Preface

It is necessary to preface this discussion with a few remarks. The present article attempts to reconstruct certain legal and economic realities in the province of Yehud in the Persian period (539–330 BCE). For the history of this region, we have a diversity of sources, but their interpretation is not without its difficulties. On the one hand, we can draw on comparative material, especially the realities of Mesopotamia in Neo-Babylonian and Persian times. However, as is well known, reasoning per analogiam has its weaknesses. The existence of legal and economic practice for temples in Mesopotamia may be helpful in reconstructing the realities of Judah at the time, as they may have inspired local arrangements, but one should be cautious of uncritically transposing these realities onto regions in provincial Judah. One has, however, to use mainly sources that relate directly to the province of Yehud and its historical realities in Persian period. This leads us back to a fundamental difficulty that has long been debated by scholars, namely the dates of composition and the reliability of the biblical records.

There now seems to be a consensus among scholars that most of the Hebrew Bible was written after the fall of the Kingdom of Judah (586 BCE), and restoration of life in Yehud under Persian rule. The biblical texts that can be used for historical reconstruction include, on the one hand, prophetic books, on the other hand, collections of laws, or narrative texts recounting different realities, sometimes historically plausible (e.g. Nehemiah) and in other cases plainly mythical (Exodus). It is therefore unwise to treat all biblical sources with equal weight.

The analysis below is based on the following assumptions. First, I assume that the legal regulations contained in the Pentateuch originated and were in force in the times of their formulation, during Persian period. This is not the place to analyse them in depth, in order to resolve the question of whether particular laws were respected or merely remained postulates. In any case, their very existence provides a certain degree of insight into the realities of the time. The stipulation of certain legal provisions shows that a certain law-making circle considered particular legal measures to be appropriate. In considering particular legal measures it is not our task to determine whether these laws were effectively enforced in reality or whether they were widely accepted. Their very existence is sufficient for reconstructing certain socio-economic realities on their basis. In the following attempt to reconstruct the legal realities, I rely on the assumption that the legal rules in force at the time, whether dating back to before the Babylonian captivity or created only in the Persian period for the needs of the province of Yehud, functioned in the realities of this small political entity and its sparse population.

My second working assumption is that the province of Yehud underwent transformations during the roughly 200 years of Persian rule and was therefore not internally static. It can reasonably be assumed that the conditions in Yehud, including economic and social conditions, shifted dramatically during these years. These changing realities are reflected in biblical texts dating from different times. As such, it is possible to date the realities described in each source to respective time. For example, the realities from Leviticus may be earlier than those contained in 1–2 Chronicles. But it is much more difficult to turn this relative chronology into an absolute chronology. Since we lack uncontroversial anchors to fix the texts of the Hebrew Bible on a timeline, all we can do is offer an approximate and highly hypothetical attempt to correlate the realities described in the Bible with a certain time.

Thirdly, in the following reconstruction, I assume that the realities of the province of Yehud in the Persian period constitute a phenomenon in their own right. That is, despite the existence of some memory of the institutions and realities of monarchical times, the prevailing legal norms of the time were created, as it were, anew. Following the Babylonian exile the province of Yehud in the Eber-Nehari satrapy was established at the initiative of the Persian authorities (Edelman 2005). A new structure of institutions and local authorities was then established. Certainly, the representatives of Persian power played a key role in the process, in political, economic and military matters (Lipschits 2006; 2024). However, due to significant population shifts, involving the resettlement in Yehud of a number of descendants of Judeans deported to Mesopotamia, internal relations between the population changed. The biblical sources express the position of this particular group, which appeared in Yehud with the Persian era, and identified with the new order and new institutions.

1 Sabbatical Year Legislation

In the Hebrew Bible there are laws regulating many different aspects of life. Some of these are the regulations concerning the so-called Sabbatical Year. The Scriptures state:

Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow so that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard and with your olive orchard. (Exod. 23:10–11; here and below quotation from NRSV)

When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in their yield, but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land, a Sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. You may eat what the land yields during its Sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound laborers who live with you, for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food. (Lev. 25:2–7)

Philippe Guillaume recently proposed an interpretation of the economic significance of the Sabbatical Year legislation.

