Biblical Evidence for Crypto-Pagans

Over the centuries, when Jews have been forced to convert to other religions (usually Christianity), some of the converts continued to practice Judaism secretly. (If you weren't aware of that, you can start making up the deficit in your knowledge by reading this Wikipedia article.)

What is less widely appreciated is that in Biblical times there were crypto-pagans among the Jews.

The clearest Biblical evidence for this is the Book of Esther. The idea that the story of Esther is a pagan story is not new. God doesn't appear in the story at all, and the names "Mordecai" and "Esther" have uncanny resemblances to the names of the two main gods of the Babylonian pantheon, Marduk and Ishtar.

Here is my conjecture. (It may not be original, but I haven't seen it on Google.) In early second Temple times there was a group of Jews who secretly worshiped the Babylonian gods. They preserved their myths of Marduk and Ishtar in a disguised form as a story about two Jews named Mordecai and Esther. Every Adar 14th they had a carnival-style party. When their neighbors inquired, they told them their tradition of the Purim story. The neighbors thought that was a cool idea and joined the celebration, and the idea spread.

The other Biblical story with pagan roots is the story, in the Book of Judges, of Samson. The Book of Judges reads like somebody in late first Temple times collected all the stories he could find about the era of the Judges and wrote them down to promote his agenda, that life under the Monarchy was better than the anarchy that had preceded it. Hence the recurring refrain,

In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

The story of Samson is tacked on towards the end, just for the sake of completeness. Like the story of Esther, the story of Samson looks very much like disguised pagan mythology, invented by a group of crypto-pagans to shelter themselves from persecution, starting with the name "Samson" ("Shimshon" in Hebrew, from "Shemesh" = Sun) and his miraculous birth. What the real meaning of the stories is is necessarily conjectural. One interpretation that I saw a long time ago, is here. There is another one here.

Update on Samson 31/1/22

 The Samson story includes an episode in which he tied burning torches to the tails of 300 foxes to burn down Phillistine crops, as an act of revenge. Recently I found out about something that took place during the Roman Cerealia festival. They used to tie burning torches to the tails of foxes and then release the foxes in the Circus Maximus. There has got to be some kind of connection there.

Bavli Rosh Hashanah 20b II

חכמת מנוח, which is among the commentaries in my Shas following masekhet Rosh Hashanah, pointed me to a book called Yesod Olam, by  Yitzhak ben Yosef Yisreli, whom the first edition of Encyclopedia Judaica calls "ISRAELI, ISAAC BEN JOSEPH". He was a medieval astronomer who wrote the book, at the request of the RoSH, to elucidate the astronomical basis of the Jewish calendar. Section 4 Chapter 8 presents his interpretation of the sugya.

Unlike the medieval commentators in part I, he is not interested in a dateline. I presume that this is because, according to his understanding of geography, all of the inhabitable land surface of the Earth is in what we now would call the "eastern hemisphere", with the rest of the globe being covered by water. So as far as he is concerned, the dateline can be anywhere in the western hemisphere and it doesn't matter where.

Instead, his interpretation is based on three meridians. His prime meridian is about 59 degrees east of Greenwich, which he estimates to be in the middle of the inhabitable hemisphere. His other significant meridians are an east meridian 90 degrees east of the prime meridian, a west meridian 90 degrees west of the prime meridian, and the meridian of Jerusalem, 23.5 degrees west of the prime meridian.

Another factor that he introduces, and that was ignored by the commentators in part I, is that as a real astronomer, he knows that the molad is just an average, and that the actual conjunction of the Sun and the Moon usually is different from the average conjunction by several hours. The modern explanation of this phenomenon is that the Moon's orbit is elliptical. The pre-modern explanation used epicycles. His estimate of the maximum deviation is 14 hours and 648 halakim (one hour = 1080 halakim). 

His explanation of "Differentiate between when the molad occurred before hatzot and when the molad occurred after hatzot" is with reference to noon at the prime meridian, and on the assumptions that the new moon is visible starting 22.5 hours after the true conjunction and that such a thin crescent won't be visible until 20 minutes after sunset. If the molad occurs before noon at the prime meridian, then, if this time the true conjunction was as early as it possibly can be relative to the molad, then theoretically it is possible for witnesses to see the new moon at sunset in or near Jerusalem. If the molad occurs after noon at the prime meridian then it is physically impossible to see the new moon at sunset in or near Jerusalem and witnesses who claim to have done so are mistaken.

