Emergence of the Synagogue

No biblical text records the founding of the synagogue, but the institution emerged in response to the catastrophe of 587 BC, when Babylon destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and deported much of Judah. With no Temple at which to offer sacrifice and a community scattered across Mesopotamia, the exiles needed a new way to keep covenant with the Lord. They began to meet — at first in homes, then in dedicated rooms — on the Sabbath and on festival days, to read aloud from the scrolls of Moses and the Prophets, to recite the Shema and the Eighteen Benedictions, and to hear teaching. The Hebrew name is bet ha-kneset, "house of assembly"; the Greek synagoge means the same. After the return from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple, the synagogue did not disappear — for most Jews, Jerusalem was a long pilgrimage away, and a weekly gathering for word and prayer met a need the sacrificial system could not. By the first century, every Jewish town in Galilee, Judea, and the Diaspora had a synagogue. It was on this circuit — Capernaum, Nazareth, the Pisidian Antioch, Corinth — that Jesus and the apostles preached, and from these gatherings that the first Christian communities took shape.