The God of Jerusalem and His Temple

Abstract

Chapter 6 explores the place Julian assigns the Jewish god in his divine order. His articulation and fixing of the Jewish god in his divine realm attempts to correct the Flavian dynasty’s mischaracterization of that order and restores the Judean ethnic god to his proper place. This endeavor realizes his ethnological arguments about Judeans in Galileans and occurs within a month of his publication of the Hymn to King Helios, in which he lays out Helios’s central place in the cosmic order. Julian’s various and sometimes contradictory characterizations of the Jewish god reveal his ambivalence over how close he ought to hold him. To rank the Jewish god too highly might collapse the boundaries between Jews and Hellenes and wreck his still fragile hellenizing program. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the impact on Christians of the replacement of Jesus with the Jewish god and the restoration of the temple.