This is how he gets it:
6 hours from noon to sunset +
20 minutes = 360 halakim +
Jerusalem is 1 hour and 612 halakim later than the prime meridian (his estimate of the longitude of Jerusalem is 23.5 degrees west of the prime meridian) +
14 hours and 648  halakim is the most time by which the true conjunction can ever precede the molad
= 22.5 hours.

His explanation of "it is necessary that both the night and the day be of the new month" is that that statement of Rabbi Zeira has nothing to do with whether the molad is before or after hatzot at the prime meridian. Instead, it is a rule of thumb to use in the diaspora to estimate when the Sanhedrin declares the new month. If the molad is before local sunset then most likely the Sanhedrin will declare the new month one day later. Otherwise, most likely the Sanhedrin will declare the new month two days later.

In his first explanation of "For us, in Babylonia, it is not visible for six hours of the old moon and eighteen hours of the new; for them, in Eretz Yisrael, it is not visible for six hours of the new moon and eighteen hours of the old" he posits, like the other Rishonim in part I, that "us" doesn't mean Babylonians, and, like some of the Rishonim (Tashbetz second explanation and Ra'avad), that "them" doesn't mean Israelis. Instead, "us" means observers at the east meridian and "them" means observers at the west meridian. He assumes that the Moon is invisible for 48 hours on the average, and gives an example of the true conjunction being at the start of Shabbat (at sunset) near the Fall equinox (for determining the day of Rosh HaShanah). The same time is midnight Shabbat for "us" and noon Friday for "them". The old Moon is invisible all of Friday and the new moon is invisible all of Shabbat at the prime meridian. For "us", though, the first six hours of Shabbat are the last six hours of the old Moon's invisibility and the last 18 hours of Shabbat are the first 18 hours of the new Moon's invisibility. Similarly, for "them", the first 18 hours of Friday are the last 18 hours of the old Moon's invisibility and the last six hours of Friday are the first six hours of the new Moon's invisibility.

I have two objections to Yitzhak ben Yosef Israeli's explanation of the sugya. My first objection is that he disconnects Rabbi Zeira's first statement ("it is necessary that both the night and the day be of the new month") from the baraita quoted by Abba the father of Rabbi Simlai. It is clear from the sugya that Rabbi Zeira's first statement is intended as an explanation of the baraita. My second objection is that the plain meaning of "us" is Babylonians and the plain meaning of "them" is Israelis. It should not be necessary to make "us" mean observers in the extreme east and to make "them" mean observers in the extreme west.

He also has a second explanation of "For us, in Babylonia, it is not visible for six hours of the old moon and eighteen hours of the new; for them, in Eretz Yisrael, it is not visible for six hours of the new moon and eighteen hours of the old" that seems to be based on interpreting "old" as meaning the old month (Elul) and "new" as meaning the new month (Tishrei) but I was unable to make sense of it.

Finally, in part I, my own explanation of "For us, in Babylonia, it is not visible for six hours of the old moon and eighteen hours of the new; for them, in Eretz Yisrael, it is not visible for six hours of the new moon and eighteen hours of the old" was that it refers to a 24 hour discrepancy, between when Israelis see the new moon and when Babylonians see the new moon, that happens in about one out of every 36 months. I was assuming that the difference in longitude between Babylonia and Jerusalem is about 10 degrees. In Section 2 Chapter 3, Yitzhak ben Yosef Yisraeli gives a value for the longitude of Babylonia that places it 13.5 degrees east of Jerusalem, not 10 degrees east of Jerusalem. If I use that longitude difference in my calculation then I get a slightly larger discrepancy frequency of about three times every 80 months.

Christianity's Dirty Secret

When Paul returned to Jerusalem after having spread Christianity among the Gentiles, some of the local Christians jumped on him for requiring Gentile converts just to obey the seven Noahide laws and accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, without having to convert to Judaism. Peter defended him (Acts 15:10) in part as follows:

Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?

In other words, the first Christians, who started out as Jews, were motivated by a desire to get out from under the burden of the 613 commandments. This despite Jesus' own message, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:18) that his followers still were bound by Halakha, and later (Matthew 23:2-3) that if you want to know the Halakha, ask the Pharisees.

