Free Essay On What Aspect(S) Of The Second Temple Period Relate(S) To Our Lives Today?

The Second Temple Period (STP) basically refers to the time when the Second Temple of Jerusalem reigned. It is a historical period in the Jewish calendar that began in 538 BCE and ended with the arrival of the First Jewish-Roman War in 70 CE.
The STP was an effort to revive the position of the Church in Jerusalem and among the nation of the Jews. Some records not that Cyrus was the one that decreed the rebuilding of the Temple Ascending to power in 538, these records say, Cyrus saw the need to resuscitate the people’s religious institutions and decreed to have the temple rebuilt. Other records, however, note that it was Nebuchadnezzar who commissioned the rebuilding of the Temple. Regardless, the second temple was seen as an answer to an already declining religiosity among the Jews.
Today, we see many efforts by different groups in many religions of the world trying hard to make things right in their own way. The split of religions into smaller cults or sects (such as Islam divided into the Shia and the Sunni, and Christianity broken into the Catholics and Protestants, and into even smaller protestant denomination) is an effort toward revival, to makes thing right as dictated in the Bible (the understanding of the Bible in this respect mostly biased). Of course, others create churches for commercial purposes. Still, many of these are efforts towards revival, even if that is only symbolic.
In revival’s most extreme, Ezra’s efforts to reinstate Torah Law, could be likened to religious fundamentalism. One possible modern-day example would be the effort of some Muslim states to establish and zealously oversee a return to the traditional Islamic ways, such as the insistence on the Sheria Law as a key component of the day-to-day running of the state, religion and the state becoming one and the same thing. Equally, the church became more political, more involved in state affairs, as was the case with the political states of Hellenistic period (332 BCE-167 BCE) and Hasmonean kingdom (from 167 BCE rebels).
Of course, in the end, things did not work well in the STP as had been expected, with many rebelling against the dominant faiths.
In the end, this period, at least in comparison to the First Temple Period (FTP), saw declining religiosity. Open miracles were no longer happening and the Ark of the Covenant is no longer a powerful symbol is it was initially. The Ark of the Covenant was the ‘Presence of God’ and the platform where God stayed when he descended from heaven, landing on its two outstretched arms made of two golden cherubs.
Now, it would be an exaggeration that this is the same thing today. However, as a symbol of the psyche of the people at the time, the declining religiosity (particularly as evident in the declining place f the Ark as the symbol of God’s presence) is the same as today. It is clear that many of the Jews stopped believing in the power of the Ark of the Covenant and maybe, by extension, they stopped believing in the possible presence of God among me. This period may have planted some of the earliest bits of sectarianism in objection to the tenets of Christianity.
In these respects (among others not discussed here), the STP was similar to some aspects of the contemporary society, especially in relation to religion (including its relationship to sectarianism and the state).