A total ban on sowing for the entire population of the province makes little sense if the aim is to stockpile food in anticipation of a major military campaign in the coming years, unless the ban resulted in a major increase of arable land ready to be sown in the following years. The arrival of new settlers could be coordinated with the prescriptions of the so-called sabbatical year. As is clear from Lev 25:4, the Sabbath of the seventh year was a Sabbath for the land, not for the farmers. (Guillaume 2015: 141)

Guillaume is undoubtedly correct that the total cessation of agricultural production for an entire year, once every seven years, is difficult to imagine in economic terms, let alone in fiscal terms. But the explanation he gives, namely that the peasants devoted this year to the clearing of wasteland to be used as plots for newcomers, is not without its drawbacks. First, it presupposes the close coordination of agricultural work in the province with the migration of labour; secondly, it operates on the assumption that peasants who were, after all, free could be used for work unrelated to their own farm, and this on an annual basis every seven years. Due to the serious flaws in Guillaume’s argument, it is necessary to find a different explanation for the role of the Sabbatical Year.

We may venture the hypothesis that the biblical legislation about the Sabbatical Year did not apply to plots of land belonging to the peasants. For it is difficult to imagine an authority that could effectively prohibit peasants from working on their own fields for their own economic gain. Was it perhaps the case, then, that the Torah’s Sabbatical Year regulations—expressing the views of the Temple elite—applied only to a particular type of land? Was this perhaps a provision whereby people obliged to work as serfs on land that was not their own were exempt from this work once every seven years? If so, it is conceivable that the elite who wrote down the biblical laws included a restriction on the use of corvée labour by free peasants, and that the land to which these restrictions applied was their own property.

Following this line of reasoning, one could imagine the Sabbatical Year as a privilege, enforced once every seven years, to exempt peasants from performing corvée labour on land belonging to the temple, i.e. on land belonging to the God. This regulation, if understood in this way, would be much more in keeping with the realities of local agriculture and would constitute a law enacted by the landowners, who, like the king, are assured of corvée labour and, by way of grace, exempt the peasants from one-seventh of this obligation, on a seven-year basis. As Guillaume claims, the Sabbatical Year is not a year of rest for the people, but a year when the land is to rest (Lev. 25:4); not all of the land in the province was accorded the Sabbatical Year, however, but instead just a particular part of it—most probably the temple estate. I would argue that it was the land belonging to the Temple that could be left as fallow every seven years, which did not compromise the financial basis of the institution, but gave relief to the ordinary peasants. Such an explanation would allow us to connect the law of Sabbath for the land with the interpretation of Sabbath for the people. Rest once every seven years applied to people obliged to do serfdom work on land belonging to God and administered by the temple.

The recognition that the biblical legislation concerning the Sabbatical Year originally applied only to Temple land also allows for a new explanation of the regulations contained in Deuteronomy 15. This chapter refers to the Sabbatical Year as an occasion for the enforced cancellation of debts:

Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but you must remit your claim on whatever any member of your community owes you. (Deut. 15:1–3)

There is so much scholarly literature on this subject that it is impossible to review all of the perspectives in detail here. Suffice it to say that it is difficult to accept the argument that creditors were forced to bear the costs of a top-down debt relief scheme. It would not fit the pragmatics of economic life. People generally need a valid reason for renouncing income due to them. The existence of the declarative biblical law was probably hardly sufficient in this regard. However, if we accept the view that the authors of the biblical laws had themselves in mind when they wrote about the obligation to forgive debts, then things look quite different. It would therefore be a provision whereby the creditor, i.e. the Temple, systematically forgave the debts of its faithful. Such a credit-relief policy would make sense, since only free, prosperous and working farmers brought offerings to the temple, whereas people sold into slavery and deprived of their possessions did not.

The importance of freeing ordinary residents of their debts and especially from debt bondage can be seen clearly in Nehemiah.

Now there was a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish kin. For there were those who said, “With our sons and our daughters, we are many; we must get grain, so that we may eat and stay alive.” There were also those who said, “We are having to pledge our fields, our vineyards, and our houses in order to get grain during the famine.” And there were those who said, “We are having to borrow money on our fields and vineyards to pay the king’s tax. Now our flesh is the same as that of our kindred; our children are the same as their children; and yet we are forcing our sons and daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been ravished; we are powerless, and our fields and vineyards now belong to others.” I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these complaints. After thinking it over, I contended with the nobles and the officials; I said to them, “You are all taking interest from your own people.” And I called a great assembly to deal with them and said to them, “As far as we were able, we have bought back our Jewish kindred who had been sold to other nations, but now you are selling your own kin, who must then be bought back by us!” They were silent and could not find a word to say. So I said, “The thing that you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God, to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us stop this taking of interest. Restore to them, this very day, their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the interest on money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them.” Then they said, “We will restore everything and demand nothing more from them. We will do as you say.” And I called the priests and made them take an oath to do as they had promised. I also shook out the fold of my garment and said, “So may God shake out everyone from house and from property who does not perform this promise. Thus may they be shaken out and emptied.” And all the assembly said, “Amen,” and praised the Lord. And the people did as they had promised. (Neh. 5:1–13)