The irony is that Jesus placed a much heavier burden on his followers. The Sermon on the Mount, by deeming sinful thoughts to be just as evil as sinful deeds, sets the bar too high:

Matthew 5:21-22:

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.

Matthew 5:27-28:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

 

Bavli Rosh HaShanah 20b

About 30 years ago I was the leader of a gemara sheur in Houston TX, going through masekhet Rosh Hashanah with Rashi. On daf 20b, as pointed out by Tosafot, Rashi's explanation is contrary to physical reality (I managed to explain Rashi by assuming a flat Earth, putting the Moon at an altitude of about 125 miles, and putting the Sun at an altitude of about 35,000 miles), so I devised my own explanation.

Here is the sugya:

אמר שמואל יכילנא לתקוני לכולה גולה אמר ליה אבא אבוה דרבי שמלאי לשמואל ידע מר האי מילתא דתניא בסוד העיבור נולד קודם חצות או נולד אחר חצות א"ל לא אמר ליה מדהא לא ידע מר איכא מילי אחרנייתא דלא ידע מר כי סליק רבי זירא שלח להו צריך שיהא לילה ויום מן החדש וזו שאמר אבא אבוה דר' שמלאי מחשבין את תולדתו נולד קודם חצות בידוע שנראה סמוך לשקיעת החמה לא נולד קודם חצות בידוע שלא נראה סמוך לשקיעת החמה למאי נפקא מינה אמר רב אשי לאכחושי סהדי אמר רבי זירא אמר רב נחמן כ"ד שעי מכסי סיהרא לדידן שית מעתיקא ותמני סרי מחדתא לדידהו שית מחדתא ותמני סרי מעתיקא למאי נפקא מינה אמר רב אשי לאכחושי סהדי

 Here is a translation to English, from Sefaria, except that:

1.  I changed "midday" to "hatzot", which is what it says in the original (חצות). "Hatzot" can mean either midday (noon) or midnight.
2.  I crossed out the parts of the interpolated explanation that assume that "hatzot" means "midday".

Shmuel said: I am able to fix the calendar for the entire Diaspora without witnesses. Shmuel was an expert on the movement of the celestial bodies and on the principles governing leap years and additional days added to months.

Abba, the father of Rabbi Simlai, said to Shmuel: Does the Master know the meaning of this statement, as it is taught in a baraita dealing with the secret of addition, which discusses calendric calculations: Differentiate between when the molad occurred before hatzot and when the molad occurred after hatzot? He said to him: No, I do not know what this means. He said to him: Since the Master does not know this, there are probably other matters that the Master does not know, and therefore you must not establish a calendar, relying upon calculations that were made based on faulty or insufficient knowledge.

As for the meaning of this obscure baraita, when Rabbi Zeira went up from Babylonia to Eretz Yisrael, he sent back a letter to his colleagues in Babylonia: In order for a day to be sanctified as the New Moon, it is necessary that both the night and the day be of the new month. That is to say, the molad must occur before the beginning of the night.

And this is what Abba, the father of Rabbi Simlai, said: The baraita means as follows: They calculate the molad; if the molad occurred before hatzot, so that there are at least six more hours left of the day, it is known that the moon will be visible close to sunset. If, however, the molad did not occur before hatzot, so that there are fewer than six hours left of the day, it is known that the moon will not be visible close to sunset.

The Gemara asks: What is the practical difference that this statement makes? In any case, the court is dependent upon the testimony of witnesses. Rav Ashi said: This information is used to refute the witnesses, as if the witnesses claim that they saw the new moon at a time when it was not visible according to the calculations, they are clearly false witnesses.

Rabbi Zeira said that Rav Naḥman said: For twenty-four hours the moon is covered, i.e., not visible. This occurs between the last sighting of the old moon and the first sighting of the new moon. For us, in Babylonia, it is not visible for six hours of the old moon and eighteen hours of the new; for them, in Eretz Yisrael, it is not visible for six hours of the new moon and eighteen hours of the old.

The Gemara asks: What is the practical difference that this statement makes? Rav Ashi said: It is used to refute the witnesses, as if they testify that they saw two moons, the old and the new, within a single twenty-four hour period, they are certainly false witnesses.

