Are there any examples in the Bible where possibly the Jews took something pagan and converted into their religion. For instance is there any place where it talks about them taking a pagan temple and “purify” it for their own worship. I’ve been looking for something like this but so far have come up empty.
I’m trying to come up with these examples as further defense for “pagan holidays” being used by Catholics and other things. thanks
If you are limiting yourself to the Biblical narrative you are going to find that the Jews were punished when they preserved and attempted to assimilate pagan worship according to the record of Scripture. By the time of the Maccabees, the thought of assimilation was tantamount to a return to slavery and the practice of the culture free from Gentile corruption equated to freedom.
While there are in fact many things the Jews did, especially in the cult surrounding the Tabernacle and later the Temple that may have resembled something similar to the pagan religions, none of these things were modeled on or built upon pagan worship, not according to the Bible, per se.
Thus if you are looking for Biblical examples, you aren’t going to find any that result in a happy ending–not for the Jews anyway.
The history of the Church’s “Christian-izing” temples and celebrations has to do with Hellenistic and Roman culture, not a Biblical practice. To the world that the Church was preaching to, conquering by a King meant assimilating both culture and religion. A King conquers your land, your temples now worship the way the King does–in the Roman world they called this guy the Emperor.
When Rome became Christian, the secular world submitted to Christ the only way it knew how. It surrendered its holy places, temples, and celebrations to the new King, the Lord Jesus Christ.
To the Romans and the rest of the civilized world, this meant proper submission. The Gentiles always seemed to do things opposite of the Jews: the Jews destroyed pagan temples, the Gentiles re-dedicated them to the “new” God (instead of destroying the temple, the Greeks tried to dedicate it to Jupiter leading to the Maccabean revolt).
Since the Old Testament is a product of Jewish culture, you won’t find anything resembling the Gentile way of doing things in it. But when God began accepting all peoples into his Church, the culture of the Gentiles became acceptable since it was part of the Gentile identity. That is also why St. Paul taught against forcing Jewish culture upon Gentile converts because Christ saves the entire person, their cultural identity as well.