In this passage, representatives of the local elite are blamed for the callous enforcement of debt obligations of ordinary residents in the province of Yehud. The enforcement of debt obligations is a phenomenon that is well known in many parts of the ancient world. There is no reason to believe that analogous debt obligations did not also arise in the relationship between the Temple and ordinary residents. And it was these obligations that were primarily addressed by the biblical laws imposing certain restrictions on the administrators of Temple property.

Another argument for considering that the Torah legislation concerned mainly the Temple property is provided by the first-born provisions. The first-born animals seem to have been directed not at the entire community of Yehud’s inhabitants, but at the Temple and its property.

Every firstling male born of your herd and flock you shall consecrate to the Lord your God; you shall not do work with your firstling ox nor shear the firstling of your flock. You shall eat it, you together with your household, in the presence of the Lord your God year by year at the place that the Lord will choose. But if it has any defect—any serious defect, such as lameness or blindness—you shall not sacrifice it to the Lord your God; within your towns you may eat it, the unclean and the clean alike, as you would a gazelle or deer. Its blood, however, you must not eat; you shall pour it out on the ground like water. (Deut. 15:19–23)

The traditional explanation that this law was imposed on all inhabitants is problematic for several reasons. Because of their piety and desire to obey biblical regulations, the keepers of livestock were expected to sacrifice every first-born animal. Such piety would have been very costly. Therefore, instead of interpreting this provision as an obsolete and utopian postulate, one can apply the same principle as before: that the addressees of these biblical norms were not originally all Israelites (Judahites), but only the community in charge of the temple. Thus, only the first-born animals from the temple herds would be sacrificed, and they would be eaten not only by the priests but also by the faithful—“within your towns you may eat it, the unclean and the clean alike”. Such a regulation would be an act of charity of the temple towards the inhabitants of the region. It would also form part of the local patronage system of prestige-building and social standing established by the Temple—a wealthy institution that gains prestige by feeding people.

My interpretation of the very purpose of Sabbatical Year legislation is not without its weaknesses. First, one would have to conclude that this understanding of the provision had sunk into the minds of the authors and editors of the Torah. For there is no doubt that some of the biblical laws point to the Sabbatical Year as an institution binding on everyone and concerning their own parcels of land. This would therefore be a situation in which the legislation by which the temple elite exempted peasants from serfdom on the temple land came from the period of the early redaction of the Torah, and in a later period such an economic phenomenon no longer existed. This could therefore mean that, for example, in the early Persian period, say until the mid-fifth century, the temple had a certain acreage for which provisions for a seven-year exemption of peasant labour were introduced, and later, the importance of this temple land—for some reason—declined. Another interpretation is theoretically possible, according to which the original layer of biblical legislation did not provide for the existence of the temple land, and only later were provisions added which built on the economic practice in which the temple land played a significant role. Such an explanation could be accepted if the only Torah regulation from which the existence of temple estate could be derived was Leviticus 27, treated by many commentators as a later appendix (Milgrom 2001: 2407). However, since the argument also relies on other biblical laws, this explanation is difficult to accept.

These doubts, however, can also be dismissed if it is assumed that the biblical legislation which refers to “thy field, thy vineyard” (e.g., Lev. 25:4) does not refer to the entire territory of the province of Yehud and all the land promised to Israel, but specifically to the temple estate. This would mean that the laws in Leviticus, or the Holiness Code, do not only apply to worship, but also to temple property.

Secondly, it needs to be asked why the text does not openly mention that it is not the whole land of Israel, but only a particular type of land in this territory. There is a straightforward explanation for this: legal provisions frequently omit some of the most obvious points because these are treated as self-evident. It is conceivable that the legislation originally referred only to the land of the temple so there was no need to indicate this fact in the legislation since it was contained in the legislation itself ex definitione.

2 Did Jerusalem Temple Possess Land?

Joel Weinberg, one of the most important scholars of the socio-economic history of the province of Yehud, claims (Weinberg 1992: 103–104):

All citizen-temple communities of the Achaemenid period can be divided into three groups:

Al. Those communities whose temples were de facto owners of the land. The temples partly leased this land to community members, and partly organized their own economies (Uruk, Sippar, Comana).