 I also crossed out "faulty or" because "faulty" is being mean to Shmuel. Abba's point was that the Sanhedrin has criteria in addition to astronomical criteria that might lead it to declare the first day of a new month one or two days different from what a purely astronomical calculation would indicate. As is stated in the mishnah at the top of 25a, a new month starts when the Sanhedrin says it starts, no matter what the Moon is doing.

The baraita is a rule of thumb that the Sanhedrin used to verify testimony about the sighting of the new crescent Moon.

According to Wikipedia the Moon is invisible, around the time of new Moon, for between 1.5 days (36 hours) and 3.5 days (84 hours). If the time from the last possible visibility of the old crescent Moon to the first possible visibility of the new crescent Moon is 36 hours then the time from the molad to the first possible visibility of the new crescent Moon is half of 36 hours, i.e., 18 hours. Then the hatzot in the baraita can't be noon on the day that the new crescent Moon will be visible at sunset, because the new crescent moon won't be visible until sunset of the following day. The next candidate for hatzot-hood is the preceding midnight. If the baraita is based on the assumption that the new Moon is invisible for 36 hours, then the rule of thumb makes sense. If the molad is before midnight then the time to the next sunset is more than 36/2=18 hours and the new crescent moon will be visible. If the molad is after midnight then the time to the next sunset is less than 18 hours and the new crescent moon won't be visible. "The night and the day being of the new month" means "most of the night, plus the following day, are after the molad.

That explains the baraita. We still need an explanation of Rav Nahman's statement. Rav Nahman can't really mean that the new Moon is invisible for 24 hours because that invalidates the baraita. If the new Moon is invisible for 24 hours then the time to which the molad should be compared is sunrise (24/2=12 hours before sunset), not noon or midnight.

The explanation I gave in Houston was that Rav Nahman's 24 hours is a possible discrepancy between observations of the first new crescent Moon (and also the last old crescent Moon) in Babylonia vs. Eretz Yisrael. Usually, observers in Babylonia and in Eretz Yisrael see the last old crescent Moon at sunrise on the same day, and see the first new crescent Moon at sunset on the same day. About 1/36th of the time, the last observation of the old crescent Moon is a day earlier in Eretz Yisrael than in Babylonia, and the first observation of the new crescent Moon is a day earlier in Eretz Yisrael than in Babylonia. Rav Nahman's point is that, in addition to knowing all the Sanhedrin's criteria for declaring the first day of a new month, someone who wants to predict the calendar needs to be aware of the possibility of observational discrepancies between Babylonia and Eretz Yisrael.
The longitude of Jerusalem is 35.2 degrees east. The longitude of Baghdad is 44.4 degrees east. So the difference in longitude between Babylonia and Eretz Yisrael is about 10 degrees, and the time in Eretz Yisrael is about 40 minutes behind the time in Babylonia.

For simplicity, suppose that the molad is at midnight halfway between Babylonia and Eretz Yisrael. Then the molad is at 00:20 in Babylonia and at 23:40 in Eretz Yisrael. Also for simplicity, suppose that sunrise in both places is at 06:00 and that sunset in both places is at 18:00. The sunrise immediately before the molad was 18 hours and 20 minutes before the molad in Babylonia and 17 hours and 40 minutes before the molad in Eretz Yisrael, so the old crescent Moon was still visible in Babylonia but no longer visible in Eretz Yisrael. The sunset immediately after the molad will be 17 hours and 40 minutes after the molad in Babylonia and 18 hours and 20 minutes after the molad in Eretz Yisrael, so the new crescent Moon will be visible in Eretz Yisrael but not yet in Babylonia.
Rav Nahman's description of the 24 hour delay before the new crescent Moon is visible in Babylonia is the 18 hours of the "new moon" from the molad until the next sunset, when the new crescent Moon is not yet visible, plus the 6 hours of the "old moon" back to the previous sunset. His description of the 24 hour pause in the visibility of the old crescent Moon in Eretz Yisrael is the 18 hours of the "old moon" from the last sunrise before the molad, when the old crescent moon was no longer visible, until the molad, plus the 6 hours of the "new" moon from the molad until the next sunrise.

