The Jews began to be a schooled people, as indeed their divine role as priests to the nations demanded. A new and quite revolutionary institution in the history of religion appeared: the synagogue – prototype of the church, the chapel and the mosque – where the Bible was systematically read and taught. Such places may have existed even before the Exile, as a result of Josiah’s reform; they certainly matured during the Exile years, when the Jewish elite had no Temple; and on the Return, when all religious activity was rigorously centralized in the Jerusalem Temple, and provincial temples and
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