In addressing the problem of the “economics of worship” in ancient societies it is advisable first to ascertain on what area of “worship” we should focus our investigation. And while one could indeed attempt to explore the economics of, say, the practices of family religion in ancient Israel and Judah, this does not seem to contribute much to deepening our understanding of the economics of worship generally—not because family religion was not representative of the overall practice of religion in that part of the world, but because, due to its very nature, it did not produce hubs of economic activity and therefore gives us no decisive insights into the correlation between economic and religious practices. By contrast, temples are indeed such hubs; this is true today and was no less true of ancient Israel and Judah. In fact, it was probably more obvious then than it is now that temples hosted economic transactions of various kinds and that some of them were veritable economic hubs of huge significance for the whole of the social formation that had brought them forth. This is why, in the following pages, we shall concentrate on them.
Biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts do not obfuscate the central significance of the economic basis and the economic consequences of cultic activity; on the contrary, they address them without any qualms. Rather, it is modern religious obsessions of the biblicist and fundamentalist variety that blind some scholars’ eyes to the undeniable and overwhelming economic importance of the pre-exilic temples of ancient Israel and Judah and of the post-exilic Jerusalem temple. It is the same obsessions that blind scholars’ and “lay” readers’ eyes to the fact that the same economic and social factors that drove the economic activities of temples and other places of worship also drove the development of the societies and states in which those places of cultic activity were situated, as well as the forms of religion through which those societies expressed themselves. Therefore ancient Israelite and Judahite cultic worship is just one of many areas of societal practice, an area that cannot be understood without exploring it in its interaction with other such areas of practice and without understanding the economic basis of the society that was at work.
Religious and economic texts from the ancient Near East provide us with ample evidence of the economic activities of temples. To name one example: the temple and palace economies of lower Mesopotamia are examples of social formations generating economic systems that centered on preeminent places of cultic worship and of royal administration: “the arable land, the basis for nearly all economic activities in lower Mesopotamia, was nearly exclusively owned by these two institutions, temple and palace” (Renger 1979, 250).1 From the Old Babylonian period—more precisely: from the beginning of the second millennium bce—onwards, however, private ownership of land became more and more widespread and entered an interaction with the two traditional, institutional land-owners.
At closer inspection, though, it becomes clear “that private ownership, in the definition of Roman Law, was negligeable [sic] if not almost nonexistent in the South [of Mesopotamia]” (Renger 1979, 251). In the North, things were different, but it is impossible to ascertain “how large a part of the available fields was owned by individuals, and how much was held by the palace or the temples” (Renger 1979, 251). It is therefore impossible “to state that private enterprise, based on ownership of the fields, is the hallmark of the Old Babylonian period” (Renger 1979, 251). While there must have been some interaction between private and institutional forms of landownership, the decisive “players” were the temple and the palace, and the “main economic activities of temple and palace households were cereal agriculture, date palm cultivation and animal husbandry. Based on these resources was a large scale manufacturing of goods, most important among which was the manufacturing of textiles. In addition, we have to consider the role of the palace in collecting, distributing or exchanging goods. These activities were to a large degree the responsibility of the tamkārum, a term we customarily translate as merchant” (Renger 1979, 252).
Much of the available land owned by the palace household was rented out to farmers who lived at subsistence level and to wealthy entrepreneurs from the city (who amassed fortunes; see Renger 1979, 253–254), a practice which—as J. Renger points out (Renger 1979, 253)—is possibly described in the story of Jacob and Laban (Genesis 29–31).
How, then, did Mesopotamian temple economies go about their work? Caring for and feeding the gods—and the priests!—required the reallocation—or, more bluntly speaking: the extraction—of agricultural produce. We are here concentrating on the main economic activities of the temples. Their work was, of course, not restricted to the activities just mentioned (Renger 1979, 254).