30 years ago I had neither the time nor the ability to look for classical explanations of the sugya other than Rashi's, but I had heard that the sugya was somehow connected to the definition of the halakhic dateline. Now I am retired and there is Internet. At HebrewBooks.org I found the book ישועות כהן - קו התאריך. Chapters 3-6 of that book explain the ways that four Rishonim (the Kuzari, HaRav Zerahya Halevi (Ba'al HaMaor), Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemah Duran (the Tashbetz) and Ra'avad) get the dateline from our sugya. All four systems are problematic. All four Rishonim agree that the dateline is 90 degrees east of Jerusalem, but to do that they need to define "us" as observers at or near the dateline, not in Babylonia. In addition, their values for the time that the new Moon is invisible (48 hours for Kuzari, Ba'al HaMaor and two of Tashbetz' three explanations, 24 hours for Tashbetz' third explanation, and 12 hours for Ra'avad) are inconsistent with the baraita.

 While writing the above, another explanation of Rav Nahman occurred to me. Rav Nahman accepts at face value the reading of the baraita as saying that the new crescent Moon might be visible in Eretz Yisrael at sunset if the molad is before noon, but he knows from his own observations that the new crescent Moon isn't visible in Babylonia until 18 hours after the molad. His conclusion is that the new Moon is invisible for 24 hours, but for some reason those 24 hours are partitioned differently around the molad in Eretz Yisrael than in Babylonia.

Under either explanation of Rav Nahman, what his statement has to do with verifying testimony about sighting the new crescent Moon is: be careful about using astronomical data from Babylonia to invalidate testimony about sightings in Eretz Yisrael.

At Age 3 My Grandmother Was A Socialist Agitator In Czarist Russia

True story.
She saw people marching outside with red banners, so she pulled the red tablecloth off the kitchen table and ran out into the street with the tablecloth and joined them. Her parents had to pick her up from the police station.

Where Did Monotheism Come From?

Judaism introduced two revolutionary ideas to the ancient world. The first was monotheism: there is only one God, Who created the universe and Who expects some kind of level of moral behavior from the people He created. The second was abolition of human sacrifice. (I have read that the Hindus abolished human sacrifice about the same time as the Jews; but casual googling gives me the impression that human sacrifice has died out gradually among the Hindus, starting around 500 BCE, and has persisted sporadically into modern times.)

So where did monotheism come from?

The following sentence is phrased to try to convince even people who don't believe in an Abrahamic religion. The traditional narrative of the ancient Israelites, as recorded in Genesis, is that their ancestors came from Mesopotamia in the early second century BCE and that those ancestors worshiped a single God.

I also assume that David Ulansey is headed in the right direction about Mithraism. You can see his take on Mithraism here and here. Briefly, Mithraism was a (sort of) monotheistic mystery cult that was popular in the Roman Empire until it was suppressed by the Christians. The earliest date claimed for evidence of the existence of the cult is 67 BCE. The Mithraic god was Mithra, the god of heaven.

The central image of Mithraism was the "tauroctony", an image of a man killing a bull.

To understand Ulansey's take on Mithraism, you need to know what the precession of the equinoxes is. The first two Google hits on "precession of the equinoxes" are to the Brittanica.com article and the Wikipedia article. Start with the Brittanica.com article first because it is much more concise than the Wikipedia article. Then skim the Wikipedia article for whatever interests you there. If you are having trouble visualizing what is going on, try this video. (You can also try YouTube but beware of videos with agendas.)  Briefly, the Earth's axis wobbles, with a period of about 26,000 years. As a result, the zodiacal constellation in which the Sun rises on the first day of Spring keeps changing. For about the past 2000 years, the Sun has been rising in Pisces on the first day of Spring, and we have been in what the astrologers call the Age of Pisces. Between about 2200 BCE and the year zero, during the Age of Aries, the Sun rose in Aries on the first day of Spring. Between about 4400 BCE and 2200 BCE, during the Age of Taurus, the Sun rose in Taurus on the first day of Spring.

Ulansey's thesis is that the tauroctony shows Mithra the god of heaven killing Taurus to usher in the Age of Aries.

The precession of the equinoxes was discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus in abut 125 BCE. Ulansey proposes that sometime in the following 50 years or so someone, presumably somewhere in the Mediterranean basin, invented a new mystery cult based on Hipparchus' discovery, with the name of the (only?) (main?) god of the cult being borrowed from the Zoroastrian pantheon to make the cult sound exotic.

