by suppressing the local shrines outright.

Lester Grabbe's survey of the period is careful to present this as a programme pursued by particular parties over centuries rather than an original condition, and the biblical books themselves record the resistance to it. Centralisation had consequences that outlast the building. It made pilgrimage necessary, since a worshipper now had to travel to sacrifice, and it created the three annual festivals as mass movements towards a single city. It also made the priesthood a national institution with a defined membership. When the temple was destroyed in 587 or 586 BCE, what had been concentrated in one place had nowhere to go, and the forms that replaced it, prayer, study and the household observance of law, were shaped by the absence of the thing they replaced.

Almost nothing physical survives from Solomon's temple, and the reason is not that it was thoroughly destroyed. It is that the ground it stood on has been continuously built over and is now one of the most sensitive religious sites in the world, where excavation is not possible. What is known about the building therefore comes from the description in the books of Kings and Chronicles, written down long after, and from comparison with excavated temples elsewhere in the Levant that share the same three part plan of porch, main hall and inner room.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman have argued that a good deal of the biblical account of the period reflects the concerns of the seventh century and later, when the texts were being edited, rather than a straightforward memory of the tenth. Other scholars read the same evidence more conservatively. The atlas records the dispute rather than choosing a side, and notes what would settle parts of it, which is stratified excavation on the platform itself, an operation that is not going to happen. What is not in dispute is that a royal temple stood in Jerusalem, that it was destroyed by Babylonian forces, and that its loss reorganised a religion.