The most ancient Jewish manuscripts indicate THE Temple Menorah had straight diagonal branches rather than rounded ones.
The menorah on the Arch would have been some secondary creation, not the original design. Perhaps the original was hidden, like the Ark. But the one taken to Rome is still pretty cool.
Very interesting. Its too bad that the original Bible/Tanach description of things, which is quite extensive, didn’t happen to mention the curvature of the Menorah arms.
As far as I have been able to ascertain,
... citations for straight-armed Menorah arms seem to all go back to Maimonides’ little 6 by ten centimeter hand sketch in his Mishna Torah. The drawing COULD have been meant as an accurate portrayal in all respects, but its very small size, marginality, and certain textual contents indicate it could have just been a quickish sort of schematic of key outline features and NOT necessarily meant as a fully accurate ‘architectural rendering’ of every detail such as curvature of the arms, etc. Its anyone’s guess what Maimonides meant by his little sketch, imho.
Speaking of Maimodines, he regularly prayed at the synagogue in Cairo (after his move there)..where a significant geniza (collection of used prayer and other books, manuscripts, etc...) was found in 1890. In that collection, which included some hand-written letters by Maimonides himself, there was a Hebrew school text containing pictures of the Jewish Temple implements including the Menorah. The text dated from the century before Maimonides and its Menorah has round arms. The Menorah on Domitian’s Arch of Titus, erected in 82CE (very shortly after Titus sacked the Jewish Temple in 70) clearly shows rounded arms. Most scholars believe this to have been intended as a representation of the Temple Menorah despite its lack of ‘feet’..since the entire Arch monument commemorates Titus’ destruction of the Temple and looting of its contents including, of course, the Temple Menorah. I believe that the weight of opinion is for round arms, but scholars cannot pin it down with absolute certainty and there are some that still think maybe the original Menorah may have had straight arms. Most rabbis, I believe, say that either design is probably acceptable for the Third Jewish Temple to come.
Best,
fhc