On what ideological basis could temple estates in Mesopotamia extract huge amounts of agricultural surplus without encountering resistance from those who were thus exploited? As regards the surplus,
[i]ts recipients— the various priests and their offsiders—do no productive work of their own, so they need others to do so. Yet the recipients of that produce justify such extraction through increasingly elaborate theological systems that assert the supreme importance of their activities for the welfare of the whole community. The viability of agricultural produce, of the river’s rising or the rain’s falling, of the avoidance of pests and invasions, of the staying of disease—all such rely upon the goodwill of capricious gods. They must be appeased to keep the system running, with sacrifices offered to the gods instituted as a primary task. The ingenuity of such an ideology is that it is couched in allocative terms: the tithe is therefore a reallocation of produce to the most important locus: the temple and its workers. The priests do the most vital work of all, so they are exempt from usual labor so they can devote their lives to a higher calling. Everyone else is to pitch in and provide produce. The complex system of festivals, seasons, and cycles attempts to include more and more within the orbit of priestcraft. (Boer: 142)
One of the main instruments of extraction was the afore-mentioned tithe, which in Babylonia was taken from all those who owned property or were in receipt of any other income (Dandamaev and Lukonin 1989, 361–362). The tithe was also central to the operation of the Israelite and Judahite temple households, as we shall see later.
In addition to their activities in agriculture and animal husbandry, temples were also centers of metallurgical work and produced money-objects and, later, the supreme money-object: coinage. So it is not just the contributions of important ancient Near Eastern temples across several languages, cultures, and religions to the economic activities and achievements generally that we need to be aware of but, more specifically, their contribution to the history of the rise of money. As we shall see soon, that rise would not have been possible without the metallurgical facilities and activities just mentioned.
B. Laum and, following him, R. Seaford point to the cults of ancient Greece as the originators of the rise of money (Laum: passim; Seaford: 37–45). Laum traces the origins of money to cultic activity, sees money as a product of the sphere of sacred law, and assumes that its payment function is older than its exchange function. He furthermore assumes that its function as a measurement of value can also be traced back to cultic activity, by means of which he also explains its “symbolizing” qualities, and he identifies “the state,” qua its being the patron of “the cult,” as the “creator” of money (Laum: 158–159). However, it needs to be stressed that the rise of money is not identical with the rise of coinage. According to Marx’s classic definition, money is “the common form into which all commodities as exchange values are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity” (Marx: 165)—and “[a]t the beginning, that commodity will serve as money […] which is most frequently exchanged and circulated as an object of consumption, and which is therefore most certain to be exchangeable again for other commodities, i.e. […] which possesses a particular use value”: Marx gives “salt, hides, cattle, slaves” (Marx: 165–166) as examples. Later, but still before the invention of coinage, money typically existed in the shape and form of “money-objects” made from precious metals: hacksilver, ingots, coils, etc. (Powell: passim). Temples played a significant, indeed central role in the production of such money-objects, all the way from coils and ingots to coinage. However, there was one essential difference between the earlier kinds of money-objects and the supreme form of money-object, coinage: using precious metals like silver in the form of hacksilver or ingots required that “at each transaction they [i.e., the precious metals] had to be weighed and cut or melted and tested for their metallic purity; in short, they had to be treated in accordance with their physical nature” (Sohn-Rethel: 59). Only coinage brought about the massive facilitation of commodity exchange processes with its overwhelming effects on the history of humanity. During the whole process, from the production of the earliest, simplest money-objects to the introduction of coinage, the activities of temples were decisive, but the origins of money are to be found not in cultic activity as such, but in the rise of a more and more intricate system of value-equivalencies from commodity-exchange. The evidence of Ur III, which was not available or accessible to Laum, shows that. As Englund has demonstrated, a growing network of value equivalences arose from the labor and commodity-exchange done in the Ur III economy (Englund: passim).
Even this quick sketch alerts us to the fact that temples played, both in Western Asia and in the Eastern Mediterranean, a key role in the monetization of the economy of the ancient world, and thus in its utter transformation. The temple economies of ancient Israel and Judah were not untypical of that transformation: like the temple economies of other social formations, they underwent a process that led from the unfolding of a more and more intricate net of value-equivalences to the rise of the universal equivalent, money, and its most ingenious expression, coinage.
But while that general development of the unfolding of a system of value-equivalences is a consequence of the increasing division of labor within the afore-mentioned temple and palace economies and of the growth of long-distance trade,2 we need to differentiate between the conditions under which these economies operated and the social formations they generated. The climate and the agricultural conditions of Israel and Judah were unlike those of the Mesopotamian plains and quite similar to those of Greece: highly varied, reaching from coastal areas to hill country, but also comprising some highly fertile areas, like the Shephelah. Unsurprisingly, many parallels between the history of economies and social formations in parts of Greece and those of Israel and Judah can be identified, as we shall see in the following overview of the history of the “economics of worship” in ancient Israel and Judah.
