How did the menorah become one of the fundamental symbols of Jewish identity? This question and related ones are the subject of a new exhibition, titled The Menorah: Cult, History, and Myth, jointly held in Rome at the Vatican Museums and the Jewish Museum of Rome. Michael Frank relates some of the history:
Consider some of the most basic facts about the object, for starters. Why seven branches? [The ancient Roman-Jewish historian] Josephus mentions the planets (six in orbit around the sun); but there is also, he adds in a later passage, “the dignity of the number seven among the Jews”—derived from the six days of creation plus the Sabbath. Why lilies and pomegranates but no almonds? This would seem to be a confirmation that Moses’ menorah was, in fact, melted down after the destruction of the First Temple, and a new one, in a revised form, was fabricated later. Josephus describes the oil lamps lined up “in one row”; yet lampstands that were made around the time of Moses were more often arranged in three dimensions, with individual lights circling a single bowl. . . .
And then there is the fascinating puzzle of the menorah’s base. Josephus asserts that the Romans had modified it so that “its middle shaft,” he says in his account of the procession, “was fixed upon a basis.”
The menorah that was rescued from the Second Temple after it was set on fire by one of Titus’s soldiers—pointedly, the story goes, not by Titus himself, who was said to be against its destruction (see his troubled expression as depicted in two narrative paintings by Nicolas Poussin from the early 17th century)—stood up on a tripod, a detail confirmed by dozens of representations on view in these exhibitions. However, the menorah on the Arch of Titus is set in a hexagonal ferculum, or box, that was carved with animals and mythological creatures, in obvious defiance of the biblical injunction against graven images.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/241001/the-menorah-as-symbol-and-myth