A2. Those communities whose temples were de facto owners of the land but who did not organize their own economies and left all the temple-land for the use of the community members (Mylasa-Olymos and others).

B. Those communities whose temples did not own land nor operate their own economy. A typical representative of this group was the Jerusalem citizen-temple community.

In asserting the above, Weinberg concluded that the Jerusalem temple and the priests had no land of their own, and that their only sources of income were tributes paid to them, taxes and offerings made by the rural dwellers, who made up 95% of the population and also owned all of the land in the province (Weinberg 1992: 49–61; cf. Carter 1999: 46–48). In fact, since the publication of Weinberg’s work, the matter of the structure of land ownership and the possibility of the existence of temple land in the province of Yehud during the Persian period has been a relatively neglected topic.

Our knowledge of the land ownership system in Palestine is limited, and any reconstruction of the system must be mainly circumstantial and on the basis of analogies from other regions. It is worth starting with the realities of sixth century BCE Mesopotamia:

Small private properties had virtually disappeared and even the large properties belonging to royal functionaries ceased to be an important element of the agricultural landscape of Babylonia. Instead, the large temple and palace estates dominated the area and were the main employers of the farming population. Alongside slaves and paid farmers, there were deportees (from the ones brought by the Assyrians to more recent ones), debt slaves and the new class of unfree serfs bound to the temple (širku). All these people worked on lands that they did not own and were ruled by a class of temple and palace ‘administrators’ (šatammu and other lower categories), who did not own the land either, but managed it on behalf of the temple and the palace. (Liverani 2013: 547; cf. Briant 2002: 72. For a general view see: Boer 2015; Jursa 2010; 2015; Waerzeggers 2011)

In the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods, the rulers certainly took advantage of the wealth of the temples in Mesopotamia, which, as economic and productive enterprises, provided liquidity so that the rulers could count on a steady flow of finances (Dandamayev 2006; Briant 2002: 73–74). It can therefore be assumed that, although Persian rulers were accused of hostile behaviours to the temples, these may have been limited to imposing tribute, i.e. tax (Briant 2002: 57–59, 862) on them without seizing their properties (Wunsch 2021; Cf. also on more general view: Robertson 1995; Briant 2002: 458; Kleber 2021).

Based on these premises, a question can be raised regarding the realities of the province of Yehud of the Persian period: what was the land ownership system in the province of Yehud in the fifth–fourth centuries BCE, and did the Jerusalem temple own/possess any land property? What follows is intended to address this issue.

The region of what would eventually constitute the province of Yehud entered the Persian period after the very severe destruction by the Babylonians, resulting in depopulation. Solely the region north of Jerusalem, associated with the territory of Benjamin, was more densely populated (Lipschits 2006: esp. 26–29). Given the decline in population compared to the end of the seventh century, throughout the Persian period the province suffered from a labour shortage with opportunities to expand agricultural land (Guillaume 2015; cf. Lipschits 2015).

Small agricultural settlements appeared during the Persian period. Their origins and circumstances of their establishment are interpreted in different ways (Faust 2018; Kletter and Silverman 2021; cf. Fried 2015), but certainly indicate a slow increase in the number of small-scale rural settlements. However, we know nothing about the ownership structure of the land cultivated there (on the economic aspects of land ownership and use in Palestine cf. esp. Guillaume 2016).

There is evidence from other areas of the Persian empire clearly indicating that at least some of the most attractive land was owned by the king. Royal land was generally given on tenancy. The existence of royal land in the area of the province of Yehud in the Persian period can only be hypothesised, although analogies from Mesopotamia, Idumea and other places provide a strong argument for its existence (Edelman 2015: 185–199; “It is also agreed, however, that the best portions of land belonged to the king, the temples, and the business houses, military elite, and civil servants of the royal and temple administration” p. 186).

There is no doubt that some of the land belonged to wealthy owners, the local aristocracy (Lipschits 2006: 30, 40; Fried 2006). Undoubtedly this group was not homogeneous. It can be assumed that a substantial part of this wealthy land-owning aristocracy were Persian officials (Fried 2006: 134–141). Probably such aristocrats with large land holdings were members of the Tobiad family (Mazar 1957; Edelman 2022).

According to Weinberg’s model—which is generally accepted by scholars—the majority of cultivated land was in the hands of individual peasants, forming small communities responsible for cultivating it and providing taxes in the form of tribute (Weinberg 1992: 49–74; Levine 1996: 228–229). But it seems doubtful that the offerings, tithes and other dues paid to the temple by the faithful were sufficient for the Jerusalem temple to fulfil all of its tasks. In other words, it seems doubtful that the list of the temple’s revenues as written, for example, in Deut. 12:6 (“bringing there your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your donations, your votive gifts, your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks”) met the needs of the institution that was the temple in the Persian period.

