# Destruction of the Second Temple The Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple on **Tisha B'Av, 70 CE**, during the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE) — the event that ended sacrificial [[Judaism]] permanently and forced the tradition into the form it has held for nineteen centuries since. ## The sequence The Second Temple's foundations were laid around 535 BCE and it was consecrated in spring 516 BCE; Herod began rebuilding it on a monumental scale around 20/19 BCE. Judaea became a Roman province in 6 CE. The revolt broke out in 66; the Temple burned in 70 (4 or 30 August, by different reckonings); Masada fell in 73–74. The second rupture was worse in some respects. The **Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE)**, triggered by Hadrian's decision to rebuild Jerusalem as the pagan colony Aelia Capitolina, ended with Betar's fall in summer 135. Cassius Dio reports 580,000 killed. Afterwards the province was renamed [[Syria]] Palaestina, Jews were excluded from Jerusalem and its environs, and Hadrianic bans on circumcision, Torah study and sabbath were imposed — mostly lifted after his death in 138. ## What replaced the Temple - **The rabbi replaces the priest.** With no altar, the hereditary priesthood has no function. Authority passes to scholars whose claim rests on learning rather than descent. - **Text replaces sacrifice.** Study, prayer and the interpretation of law become the central religious acts. The Sanhedrin relocates through the Galilee — Usha, Beit She'arim, Sepphoris, Tiberias — where the Mishnah is redacted around 200 CE. See [[Talmud]]. - **The sects vanish.** Sadducees, whose entire programme was Temple ritual, disappear after 70 CE; not a single line of their own writing survives. Essenes likewise. **The Pharisaic party is the only one that had built a religion that could function without the building** — which is why rabbinic Judaism is Pharisaic Judaism, and why almost everything we know about the others comes from hostile sources. > [!note] The Council of Jamnia did not happen > The claim that a council at Jamnia around 90 CE closed the Hebrew canon is Heinrich Graetz's 1871 hypothesis, dismantled by W. M. Christie (1925), decisively by Jack P. Lewis (1964) and independently by Sid Leiman (1976). Rabbinic sources record debates about particular books, but canonicity was not the question at issue. When the canon actually closed remains disputed. Do not put Jamnia on a timeline. ## Why it matters to this vault Read next to the [[Babylonian Exile]], this is the second and decisive proof of the same mechanism: **a religion survives the destruction of its central institution only if some faction has already, for its own reasons, built a version that does not need it.** The Pharisees did not plan for 70 CE. They had simply developed a practice of law and study that turned out to be portable, and that accident of readiness is the whole reason the tradition continued. The Temple's absence also generates the eschatology that American [[Dispensationalism]] and [[Christian Zionism]] now run on — the rebuilt Temple as an end-times precondition, a project with active American funding and almost no constituency among actual Jews. ## See also [[Judaism]] | [[Judaism Timeline]] | [[Babylonian Exile]] | [[Talmud]] | [[Ancient Rome]] | [[Christian Zionism]] | [[Dispensationalism]] | [[World Religions Timeline]]