What Happened When the Altar Stopped

The system had a single legitimate address. Deuteronomy restricts offering to the place the deity chooses, and by the later Second Temple period that meant Jerusalem, with the Judaean garrison temple at Elephantine and the Oniad temple at Leontopolis standing as the exceptions that show how contested the rule had been. When Roman forces destroyed the Temple in 70 CE the daily service stopped, and it has not resumed.

What replaced it was not another altar but a set of substitutions in a different register. The fixed daily prayers were built on the pattern and the hours of the offerings they stood in for, which is why the morning and afternoon services of the synagogue still carry the names of the morning and afternoon offerings. Study of the sacrificial law was itself held to count in place of its performance, and that principle is the reason the order of the Mishnah dealing with holy things was compiled and transmitted with the same care as the orders governing practices anybody could still carry out. Acts of loving kindness were named as a third substitution.

None of this made the system a closed historical subject. The laws of the offerings are studied as live halakhah, the liturgy keeps their shape and their vocabulary, and what a restoration would involve is argued in the present tense rather than the past. The atlas records the system as its sources describe it, and it does not take a position on that argument. What it can say is that a reference work which files the offerings under antiquity has already made a judgement, and that the judgement is not the only one available.