The work of the sword was followed by a change of policy. The policy pursued by the earlier Hellenistic states, and taken over from them by the Romans--which reached in reality far beyond mere tolerance towards foreign ways and foreign faith, and recognised the Jews in their collective character as a national and religious community--had become impossible. In the Jewish insurrection the dangers had been too clearly brought to light, which this formation of a national-religious union--on the one hand rigidly concentrated, on the other spreading over the whole East and having ramifications even in the West--involved. The central worship was accordingly once for all set aside. This resolution of the government stood undoubtedly fixed, and had nothing in common with the question, which cannot be answered with certainty, whether the destruction of the temple took place by design or by accident; if, on the one hand, the suppression of the worship required only the closing of the temple and the magnificent structure might have been spared, on the other hand, had the temple been accidentally destroyed, the worship might have been continued in a temple rebuilt. No doubt it will always remain probable that it was not the chance of war that here prevailed, but the flames of the temple were rather the programme for the altered policy of the Roman government with reference to Judaism.[185] More clearly even than in the events at Jerusalem the same change is marked in the closing--which ensued at the same time on the order of Vespasian--of the central sanctuary of the Egyptian Jews, the temple of Onias, not far from Memphis, in the Heliopolitan district, which for centuries stood alongside of that of Jerusalem, somewhat as the translation by the Alexandrian Seventy stood side by side with the Old Testament; it too was divested of its votive gifts, and the worship of God in it was forbidden.