In addition to the existence of an effective temple land system in other regions of the empire (Weinberg’s model A1: where temples were de facto owners of the land; and model A2: where temples were de facto owners of the land but did not organize their own economies), which could have served as a model for the land tenure system in Yehud, it must be remembered that as a result of depopulation there was a great deal of “free” land in the province, which was certainly not owned by the farmers. Taking this into account, one may ask whether a model of temple estates could have also existed in the province of Yehud during the Persian era.

Any attempt to answer this question—in the absence of other primary sources—must be based on a critical assessment of the biblical data available to us. The biblical texts make no mention of land ownership/possession by the temple. This is mainly due to the fact that these texts were placed at a time when the temple could not have been the owner of the land—in the mythical times of the Pentateuch narratives, it had not even been built yet, and in the times of the monarchy it would have been anachronistic to attribute ownership to it, given the authority of the kings. Nevertheless, the lack of explicit information about the status of land in the Persian period when the temple—as an institution—could have owned land may seem surprising. As such, the question whether temple did own land properties is particularly puzzling.

The argument for the possible existence of temple property is based on the assumption that in the early Persian period, there existed land in Judah that did not belong to ordinary farmers, families, clans or village organisations. The land in question was land that had been formerly owned by the king in the era of the Judahite monarchy, and perhaps also in Neo-Babylonian times. Assuming that such royal land existed in the time of the monarchy (Lipschits 2024: 320), there are two ways of managing land ownership. The first model envisages a scenario where the king had his royal lands and the rest of the land was privately owned by his subjects. The second model, meanwhile, envisages a scenario where the king owned all the land within his dominion, which he granted to his subjects on the basis of permanent or time-bound endowments. Given the economy of the region, and the role of small agriculture farmers, I lean more towards the first of these scenarios. However, whichever model of land ownership was adopted in Judah before the Babylonian Captivity, it is clear that at least part of the land did belong to the king. So the question presents itself: what happened to this royal land after the end of the monarchy? It is possible that it was by definition the property of the government, regardless of its origins, and so the domain of the kings of Judah may have passed to the rulers of Babylon, acting through their officials, and then to the kings of Persia. Officials, in the name of the king, were managing land directly, or were leasing it to tenants. The last model is well known from Mesopotamia and probably offers a good analogy here (Wunsch 2021).

Ernst Axel Knauf has drawn attention to the importance of land ownership exercised in the name of God, as a continuation of land ownership by the kings of Judah:

Yhwh did not inherit Israel’s land from the kings of Canaan in the Early Iron Age (pace Albertz, Gottwald, and others), but from the kings of Israel and Judah. The “Torah revolution,” in the case of land ownership, served several purposes—and met the needs of the time. Now, ownership of the land had become a topic of bitter controversy. There was the dispute on ownership between the disowned descendants of the deportees of 597, 586, and 582, and those who had profited at their expense (of course, there were also disputes between, e.g., the descendants of the 597 group and the 586 group). By the 5th century, the economy was partially monetarily based. Now there was the possibility of exchanging land for money on a larger scale, but also the threat of losing one’s land because of tax debt. Claiming land-ownership for God was a way, for the Second Temple, to save a piece from the estate of the late Israelite and Judahite kingdoms for its own coffers (otherwise, the rights of succession would have fallen to Persia). By inhibiting the latifundalization of Yehud, the priestly aristocracy could try to prevent the emergence of a competing landed aristocracy (the Temple lost that fight in the second half of the 3rd century when tax farming opened the way to wealth and power to non-priestly families). (Knauf 2011: 191)

However, it is not clear at all from Knauf’s argument whether he is thinking about the ownership of former royal lands by individual priests, or rather their families, or whether he is thinking of temple property. It is this distinction that complicates our reconstruction. For we see legislation indicating the existence of ownership by individual priests or entire priestly families and Levites (Wilson 2024). We see the economic functions of the temple as an institution, while there are no explicit references to the fact that the temple as an institution owned some property, including, in particular, land. There is, of course, a temptation to conclude that, where land ownership by the priests is mentioned, the authors mean ownership by the temple. However, this assumption cannot be made a priori. For the sake of greater clarity of argument, I will now consider the distinction between ownership of land by the priests and ownership of land by the temple as an institution.

