Second Temple Period

The Second Temple Period takes its name from the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt after the Babylonian exile and dedicated around 516 BCE under Persian imperial sponsorship, replacing Solomon's Temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed in 586 BCE. Under Persian rule, the reforms associated with Ezra and Nehemiah reorganized Judean religious life around the Torah as a governing legal text, a foundation that Hellenistic and later Roman rule left largely intact even as political control passed from the Persians to Alexander's successors, first the Ptolemies and then the Seleucids.

Seleucid attempts to suppress Jewish religious practice under Antiochus IV Epiphanes provoked the Maccabean revolt in the 160s BCE, commemorated in the account of the Temple's rededication after its recapture, and led to a century of Hasmonean self-rule before Rome absorbed Judea, first as a client kingdom under Herod the Great, who greatly expanded the Temple complex itself, and then as a directly governed province. The period ends with the First Jewish-Roman War, in which Titus's forces destroyed the Temple in 70 CE after a prolonged siege of Jerusalem, an event that closed the Second Temple era outright and reshaped Judaism around study, prayer and the emerging rabbinic tradition rather than temple sacrifice. E. P. Sanders's Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE, remains a standard scholarly account of the period's religious life on the eve of that destruction.

Second Temple Judaism was religiously diverse in a way later rabbinic sources sometimes obscure. The Pharisees emphasized both the written Torah and an oral tradition of interpretation and held that resurrection and an afterlife awaited the righteous; the Sadducees, drawn largely from priestly and aristocratic circles associated with the Temple itself, rejected both the oral tradition and the doctrine of resurrection; and the Essenes, a separatist movement usually linked to the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran, withdrew from what they regarded as a corrupted Temple establishment to await a final divine reckoning. Zealot and other more overtly militant movements emerged later in the period, particularly as Roman rule grew harsher through the first century CE, and contributed directly to the revolt that ended the era.

The period also produced a substantial body of literature outside what later became the Hebrew Bible, including apocalyptic and wisdom texts, some preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls and others surviving through Christian transmission as the Apocrypha, reflecting the era's active debate over the boundaries of scripture itself, a question not formally settled within Judaism until after the Temple's fall. This same period saw the historian Josephus, writing after 70 CE, provide the fullest surviving narrative account of the war and the sects that preceded it, and it is the world within which both the rabbinic tradition, formed by the Pharisees' heirs, and the earliest Christian movement, centered on Jesus and the first Jerusalem community, took shape, so that the Second Temple's destruction marks a genuine turning point for both.