How did the Israelites worship in the Temple?

Answer 1

Answer
The people of Judah seem to have worshipped many different gods in a range of ways in Solomon's Temple, in Jerusalem. Two examples of the form of worship are to be found in the Book of Ezekiel:
Ezekiel 8:14 describes women in the Temple "weeping for Tammuz" - the Semitic god condemned to hell by the goddess Astarte after she was crucified and resurrected. There must have been a whole cult around Astarte and Tammuz, with annual rituals of death and resurrection.
Ezekiel8:16 says: "And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east".
The gospels remind us that the Jews sacrificed animals in the Temple.

Answer 2

A:The original god of Israel was El, the Canaanite father of the gods, but quite early on, Yahweh (YHVH, biblical Heb: YHWH) is understood as Israel's god in distinction to El.

Deuteronomy 32:8-9 presents an order in which each deity received its own nation. Yahweh is cast in the role of one of the sons of El, here called 'Elyôn, and Israel was the nation that Yahweh receives. It also adds to the evidence that Yahweh was known separately from El at an early time in Israelite history. Even before the fall of Israel, El and Yahweh had become identified as the same God.

Solar imagery for Yahweh developed during the period of the Judahite monarchy, perhaps through the influence of monarchic religious ideology, but seems to be strictly a southern development. The archaeological evidence is that in the north he was identified as the moon God.

Semitic religions frequently portrayed their gods in the form of a bull. Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God) says that evidence for Yahweh as bull appears in Amherst Papyrus 63 (column XI): "Horus-Yaho, our bull is with us. May the lord of Bethel answer us on the morrow." Despite later syncretism with Horus, the text apparently preserves a prayer to Yahweh in his emblem animal as a bull invoked as the patron-god of Bethel. The 'Bull of Jacob' is used in Psalm 132 is a title of Yahweh, and for that reason is often translated into English as the 'God of Jacob' (the KJV places 'God' in italics to show that this is not a literal translation).

It is widely accepted that worship of God involved animal sacrifices, but Smith says the evidence is that the early Hebrews also sacrificed children to God, even if the practice was no longer common in the seventh century BCE and had entirely ceased in post-Exilic times.

Keel and Uehlinger (Gods, Goddesses and Images of God in Ancient Israel) describe hundreds of religious artefacts from the periods of the Judges and the monarchy, some of which were images of Yahweh and other gods of the early Hebrew pantheon. By the seventh century BCE, images disappear from the archaeological record, showing that the religion of Judah had become aniconic.

Answer 3

Jewish worship in the Great Temple in Jerusalem required sacrifices. Modern Jewish worship is through prayer.