Menachos Daf 109
May. 1st, 2026 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI know I said I wasn't going to blog Menachos but holy shit Chonyo/Onias IV!!
Who was the son of High Priest Shimon HaTzadik and got into a succession fight with his brother that led to him fleeing to Alexandria and establishing a rival Beis Hamikdash there roughly halfway through the Second Temple period. The Rabbis of the Mishnah on Menachos Daf 109, some 300 years later, seem flummoxed by this, they can't seem to figure out if this was avodah zarah or not.
But what really flummoxed me is apparently "Beis Chonyo" stood, per Wikipedia, until ~73 CE when the Romans destroyed it, just a couple years after destroying the Beis Hamikdash. And I am so fascinated by the counterfactual of Yochanan Ben Zakkai instead of establishing Rabbinic Judaism in Yavneh, attempting to shift the focus of the avodah to the Bama of Beis Chonyo. Apparently Vespasian was worried enough about this possibility to preemptively raze Beis Chonyo, why don't we talk about this?
Who was the son of High Priest Shimon HaTzadik and got into a succession fight with his brother that led to him fleeing to Alexandria and establishing a rival Beis Hamikdash there roughly halfway through the Second Temple period. The Rabbis of the Mishnah on Menachos Daf 109, some 300 years later, seem flummoxed by this, they can't seem to figure out if this was avodah zarah or not.
But what really flummoxed me is apparently "Beis Chonyo" stood, per Wikipedia, until ~73 CE when the Romans destroyed it, just a couple years after destroying the Beis Hamikdash. And I am so fascinated by the counterfactual of Yochanan Ben Zakkai instead of establishing Rabbinic Judaism in Yavneh, attempting to shift the focus of the avodah to the Bama of Beis Chonyo. Apparently Vespasian was worried enough about this possibility to preemptively raze Beis Chonyo, why don't we talk about this?