…

Before attempting to answer the question whether Jerusalem temple did own/possess land, it is worth noting the law that implicitly indicates that there was a certain category of goods ascribed to the God administered through the temple. Such a law refers, first of all, to the provisions on first-fruits (e.g., Deut. 15:19–23). Since everything firstborn is to be offered to the Lord, how is the fate of the firstborn of unclean animals to be imagined? In particular, what happened to the first-born of unclean animals whose owner was unwilling or unable to redeem them (cf. Exod. 13:12–13)? Here is the prescription, also from Leviticus 27:

If it concerns an animal that may be brought as an offering to the Lord, any such that may be given to the Lord shall be holy. Another shall not be exchanged or substituted for it, either good for bad or bad for good; and if one animal is substituted for another, both that one and its substitute shall be holy. If it concerns any unclean animal that may not be brought as an offering to the Lord, the animal shall be presented before the priest. The priest shall assess it: whether good or bad, according to the assessment of the priest, so it shall be. But if it is to be redeemed, one-fifth must be added to the assessment. (Lev. 27:9–13)

This regulation states that the priest was to estimate the value of the unclean animal and the person offering the sacrifice was to pay the temple (?)/priest (?) the indicated value plus 20%. However, even if someone actually wanted to follow this rule, what is the probability that, having no money, he would go into debt to cover this fifth of the value of the sacrifice? Can it be imagined that an unclean animal, instead of being replaced by a substitute sacrifice, became the property of the temple? If, for example, donkeys or camels were involved, would the temple have been willing to accept ownership of such animals? Some scholars, including Jacob Milgrom, argue that despite their uncleanness, such animals became the property of the temple and augmented the stock of movable goods used for its maintenance:

Levine (1989) presumes that from the outset the offerer meant to contribute only its monetary value. Not necessarily. The offerer intended the animal (e.g., a donkey) for sanctuary maintenance. (Milgrom 2001: 2378)

If we therefore—following Milgrom—agree that the temple may have had its own animals, the question arises as to where they were kept, and from where the resources for their maintenance and breeding were drawn. Did gifts to the temple and portions of the offerings given to the temple guarantee sufficient resources? The evidence suggests that this is unlikely.

The most direct reference to the temple’s ability to own land can be found in Leviticus 27:

If a person consecrates to the Lord any inherited landholding, its assessment shall be in accordance with its seed requirements: fifty shekels of silver to a homer of barley seed. If the person consecrates the field as of the year of Jubilee, that assessment shall stand, but if the field is consecrated after the Jubilee, the priest shall compute the price for it according to the years that remain until the year of Jubilee, and the assessment shall be reduced. And if the one who consecrates the field wishes to redeem it, then one-fifth shall be added to its assessed value, and it shall revert to the original owner, but if the field is not redeemed or if it has been sold to someone else, it shall no longer be redeemable. But when the field is released in the Jubilee, it shall be holy to the Lord as a devoted field; it becomes the priest’s holding. If someone consecrates to the Lord a field that has been purchased that is not a part of the inherited landholding, the priest shall compute for it the proportionate assessment up to the year of Jubilee, and the assessment shall be paid as of that day, a sacred donation to the Lord. In the year of Jubilee the field shall return to the one from whom it was bought, whose holding the land is. All assessments shall be by the sanctuary shekel: twenty gerahs shall make a shekel. (Lev. 27:16–25)

The interpretation of this passage poses some difficulties. First, it is not clear what legal situation is referred to by the verb ‘to consecrate’ (qdš) used here. Secondly, the temporary endowment of the land to the priest does not seem to constitute possession or ownership, although it certainly implies the usage (disposal) of the land. Thirdly, the passage clearly refers to giving the land ‘to the priest’ (v. 21), or ‘to the Lord’ (v. 16), rather than to the temple, which creates an additional aspect requiring explanation. It is not clear whether granting land for use to a priest should be considered as a transfer to a person or whether it should be regarded as equivalent to a transfer to an institution.

However, there is no doubt that this passage indicates the existence of a legal framework under which landowners could temporarily transfer land to priests. This probably happened as part of a settling of accounts between landowners and creditors—whether institutions or individuals. Indeed, the temporary handing over of land to another entity seems to constitute a transfer of a certain debt, which was charged to the landowners by virtue of their tax obligations, arising from debts, or obligations of a different nature. Nowhere here, however, is it openly stated that the temple, as an institution, was the holder of the land thus ‘acquired’, although this is highly probable (cf. Lipschits 2024; who argues that until the end of the Persian period Jerusalem did not play a major role in the economic life of the province).