It is hard to say whether in Israel and Judah much of the land owned by the temple or palace households was rented out to farmers living at subsistence level, on the one hand, and to wealthy entrepreneurs, on the other (Renger 1979, 253–254), but—as we already mentioned—Genesis 29–31 and other texts seem to indicate that it did.
A distinctive, but not exclusive feature of Israelite and Judahite agriculture and the legal traditions of both countries was a certain concept of communal, non-institutional ownership of land: the concept of the naḥalâ, which is best described as the inalienable property of a kinship group; cf. Num 27:7b, 1 Kgs 21:3–4, Prov 19:14. In principle, neither the temple priesthoods nor the royal household were allowed to interfere with a naḥalâ, but its owners (headed by someone like a “chief clansman”) were nevertheless in danger of losing it, either due to the sheer, unmasked greed of the ruling classes (and by that we mean the royal houses, the Israelite and Judahite equivalents of landed aristocracy, wealthy individual landowners, and the temple priesthoods) or due to the same, but “tamed” greed, devising, and operating with the help of, concepts of debt and debt-slavery as those found in, say, Exod 21:1–11 and Lev 25:23–46.
The concept of debt was a key instrument of power in the hands of the temple priesthoods, the royal household, and wealthy individual landowners and was the tool by means of which free small-time farmers were turned into debt-slaves or indentured laborers; this was an instrument of oppression that was devised early on in Mesopotamian history, by 2400 bce (Graeber: 21, 64–65). It is hard to determine the exact borderline between slave-labor and non-slave labor in the ancient Near East (Diakonoff: 1–2), but we are here talking about persons whom the economic and social circumstances, finding expression in laws that have come down to us as parts of the Bible and being enforced by the temple and state authorities of the time, forced to transition from “a class of persons sharing property rights in the means of production and partaking in the process of production in their own interests” to “a class devoid of property in means of production and taking part in the process of production in the interests of others” (Diakonoff: 3).3 They can therefore be subsumed, together with other categories of unfree laborers, under the designation of “slaves.”
In pre-exilic times, and especially from the eighth century onwards, Israel and Judah underwent a significant development of their productive forces and an ever-increasing division of labor. Under Jeroboam II of Israel (787–747 bce) and Manasseh of Judah (696–642 bce), the economies of the respective countries expanded significantly and produced significant surpluses (Faust and Weiss: 71–92), with that kind of success having the consequences typical of an ancient West Asian, pre-capitalist social formation: formerly independent farmers operating at subsistence level were now drawn into the orbit of the temple and palace economies and lost their economic independence. They rented land from the temple and palace estates and thus became dependent farmers or indentured laborers—or worse, debt slaves of those households, if adverse climatic conditions, like a succession of droughts, made it impossible for them and their social unit to subsist on the basis of their own, inherited plot of land, their naḥalâ.
This was a general trend in the history of Israel and Judah, comparable to developments in Assyria in the first millennium bce (Postgate: 104), but also to the situation in parts of Greece, where the environmental conditions and their economic and social consequences were in some respects remarkably similar to those in Israel and Judah (Thomson: 175–207). As R. S. Nam points out, a concept of inalienable patrimonial land was also known in Ugarit, where “the plots land intrinsically belongs to the patrimonial line. At some cases, the royal class could facilitate transfer, but they executed such exchange only with reparations. Similarly, the biblical law codes all testify to the inalienability of land holdings to one’s to one’s kinship group” (Nam: 143). Nam rightly refers the reader to Num 27:1–11, Lev 25:8–31 and Deut 25:5–10 (Nam: 143, n. 169). While the comparison with Ugarit is important, Nam gives an odd interpretation to the fact that the Bible contains more than just a trace of the factual vulnerability of owners of a naḥalâ even if they were not indebted to anyone. The locus classicus is, of course, the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kgs 21:1–19), and Nam tells us that “[a]lthough the passage emphasises the moral wickedness of the northern king’s house, the narrative presents a glimpse into the limits of royal redistribution” (Nam: 144). The point of the story is, however, that the king and queen are willing and able to hound down Naboth and alienate his property—which gives us a deep insight into the traditional legal framework of ancient Israel and its vulnerability in the face of economic, social and political change, in this case embodied by an economically successful, greedy royal couple.
