Omar6741 said
Did anyone ever actually consecrate his or her child to the lifelong service of the Jerusalem Temple in the Second Temple period?Could the mother of Jesus have been a consecrated virgin in the Temple?

If you have references or links to scholarly resources that deal with this issue, I’d be very grateful.
Thanks!

”A consecrated virgin in the Temple? ”

Perhaps you have in mind The Infancy Gospel of James. It was deemed she needed a husband….at 12 years of age…..16 years old when with child…

Infancy Gospel of James

And the child was three years old, and Joachim said: Invite the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let them take each a lamp, and let them stand with the lamps burning, that the child may not turn back, and her heart be captivated from the temple of the Lord. And they did so until they went up into the temple of the Lord. And the priest received her, and kissed her, and blessed her, saying: The Lord has magnified thy name in all generations. In thee, on the last of the days, the Lord will manifest His redemption to the sons of Israel. And he set her down upon the third step of the altar, and the Lord God sent grace upon her; and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her.

8. And her parents went down marvelling, and praising the Lord God, because the child had not turned back. And Mary was in the temple of the Lord as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food from the hand of an angel. And when she was twelve years old there was held a council of the priests, saying: Behold, Mary has reached the age of twelve years in the temple of the Lord. What then shall we do with her, test perchance she defile the sanctuary of the Lord? And they said to the high priest: Thou standest by the altar of the Lord; go in, and pray concerning her; and whatever the Lord shall manifest unto thee, that also will we do. And the high priest went in, taking the robe with the twelve bells into the holy of holies; and he prayed concerning her. And behold an angel of the Lord stood by him, saying unto him: Zacharias, Zacharias, go out and assemble the widowers of the people, and let them bring each his rod; and to whomsoever the Lord shall show a sign, his wife shall she be. And the heralds went out through all the circuit of Judaea, and the trumpet of the Lord sounded, and all ran.

………….

But Mary had forgotten the mysteries of which the archangel Gabriel had spoken, and gazed up into heaven, and said: Who am I, O Lord, that all the generations of the earth should bless me? And she remained three months with Elizabeth; and day by day she grew bigger. And Mary being afraid, went away to her own house, and hid herself from the sons of Israel. And she was sixteen years old when these mysteries happened.

** you do not have permission to see this link **

(my bolding in the above quote)

Omar6741 said

Yes, thank you! That Infancy Gospel is what motivated my question.

According to Professor George Zervos, this Gospel seems to be a composite of earlier texts, which in turn can be recovered by careful source criticism. So this is not a reliable text, historically speaking; that left me wondering if there were any other sources that contained reliable evidence of children being dedicated to temple service in the Second Temple period.

Do you know of any other sources for this practice in Second Temple Judaism? (Long before that, Samuel was dedicated to service in the Tabernacle, I think, by his mother Hanna — it was something like a Ancient Near Eastern custom at the time.)

I’m not aware of sources regarding dedicating children to Second Temple service.

As for the Hannah and Samuel story  –  I’m not aware of any Jewish history that supports this OT story.

Actually, if one is looking for parallels between the OT story and the gospel story  –  then it is Elizabeth and her son, John the Baptist, that would be the better parallel to the Hannah and Samuel story. 

Daniel Schwartz makes an interesting observation regarding the story in gLuke regarding Elizabeth and Mary.

Regarding the Magnificat, the hymn of praise that is attributed to Mary   –  Schwartz says it better fits Elizabeth…

Daniel Schwartz: Reading the First Century.

Namely, just about all witnesses to v. 56, right after the recitation of the
Magnificat, read “And Mary stayed with her about three months.” This
differential usage of proper name (which normally implies the introduction
of a new character or reference to one whom the reader would not expect if
“he” or “she” were used) and pronoun (which normally denotes the person
already present in the reader’s mind) clearly implies that Elizabeth has until
now been at the center of attention. But in the text as we have it, Mary has
been at center stage, and Elizabeth in the wings, for the past ten verses.
That this is not nitpicking, but seriously problematic, is indicated clearly
by the fact that numerous modern translators find a need to add Elizabeth’s
name into v. 56, reading “Mary stayed with Elizabeth […].”106 That is, the
way v. 56 is written clearly implies the second stage of the story’s development as hypothesized above: both women were already in the story, but
the Magnificat was still (as in the first stage) Elizabeth’s. It was only to be
in the third and final stage that the Magnificat was transferred to Mary, not
without leaving a hint not only in the manuscript evidence for v. 46 but also
(as we now see) in the anomalous naming procedure employed in – that is,
surviving in – v. 56.

Table summarizing apparent growth of Luke 1:

Stage 1: Birth of John the Baptist, no mention of Jesus; Elizabeth sings
Magnificat

Stage 2: Introduction of vv. 26–45, on Mary, her pregnancy, and her meeting
with Elizabeth

Stage 3: V. 46 changed to transfer Magnificat to Mary; v. 56 left unchanged.

Thus, from three different directions – the varying evidence for the text
of v. 46 analyzed according to the lectio difficilior rule; the biblical context
(the implied comparison of the singer of the Magnificat to Hannah); and
the local context, namely, the implication of the formulation of v. 56 – we
have concluded that the Magnificat was originally understood to be sung
by the mother of John the Baptist, not by the mother of Jesus. Moreover,
we got to this conclusion by building on other evidence for the original
independence of John’s movement, evidence that encouraged us to look
for evidence that Mary was not, in fact, part of the original text of what is
now Luke 1 – a quest that bore fruit in our recognition of the anomalous
formulation of v. 56. Accordingly, if to begin with we set out to find liturgy
of John’s movement, we have probably found some of that but also evidence
for the process by which that movement, and its materials, were incorporated into Christianity. Not a bad harvest for a quest that began only with
some badly outnumbered variant readings (“she” or “Elizabeth”) in Luke
1:46.

——————-

On one level the Infancy Gospel of James was designed to connect, via family relationship, Elizabeth and Mary  –  hence John and Jesus. On another level, the Hannah and Samuel dedication to the Temple story is retold, as it were, in the story of Anna and Mary  –  instead of the better fit with Elizabeth and John. i.e. the Infancy Gospel of James has applied the Hannah and Samuel story to a later birth than that of Elizabeth and John. 

The result being that any earlier stories regarding Elizabeth and John became part of the Mary and Jesus story  –  as is now in gLuke with Mary given the Magnificat  –  a prayer of praise that better fits an older barren woman. (no surprise that a 16 year old would fall pregnant  –  holy ghost notwithstanding….)

The NT Mary was not dedicated to Second Temple service. The Infancy Gospel of James figures, Mary and her mother Anna, are stand-ins, as it were, for the OT story of Hannah and Samuel and the dedication to the Temple. 

As Daniel Schwartz has pointed out, the gLuke Magificat better fits the Elizabeth and John the Baptist story than a Mary and Jesus story. Thus, the Hannah and Samuel dedication to the Temple story is applied, re the Infancy Gospel of James, to Anna and Mary. It is then applied in gLuke, via the Magnificat to Mary and Jesus. (also re the young Jesus at the Temple  –  and also a prophetess Anna in the Temple stories..)

Dedicating, or not dedicating, ones children to the Temple, or Second Temple, does not actually add anything to the gospel narratives. The point of the gospel birth narratives is that God, re Jewish theology, intervened in history. What that intervention actually was  –  well then, first we have to deal with Jewish history and then try and figure out what it was in that history that Jewish thinkers found to be relevant to their prophetic musings….

Bottom line  –  all this demonstrates that the gospel story developed over time. The incorporation of a John the Baptist type movement into a Jesus movement required some tweaking of the storybook….