As we have seen, Weinberg claimed that the priests did not own the land outright (Weinberg 1992: 49–61; cf. Carter 1999: 46–48). Support for such a claim can be found in the Torah’s stipulations that the priests and Levites would be deprived of their share of the land, as in the following instance:

Then the Lord said to Aaron: You shall have no allotment in their land, nor shall you have any share among them; I am your share and your possession among the Israelites. (Num. 18:20)

However, there are biblical laws contradicting Weinberg’s suggestion. This is especially true of Leviticus 27:16–21, quoted above. The text openly indicates that there was a category of land which, under certain circumstances, became the property of priests, by way of consecration. This happened in spite of the explicit biblical rules depriving the priests of land ownership. Of course, it should not be assumed that all the biblical laws were always enforced. Nor can it be ruled out that the regulations cited here come from a different time and therefore reflect different historical realities (Levine 1996 argues that Lev. 25 and 27 should be dated to the Persian period. Cf. Rhyder, 2019: 36–66, who argues that the Holiness Code should be dated to the post-exilic era. At the same time, it is possible that chapt. 27 was added even later).

The question remains, however, whether the land referred to in Leviticus 27:16–21 became the property of individual priests or of the temple as an institution.

The rabbis constantly distinguish between priestly and sanctuary entitlements: consecrations may be specified to one or the other. Perhaps this was the practice at the end of the Second Temple period. However, there seems to be no such distinction in the priestly laws of the Bible: for all purposes, priesthood and sanctuary were one and the same. (Milgrom 2001: 2386)

Perhaps the key to explaining the discrepancy that Milgrom highlights here is the distinction between the land of the temple as an institution, and the priests as individuals. The temple as an institution may have owned land, but the Levite priests—just like ordinary landowners—did not. According to Jacob Milgrom, commenting on Leviticus 27:

how could any tenured field belong to a priest, when Scripture repeatedly forbids it (e.g., Num. 18:20a; Ezek. 44:28b)? The answer, of course, is that the field belongs to the sanctuary, but the priest may benefit from its produce. (Milgrom 2001: 2386)

There is another reference in the Torah that may suggest the existence of Levites’ landed properties:

If a Levite leaves any of your towns, from wherever he has been residing in Israel, and comes to the place that the Lord will choose (and he may come whenever he wishes), then he may minister in the name of the Lord his God, like all his fellow-Levites who stand to minister there before the Lord. They shall have equal portions to eat, even though they have income from the sale of family possessions. (Deut. 18:6–8)¹

How is the term “family possessions” in v. 8 to be understood in relation to the Levites, or to the Levite priests mentioned in v. 1? The text seems to suggest here that the Levites may have possessed hereditary property, analogous to ordinary residents (cf. Wilson 2024: 73–76). There is, however, no indication here that such possessions were temple estates.

Leviticus 6:20–23 outlines the rules for food offerings made on the occasion of the anointment of a priest (cf. also the rams sacrificed in Lev. 8):

This is the offering that Aaron and his sons shall offer to the Lord on the day when he is anointed: one-tenth of an ephah of choice flour as a regular offering, half of it in the morning and half in the evening. It shall be made with oil on a griddle; you shall bring it well soaked, as a grain offering of baked pieces, and you shall present it as a pleasing odor to the Lord. And so the priest, anointed from among Aaron’s descendants as a successor, shall prepare it; it is the Lord’s—a perpetual due—to be turned entirely into smoke. Every grain offering of a priest shall be wholly burned; it shall not be eaten. (Lev. 6:20–23)

This raises the question of where the grain offered by the priests came from. Was it bought by the priest, did it come from tithes from other offerings, or did it come from some property managed by the priests? Where did the sacrificial animals offered by the priests mentioned e.g., in Lev. 9:1–14 come from? The sacrifices by the priests do not seem to have come from among the animals belonging to individual believers. If the sacrifices described in Leviticus were to be offered in the temple, it is difficult to imagine that they would have come from anywhere other than the temple’s own resources.