My problem with that foundational hypothesis is: Why a bull? Why not a ram? In about 100 years the vernal equinox (the point in the zodiac where the sun is on the first day of Spring) is going to move from Aries to Pisces. Wouldn't it be more to the point to depict the Master of Heaven as ushering in the Age of Pisces?

I propose that what eventually became Mithraism started more than 2000 years before, in The Theological Crisis of the 24th Century BCE. I conjecture that during the Age of Taurus Mesopotamian priest-astronomers developed an elaborate (poly)theology, one of whose essential components was that the vernal equinox has to be in Taurus. In the 24th century BCE these priest-astronomers saw to their horror that the vernal equinox was continuing to move west through Taurus and in about 100 years or so would move into Aries. To some of the priest-astronomers, this could only mean that the gods they had been worshiping were mere servants of a Master God Who dwells outside the observable universe and Who directs the affairs of the universe through His servants. Of course, these heretics had to keep their heresy secret.

This conjecture also addresses some of the other weaknesses in Ulansey's theory that have been identified by his critics. For example, Shepherd Simpson wrote:

Prof Ulansey argues that the characters are constellations and that the constellations shown are those which lay on the Celestial Equatorduring the period between about 2000 BC and 4000 BC - his dates for the Age of Taurus. This, he argues, is how the tauroctony is able to depict a particular moment in time: owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the constellations which lie along the Celestial Equator change slowly with time, so a particular constellation list indicates a particular time period.

...

Finally, the other question which arises is - even for a skilled astrologer - would it have been possible at the time to calculate which constellations would have been on the Celestial Equator during the Age of Taurus? To say the least this would have been an impressive feat! We have no indication that this was possible, nor any indication that any astrologer of the time ever attempted or achieved such a task.

 The heretical priest-astronomers didn't need to calculate anything. They just had to look up at the sky to see which constellations were on the celestial equator.

Several centuries later, some of the heretics migrated (fled?) west to the shores of the Mediterranean. Some of the migrants were the ancestors of the Israelites. The other migrants kept their heresy entirely secret until the precession of the equinoxes was rediscovered and published by the unbelievers and it was no longer necessary to preserve total secrecy.

Some Mitzvot have Expiration Dates II

I need to re-think Part I in light of last Shabbat's Haftarah, from Yeheske'el 44:15:

והכהנים הלוים בני צדוק אשר שמרו את משמרת מקדשי בתעות בני ישראל מעלי המה יקרבו אלי לשרתני ועמדו לפני להקריב לי חלב ודם נאם אדני יהוה

At the end of Part I I wrote: 

Next (and this is where I go beyond RaMBaM) the system was designed to gradually invalidate the members of that extended family [the Kohanim]. We didn't get the hint after the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple, so God had to send the Romans to destroy the second Temple.

 So what do I do about Yehezke'el 44:15? Maybe it was a certification of the purity of the descendants of Zadok. Maybe it was a re-set of the purity of the descendants of Zadok. Or maybe it was not at all a reference to the Terrestrial Temple, but rather to the Celestial Temple, Judaism has a concept of בית המקדש של מעלה that may date back all the way to Yeshayahu's first vision:

בִּשְׁנַת-מוֹת הַמֶּלֶךְ עֻזִּיָּהוּ, וָאֶרְאֶה אֶת-אֲדֹנָי יֹשֵׁב עַל-כִּסֵּא רָם וְנִשָּׂא; וְשׁוּלָיו, מְלֵאִים אֶת-הַהֵיכָל. 

 Where was that היכל? Not on Earth:

כה אמר יהוה השמים כסאי והארץ הדם רגלי אי זה בית אשר תבנו לי ואי זה מקום מנוחתי  

(Yeshayahu 66:1) but rather in Heaven. Yehezke'el's whole discussion of what now is called "the Third Temple" may be an extended description of an abstract entity, of which the Terrestrial Temple was just a physical representation, the way "2" is a physical representation of an abstract mathematical concept. In support of this thesis, I point out that the floor plan of the Second Temple followed the floor plan of the First Temple, not the floor plan of Yehezke'el's Temple.

If the future Temple, and the associated rituals, are a complex of abstract concepts, an understanding of which is connected to the Final Redemption, either as a consequence or as a prerequisite, then praying for the restoration of the Temple and of sacrificial worship continues to make sense, despite the built-in impossibility of their physical restoration.