Second Temple Menorah

The Second Temple menorah was the seven-branched golden lampstand that stood inside the Temple in Jerusalem until its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. It continued the lampstand commanded in Exodus, kindled and tended daily by the priests, and it was among the holiest furnishings of the sanctuary. Of all the great objects of ancient Israelite worship, it is the one whose appearance is best known, because it was carried to Rome and carved in stone on the Arch of Titus.

Its status here is "attested but lost." Its existence is beyond doubt: it is described by the eyewitness historian Josephus and depicted in the triumphal relief on the Arch of Titus, the single most important image of the object. What is unknown is what became of it after it reached Rome. It was placed in the Temple of Peace, glimpsed once more in a rabbinic tradition, and then lost to the record. Centuries of legend have proposed that it went to Carthage, to Constantinople, into the Tiber, or into the Vatican, but none of these can be substantiated.

When Titus took Jerusalem in 70 CE and the Temple burned, its sacred vessels were seized as the spoils of war. Josephus, who had gone over to the Romans and witnessed the aftermath, describes the triumphal procession in Rome the following year, in which the golden table of the shewbread and the golden lampstand were borne through the city before the crowds. Soon afterward the Arch of Titus was raised in the Forum, and its southern inner relief shows the menorah carried aloft on the shoulders of soldiers, the image that has fixed the object in the visual imagination ever since and that lies behind the emblem of the modern State of Israel.

The spoils were housed in the Temple of Peace, completed by Vespasian in 75 CE. The last apparent notice of the menorah is a rabbinic report that Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai saw it in Rome in the 2nd century. The Temple of Peace was gutted by fire around 192 CE; whether the menorah survived that blaze is unknown, and after it no reliable source mentions the object again. Later chroniclers and legends carry it to Vandal Carthage in 455 and thence to Byzantine Constantinople under Belisarius in 534, but these accounts are late and cannot be tied securely to the original Temple menorah rather than to other ritual objects.

There is no controversy about whether the Second Temple menorah existed: a contemporary historian describes it and a contemporary monument depicts it, which is as strong as ancient attestation gets. The scholarly questions are two. The first is what it actually looked like. The Arch of Titus shows a distinctive two-tiered octagonal base decorated with sea creatures, which some rabbinic authorities and later commentators found difficult to reconcile with a purely functional Temple object; Steven Fine and others have studied whether the relief shows the true Temple menorah, a Herodian-era replacement, or a Roman sculptor's adaptation, and modern imaging of the relief has even recovered traces of the yellow paint that once made the lampstand read as gold.

The second question is its fate, and here scholarship is largely a matter of clearing away legend. The claims that the menorah survives in the Vatican, or lies in the Tiber, or reached Constantinople, are unsupported: the Vatican has stated it does not hold it, and a 2002 Hebrew University survey found no trace. The responsible conclusion is that the object is genuinely lost, its last secure attestation being in Rome in the first two centuries CE, and that the many later sightings and hiding-places belong to tradition and hope rather than to evidence.