Similarly, the source of the birds obtained by the priests for the sacrifice at the cleansing of the houses in Lev. 14:49–53 is unknown. Although the text does not specify the point, it can nevertheless be assumed that they were supplied by the person beneficiary of the cleansing process, i.e. the owner of the house. More striking are the subsequent examples provided by Lev. 16. We do not know where the priest obtained the linen robe, which is contrasted with the priest’s own robe in Lev. 16:23–24.² Most striking, however, is the juxtaposition of the sacrificial animals on the Day of Atonement. The two goats are said to come from the people, whereas the source of the bull sacrificed for the priest’s sins is not indicated:

He shall take from the congregation of the people of Israel two male goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself, and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. (Lev. 16:5–6)

The existence of certain assets belonging to the temple can be deduced also from other laws, or rather the lack of them. It goes without saying that every temple needs resources to function. The main sources of these resources are, of course, offerings from the faithful (some of which went in the form of smoke to the deity, and some of which remained the responsibility of the temple staff) and gifts from the aristocrats and monarchs. In the case of the biblical legislation, and therefore of the Jerusalem temple, the income also consists of additional obligations in the form of tithes and other voluntary and compulsory services from the faithful. The question that arises here, however, is whether a central place of worship, even in the small and sparsely populated province of Yehud, could function with all its priestly personnel solely on the basis of these revenues, offered to God (i.e. temple). The biblical laws do not mention where the oil and wood needed for each sacrifice came from. We do not know where the priests were supposed to get the funds for their robes, or the items needed for worship, such as knives and musical instruments. Did the voluntary offerings of ordinary people and the gifts of monarchs, which could never be certain, meet the budgetary needs of the temple? The evidence suggests that this is unlikely.

At the same time, it is probably no coincidence that the Torah regulations make no mention of the source of the wood used in the temple, and in Nehemiah’s time it became important to determine who would provide the necessary wood:

We have also cast lots among the priests, the Levites, and the people, for the wood offering, to bring it into the house of our God, by ancestral houses, at appointed times, year by year, to burn on the altar of the Lord our God, as it is written in the law. (Neh. 10:34)

Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign, and I established the duties of the priests and Levites, each in his work; and I provided for the wood offering, at appointed times, and for the first fruits. Remember me, O my God, for good. (Neh. 13:30–31)

Conclusions

Taking all of these points into consideration, I would like to propose that in the earliest stage of rebuilding/reestablishing the Judean community after the Babylonian exile, probably still in the times of Cyrus or Cambyses, the Persian overlords granted part of the former royal lands in the province to the temple. This endowment was accompanied by service obligations, which—as in the rest of the Persian empire—consisted of both the payment of taxes (hence the emphasis on tithing in the biblical regulations) and the transfer of obligations in-kind, which was particularly important in a region through which numerous Persian armies marched to Egypt. It is possible that at some point the importance of the temple as an institution responsible for tax collection declined in favour of the authority of the governor, whose seat was in Ramat Rachel (Lipschits 2006). It is difficult to be certain here whether this occurred already in the early fifth century or, for example, in times of the governor Nehemiah (cf. Edelman 2005). Some of the biblical legislation therefore dates from the period when the temple’s role was already crucial as an economic and fiscal centre, and some from the period when this function was taken over by the governor (Lipschits 2024).

It is probably only the disposition of financial resources, and therefore the existence of the temple as an economic centre on which the functioning of the local population depended (because, for example, in such a place they could obtain credit) that explains the prestige enjoyed by priests in the early Persian period (Niesiołowski-Spanò 2019–2020). The importance of the priest Joshua in the book of Zechariah, alongside the “royal” figure of Zerubbabel, is more easily explained if we consider that he may have been one of the most influential men in the region, responsible for tax collection, grain storage and redistribution, and suchlike. How else can we explain the role that priests acquired, for example, in the Persian-period judicial system (of the kind described in the Torah), if not by recognizing that they constituted the financial elite of the province? Since they did not have a right to hereditary land ownership, they must have had other sources of income and wealth that provided them with prestige, prosperity and high social status. Only material wealth allowed priests to gain the role of an intellectual elite over time. This process took place in a different way than is sometimes assumed: the priests first gained funds as managers of temple property, and only later took the highest positions in local society, among others as the intellectual elite. This was possible thanks to the property that was granted to the temple at the beginning of the Persian period and that remained one of the fundamental sources of funding for the priestly personnel throughout this time.

Against this background, the biblical regulation of the Sabbatical Year can be better understood. Once every seven years, the priests exempted the local population from the obligation to work the land belonging to the temple. It was thus a law based on a rational system of land tenure, including the exemption of the subordinate population from forced labour on that land. The analogy is with the provision for the cancellation of debts, which makes sense only if the legislator is also a generous debt forgiver. Such exemptions are both an economic and a political move: by exempting people from work or offering debt forgiveness, the temple—much like benign and generous rulers—built up its image/reputation as a benevolent institution, caring for its subjects. Therefore, these were not only economic measures, but also a political ones.