One Altar, and What That Cost

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.