The effects of such onslaughts against traditional legal conceptualization of inalienable property attracted the criticism of some of the prophets immortalized in the Bible, most importantly Amos. It is telling that Amos’s criticism is directed especially against the priesthood in Israel (cf. especially the conflict with “Amaziah, the [chief] priest of Bethel,” a royal temple of the northern kingdom; cf. Amos 7:8–17, especially v. 13) and against rich individuals, probably because he intends to attack them as the main representatives of the concentration of land in the hands of the temple hierarchy and wealthy individuals. Amos’s polemics are telling with regard to the fact that one of the palpable consequences of the economic success of Israel in his lifetime was the abundant cultic activity of the Israelite temples—which is precisely what he attacked. Significantly, Amos was active in the days of Jeroboam II, and he uttered his denunciations of the priests and the rich under the impression of the huge economic progress made during the reign of that king—progress that created problems for those living at subsistence level, free farmers who were now more prone than before to being drawn into the economic orbit of the temples, the palace, and rich individual landowners and were in constant danger of being reduced to the status of debt-slaves, as mentioned earlier.
Amos does not polemicize against the cult as such, but against abundant cultic activity as the consequence of exploitative practices of land accumulation and of the erosion of the traditional freedom of the small, independent farmer.
Amos paradigmatically castigated an economic and social “megatrend” which it would have been well-nigh impossible to reverse, if the ruling classes of Israel and Judah had wanted to reverse it in the first place. Neither Israel nor Judah gave birth to a Solon—unless one counts Ezra or Nehemiah, in the post-exilic period, as a counterpart of the great Athenian reformer (of which more in section 5).
The “megatrend” just mentioned, which was also operative in other West Asian and Mediterranean societies—the most famous example of successfully taking action against the detrimental effects of debt and debt-slavery being the reform introduced by Solon of Athens in c. 594 bce—went hand in hand with the more and more complex division of labor and made debt slavery an increasingly important factor in the Israelite and Judahite economies. This is reflected in numerous biblical texts from the eighth century bce onwards, starting with the so-called Covenant Code (Exod 20:22–23:19). Debt-slavery was considered a morally offensive practice by some (e.g., by Amos, if we have correctly inferred the ultimate reason for his polemics), it was a practice that suited a succession of monarchs in both Israel and Judah as well as the priesthoods of the temples of both countries.
Over the course of the time and generally in ancient Near Eastern societies, the power of rulers over temple economies in their territories increased; Israel and Judah were no exceptions, and the history of the state temples of Israel and the Jerusalem temple as the sanctuary of the Davidides illustrate the point.
The types of sacrifice in and through which those types of animals and produce were offered to the god of Israel were manifold (Rainey 1971: cols. 599–607) and need not occupy us here because it is the “stuff” of sacrifice that is of interest here, not its theological systematics.
When seen from the point or view of religion and its practice, the temples and other cultic installations of ancient Israel and Judah were, first and foremost, places of animal sacrifice, and only domesticated animals were used for sacrificial purposes. In the case of sin offerings, bulls (Lev 4:3.14), rams (Lev 5:15), goats (Lev 4:23.28), lambs (Lev 4:32) doves, and pigeons (Lev 5:7) could be offered. Non-animal sacrifices could be brought as a sin-offering in lieu of animal sacrifice, as in the case of the sacrifice of fine flour (Lev 5:11–13; Rainey: col. 600).
The meal offering consisted of a mixture of oil, fine flour, and frankincense or, if baked, were offered as unleavened cakes with oil admixed. Libation offerings used wine.
The “stuff” of sacrifice and its agricultural sources tell us about the way in which the cult is situated in the agriculture that determines it and the society that uses the cult to express itself.
Israelite and Judahite temples collected tithes of a range of animals and agricultural produce (Lev 27:32: cattle and sheep; Deut 14:23: grain, new wine, oil) for the upkeep of the temples and in support of the temple priesthood whose food supply it secured. Tithing can be conceived of as a tax system that encompassed the whole of society and provided the economic basis for the existence of the temples and their personnel. However, its significance went beyond that: surpluses were traded, and income from tithing thus contributed to the temple household more generally, involving it in the trading networks of the wider economy and thus strengthening it in the context of an economic system that was dominated by the interplay between temple households, the royal household, and private land-ownership. By the same token, a temple trading its surpluses also contributed to the growth of the general economy, the establishment of wider and wider trade networks and thus to the unfolding of a more and more intricate system of value-equivalencies and, therefore, to the monetization of the cult and of society generally, as can clearly be seen in Leviticus 27 and Deuteronomy 14, to name just two examples.
