TEMPLE SERVICES
On the dread Day of Atonement[269] the high-priest was supported to the Holy House by two priests, while a third laid hold of one of the jewels on his shoulder. The sound of the golden bells was heard as he went alone within the inner veil, but priests and people waited in awe-stricken silence, till he came out to bless them by the very name of Iahu, and to send forth the goat bearing the sins of the nation to the grim precipice of Ṣûḳ—a mountain visible from Olivet—which rises over the Desert of Judah. Yet more rarely—perhaps only seven times in the period between Ezra and Herod—he left the Temple by the Shushan Gate, and passing over a high wooden causeway, ascended Olivet to burn the red heifer. Its ashes were mingled with water from Siloam, brought to the Temple, it is said, by innocent boys mounted on oxen, with much fear lest these should tread on some “grave of the depth,” or hidden tomb, and so defile the children who rode them, and who had been born in the outer court of the sanctuary. Without these ashes there was no purification for Israel from defilement by the dead. They were stored partly on Olivet and partly in the Temple.
The Feast of Booths was a time of rejoicing rather than of fear. It was then that the king, once a year, read the law to the people from a pulpit in the Court of the Women, and it is said that Agrippa I. wept at the words “Thou mayest not set a stranger over thee which is not of thy brethren,” touching the hearts of the people, who shouted, “Thou art our brother—thou art our brother.”[270] For did he not yearly bear the basket of first fruits, when the bull with gilded horns was brought to the Temple, and “the pipe played before them till they came to the mountain of the house”? At “Tabernacles” also the pipes played at the feast of the “water-drawing,” when four golden lamps lighted up the Court of the Women, and Levites stood on the fifteen steps of Nicanor chanting the fifteen “songs of degrees,” while “pious and prudent men danced with torches in their hands, singing psalms and hymns before the people.” Two priests blew the rams’ horns in the court, and when they reached the Nicanor Gate they sang:
“Our fathers who were in this place
Turned their backs on the House,
And their faces were towards the east,
And they worshipped the rising sun.[271]
But we turn to Adonai,
On Adonai are our eyes.”
The paganism of Rome penetrated, however, even into the temple of Jehovah. The golden eagle—emblem of the empire—“erected over the great gate of the Temple,” was not cut down till rumour arose that Herod was dying.[272] It perhaps spread its wings on the soffit of the lintel, as at Ba’albek and Si’a. The money-changers who—for a small charge—changed old half-shekels for the new ones, which alone could be given for the Temple tax,[273] and the sellers of doves, were established in “shops” in the outer cloisters, and made the Holy House a “den of thieves.” The great fortress, built to defend the Temple on the north, and to guard the sacred robes of the high-priest, was held under Idumæans and Romans by a foreign garrison overawing the people. This fortress of Antonia requires a special description.