The historical importance and practical history of rebuilding
ancient Judaism's sacred center. The following article is
reprinted with permission from From Text to Tradition: A History
of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Ktav). The Historical
Significance of Restoration From the point of view of Judaism as
a religion, there can be no doubt of the historical importance
of the restoration of the sacrificial ritual in approximately
520 B.C.E. Written soon after the destruction of the First
Temple, the Book of Ezekiel held up the dream of a rebuilt
Temple in Jerusalem, including an enlarged Temple complex, in
which sacrifice would be offered to an even higher standard of
priestly sanctity and ritual purity than that required in the
levitical codes of the Torah. The restoration allowed Israel to
continue its ancestral worship of God in the ways prescribed by
its ancient literature. More importantly, it established the
biblical sacrificial system as the dominant pattern of worship
for the entire Second Temple pe