As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Schaper 1995: passim; Schaper 1997: passim; Schaper 2000, 130–161; cf. Torrey: passim), the Jerusalem temple was a not insignificant venue of metallurgical work and coin production in the Persian period and probably already produced pre-coinage money-objects in the pre-exilic period. The production of such pre-coinage money-objects reflects the need for the expression of value equivalents, which demonstrates that the productive forces and long-distance trade were increasing and money, in those pre-coinage times, had to reflect an ever more complex network of value equivalences in a world that was becoming, through long-distance trade, more and more “global.”
Given the developments we have just sketched, it will have become obvious that the temples of ancient Judah, and especially the Jerusalem temple, had a key function in the standardization of payments and the establishing of normativity in cultic practice and indeed in the whole of the Judahite economy. Similar processes took place in other ancient Near Eastern cultures (Lipiński 1979: passim).
A prime example of the standardization of payments being effected by cultic activity is the fact that sacrificial animals were available for purchase at the Jerusalem temple for those who could not, or did not want to, undergo the trouble of driving them all the way from their abodes to Jerusalem. Deuteronomy 14 indicates the existence of that practice. The need for such a practice, especially in the context of the pilgrimage festivals and with a view to Jewish pilgrims from the Diaspora, must have accelerated the development of a monetized economy in Judah after the return from the Babylonian exile, but its roots lie in the pre-exilic period.
Another important factor in the acceleration of the movement towards a fully monetized economy was the necessity of running the Jerusalem temple efficiently on a day-to-day basis, which entailed the ability efficiently to render payments. The pre-coinage money-objects, and later the coinage, used for such payments were kept in the temple treasury (Schaper 1995: passim), of which a committee had the oversight (Schaper 1997: passim).
The book of Deuteronomy reflects the modernization of Judahite society (Blenkinsopp: 1, 5)4 that was effected by the economic transformation it underwent from the late pre-exilic period onwards. These developments came to a head in the time of King Josiah. The dissolution of the tribal and clan structures and the privileging of the family were rightly identified by Blenkinsopp as being characteristic of the economic and social transformation that were taking place from the time onwards when the earliest part of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 12–26*) was authored. George Thomson identifies the equivalent transformation in the Greek world; virtually every word of Thomson’s analysis also applies to ancient Judah:
It was the introduction of iron which, by raising the productivity of the small producers, both farmers and artisans, enabled them to become independent. Commodity production developed to the point at which the invention of coined money became possible and necessary, and, thus assisted, it expanded more rapidly than ever, penetrating all ranks of society and dissolving all that remained of the old communal relations. (Thomson: 17)
Similar economic and technological changes have similar social effects, regardless of cultural boundaries. It was the Greeks who invented coinage, but in Judah—or rather; in Yehud, i.e. after the Babylonian exile—coinage was eventually also introduced when the economic conditions required it (see next section). The main point for our purposes is that, centuries before the introduction of coinage, the necessities of the temple economies in Israel and Judah accelerated the standardization of payments and money-objects and eventually led to the introduction of coinage. While the introduction of coinage was just another step in the process of the development of money-objects, it was a very important one since it hugely facilitated payment procedures and thus enabled the priesthood to run the Jerusalem temple more smoothly and efficiently. It is unlikely to be an exaggeration to see the Jerusalem temple, in the late pre-exilic period and then again after its rededication in 516 bce, as the main catalyst of economic development: it was the hub at which numerous and diverse economic activities converged and which therefore was the place where innovations in financial administration were bound to happen.
The usual economic activities of a temple resumed in the Jerusalem temple once it had been rededicated, cf. Neh 10:36–39 on the collection of tithes: “the first fruits of our soil and the first fruits of all fruit of every tree”; “the firstlings of our herds and of our flocks”; “the first of our dough” and of wine and oil, and cf. Mal 3:10. The tithing system was rebuilt, only from now on there was just one, central temple, and it conducted a sacrificial cult of state-wide importance. If “tithing was the religio-political basis of taxation in the Second Commonwealth” (Spiro: 195), and if consequently, because of the constant influx, not all the tithes could be consumed, the interesting problem arises of what happened to the tithes redeemed in money. It is likely that they “were sacred and were therefore deposited in the Temple treasury with other holy funds” (Spiro: 198). The treasury was overseen by a permanent committee staffed by two priests and two Levites (Neh 13:13; cf. Ezra 8:33–34; Schaper 1997, 201–205). The term tĕrūmâ (Neh 10:40) was used “to designate, as a generic term, all the taxes and contributions the Judaean population was supposed to pay to the temple hierarchy” (Schaper 1995, 538).
