Rebuilt History: The Significance of the First Temple in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Religion
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
The First Temple in Jerusalem is an incredibly complex structure, standing for hundreds of years initially as a representation of a thriving Israelite nation. Though modern discussions of Solomon's Temple typically include mention of sanctity or divine presence, the initial significance of the structure differed for early Israelites and was religiously reassessed during the Babylonian exile. This thesis seeks to reveal that the First Temple, in fact, lacked its presently touted sacred nature. The Temple, a unifying factor for both pre-exilic Israelites and modern Jews, stands as just one of many examples in which historically impactful and religiously central architecture transcends time and space, elevated and eternalized in the minds of believers. Israelite perception of the space, divided by hundreds of years and catastrophic destruction, varied. The tumult of its destruction and the subsequent exile changed the ideals of the Israelites and propelled the space from a political centralizer into an eternal religious and spiritual unifier irreplaceable to post-exilic Jews. Revealing the complex identity differences between the completed first Temple and evolved post-exilic priestly perceptions of the space, requires two prominent biblical texts, pre-exilic 1 and 2 Kings and post-exilic 1 and 2 Chronicles. These texts, paired with clarifying historical and literary context, expose the First Temple as altered initially by the more politically-minded pre-exilic Israelite kings and transformed into a more spiritual and holy communal space by kingless post-exilic Israelites.