E-Lectures Glossary
17th of TammuzThe 17th day of the month of Tammuz is a fast day according to Jewish tradition. The Mishnah Taanith IV 6 states that there are five reasons for fasting on this day:Five calamities befell our fathers on the 17th of Tamuz… On the 17th Tamuz the Tables of the Law were broke, the daily sacrifice ceased to be offered, the city of Jerusalem was broken into, Apostomos burnt the Torah and set up an idol in the sanctuary [see bellow that perhaps one should read: an idol was set up in the sanctuary]".The Torah does not explicitly say when the tablets where broken, but this date was already mentioned by Pseudo-Philo (presumably a first century Jewish writer) in Antiquities XIX:7 according to whom God said to Moses: But unto thee will I show the land before thou die, but thou shall not enter therein in this age, lest thou see the graven images whereby this people will be deceived and led out of the way. I will show thee the place wherein they shall serve me 740 (l. 850) years. And thereafter it shall be delivered into the hand of their enemies, and they shall destroy it, and strangers shall compass it about, and it shall be in that day as it was in the day when I brake the tables of the covenant which I made with thee in Oreb: and when they sinned, that which was written therein vanished away. Now that day was the 17th day of the 4th month.The Rabbis (Babylonian Talmud 28b) calculated that the tablets where broken on the 17th of Tammuz, by assuming that the seventh day on which Moses was called to ascend Mt. Sinai was the 7th day of the month of Sivan (Exodus 19:1 + 24:15), and adding 40 days (Exodus 24:18) to that date. The other four occurrences mentioned in the Mishnah are connected to the destruction of either the first or second Temple. According to the Torah (Exodus 29:38-42; Numbers 28:1-8) two sheep were to be sacrificed in the Tabernacle daily, one in the morning and one in the evening. This sacrifice, known as the Tamid, was stopped some time before the destruction of the Temple. There has been some debate as to whether this took place on the 17th of Tammuz before the destruction of the first or second temple (See Ithamar Verhaptig, "The Secession of the Tamid - First Temple or Second Temple", Hamaayan 33:4 1993, pp 6-14 [Hebrew]), but it must be noted that Josephus mentions this date in his description of the fall of the second Temple. And now Titus gave orders to his soldiers that were with him to dig up the foundations of the tower of Antonia, and make him a ready passage for his army to come up; while he himself had Josephus brought to him, (for he had been informed that on that very day, which was the seventeenth day of Panemus, [Tamuz,] the sacrifice called "the Daily Sacrifice" had failed, and had not been offered to God, for want of men to offer it, and that the people were grievously troubled at it,) and commanded him to say the same things to John that he had said before, that if he had any malicious inclination for fighting, he might come out with as many of his men as he pleased, in order to fight, without the danger of destroying either his city or temple; but that he desired he would not defile the temple, nor thereby offend against God. (Josephus, Wars of the Jews, VI:93).The walls of Jerusalem were broken down by Nebuchadnezzar, before the destruction of the first Temple, on the 9th day of Tammuz (Jer. 39:2), and they were breached once again by Titus, before the destruction of the second Temple on the 17th of Tammuz (see the quote above from Josephus and Babylonian Talmud Taanit 28b. The Jerusalem Talmud however says that the date in Jeremiah is mistaken - see Jerusalem Talmud Taanit 23a). The details of the incident of Apostomos burning of the Torah are not known. Apostamus is of course a Greek name and it should be assumed that this took place before the destruction of the second temple. A descriptions of such an occurrence appears in Josephus The War of the Jews ii 231 and in Antiquites of the Jews xx 113, but it includes neither the name Apostomus nor the date of the event. In the Jerusalem Talmud, Taanit 23b, there is a debate as to where this incident took place. When and who set up an idol in the Temple is also unclear. According to on opinion in the Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 23b) it was the same Apostomos who erected (Hebrew: he-emid) the idol in the Temple. According to another opinion it was the Israelite king Menashe of the first Temple. Bibliography
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