In addition to collecting the contributions required by the temple personnel for itself and the upkeep of the temple and its activities, the temple was also active as an extension of the Achaemenid imperial tax administration: it collected taxes (middâ, bĕlo and halaḵ; see Schaper 1995, 538–539) for the Persian overlords. We know of the Babylonian temple administration during the rule of Nabonidus that a new temple institution was founded in order to collect income for the state and then to transfer it to the state institutions as efficiently as possible. That institution was called the quppu ša šarri, the “king’s chest,” under the supervision of the rēš šarri bēl piqitti (San Nicolò 1935, 367, n. 2; Oppenheim: 117; Dandamaev and Lukonin: 88–89) who was a member of the temple administration (San Nicolò 1941, 30, n. 72; Dandamaev and Lukonin: 89). The tax regime of the new, Achaemenid rulers was in continuity with that of the Neo-Babylonian empire, and seems to have been implemented in the Jerusalem temple (Schaper 1995: passim).
With its roots being located in the late pre-exilic period, the post-exilic period saw the centralization of the cult in Jerusalem and, towards the end of the Persian period or early in the Hellenistic period, the beginnings of a system of three great annual pilgrimage festivals (cf. Exod 23:17; Deut 16:16). Their significance grew over the course of time, especially from the Hasmonaean period onwards, and later also entailed participation from Diaspora Jews (Dyma: passim). The pilgrimage festivals provided significant additional income for the Jerusalem temple, but probably this really only became an important factor when the participation of Diaspora Jews started in earnest under Herod (Goodman 1999).
Coinage had been invented in the Greek cultural sphere, in Lydia or Ionia in the late seventh century or early sixth century bce. The new money-object was an immediate, international success that “caught on”; the Achaemenid empire followed the Lydian example and introduced coinage c. 520 bce, probably without ever developing a full understanding of the uses of coinage or of its economic and social consequences.
After the demise of the Neo-Babylonian empire, a much reduced—not least territorially reduced—Judah became part of the Achaemenid empire under the name of Yehud, and Yehud coins were first minted around 520 bce. The minting probably took place in the Jerusalem temple (Schaper 1995, 533–534, 15, following Weippert: 726–727), and the Yehud coins give us all kinds of remarkable insights into the economic, social, and political situation in that province of the empire (Schaper 2002). The Yehud coins have to be seen in the context of the “modernization” and globalization brought about by the spreading of electrum, gold, and silver coinage, money-objects that greatly facilitated payment and standardization procedures throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and vast areas of Western Asia, including the Achaemenid empire. The use of coinage in Yehud will also have facilitated the operation of the sacrificial cult.
The standardization of the values of the commodities entering the Jerusalem temple as sacrificial objects was brought about by the ever-growing “network” of value equivalences (see section 2). That standardization found expression in the creation of the money-objects we have discussed, culminating in the production of coins. The yoser (Zech 11:13) was the officer in the Jerusalem temple who controlled the processes of melting precious metals that enabled the creation of such money-objects (Schaper 1995, 530; Powell).
The Jerusalem temple seems to have provided not just religious, but also economic continuity for the people of Yehud and Judaea through hundreds of years of relative uncertainty and, sometimes, massive upheaval. That continuity came to an end only with the destruction of the temple in 70 ce at the hands of the Romans. The transitions from Persian to Greek and from Greek to Roman rule and, of course, the tribulations of the Maccabaean Wars, with all the adversities these developments created for the population, did not diminish the central importance of the temple as an economic institution.
Regarding the ongoing facilitation of sacrifice provision that was made possible by the increasing monetization of the cult, an interesting example of the effects of such facilitation is found with regard to the sacrificing of doves, the cheapest form of sacrifice the temple had to offer. From some point onwards, those who intended to have such sacrifices conducted simply deposited the right amount of money in the shofarot that were provided: “Toward the end of the Second Temple Period, doves were no longer sold in the Temple precincts. Instead shofarot were set up in the Temple and anyone who was obliged to offer a pair of doves or wished to do so as a freewill offering dropped the some into it [sic], and each day sacrifices were offered in accordance with the amount in the shofarot” (Shek. 6:5 and Tosef., Shek. 3:2–3; Safrai 1971, col. 982).