A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

Then, out of the blue, Yahweh made an appearance in Tel Aviv. Among the first batch of deportees to arrive in Babylon in 597 was the priest Ezekiel. For the first five years, he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he was—literally—knocked out by a shattering vision of Yahweh which left him stunned for an entire week. A cloud of light had seemed to approach him from the north in the midst of which he saw a huge chariot drawn by four of the cherubim, strange beasts not unlike the karibu carved on the palace gates of Babylon. When he tried to describe this apparition, Ezekiel was at pains to show that it lay beyond normal words and concepts. What he had seen was “something … shaped like a throne and high upon this throne was a being that looked like a man.” In the dense confusion of storm, fire, and tumultuous noise, Ezekiel knew that he had glimpsed “something that looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Like Isaiah, Ezekiel had glimpsed the extraordinary Reality that lay behind the symbols of the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant—Yahweh’s earthly throne—was still in the Temple in Jerusalem, but his “glory” had arrived in Babylon. It was indeed a “revelation,” an unveiling: the great curtain separating the Hekhal from the Devir in Solomon’s Temple had represented the farthest limit of human perception. Now that veil had been pulled to one side, though Ezekiel was careful to distinguish between Yahweh himself and his “glory,” a manifestation of his Presence which made the ineffable reality of the sacred apprehensible to human beings. The vision was a startling reformulation of an older theology. In the very earliest days, Israel had experienced God as mobile. He had come to his people from the Sinai to Canaan on the wings of the cherubim. Now the cherubim had conveyed him to his people in exile. He was not confined to either the Temple or the Promised Land, like so many of the pagan gods who were associated indissolubly with a particular territory.

Furthermore, Yahweh chose to be with the exiles, not with the Judaeans who were still living in Jerusalem. Ezekiel had his vision in about 592, some six years before the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, but in a later vision he realized that Jerusalem was doomed because even though they were on the brink of disaster the Judaeans back home were still worshipping other gods and ignoring the terms of their covenant with Yahweh. One day Ezekiel was sitting in his house in Tel Aviv with the exiled elders of Judah when “the hand of the Lord Yahweh” fell upon him and he was taken in spirit to Jerusalem. There he was led on a conducted tour of the Temple and was horrified to see people bowing before alien gods within the sacred precincts. These “filthy practices,” he was told, had driven Yahweh from his house, and Ezekiel watched the cherubim spread their wings, the wheels of the great chariot-throne begin to move, carrying the “glory of Yahweh” out of the city of Jerusalem and disappearing over the Mount of Olives to the east of the city. He had decided to come to the community of exiles instead, and now that Yahweh was no longer living in Zion, the destruction of Jerusalem was only a matter of time.

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But Yahweh also promised the prophet that one day he would return to his city, taking the same route over the Mount of Olives, and reestablish his residence on Mount Zion. There would be a new exodus, as the scattered exiles were brought home, and a new creation in which the land would be transformed from a desolate wasteland to become “like the garden of Eden.” It would be a time of healing and integration: Judah and Israel would be reunited under a Davidic king and, as in Eden, Yahweh would live among his people.

(#litres_trial_promo) It would be the end of separation, alienation, and anomie and a return to that original wholeness for which people longed. Jerusalem was central to this vision. Some fourteen years after the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, either Ezekiel or one of his disciples had a vision of a city “on a very high mountain” whose name was Yahweh Sham: “Yahweh is there.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The city was an earthly paradise, a place of peace and fertility in the old sense. Just as the stream had welled up in the midst of the Garden of Eden and flowed down the sacred mountain to fructify the rest of the world, Ezekiel saw a river bursting up from beneath the city’s Temple, leaving the sacred precincts and bringing life and healing to the surrounding territory. Along the banks of this river there grew trees “withleaves that never wither and fruit that never fails … good to eat and the leaves medicinal.”

(#litres_trial_promo) As they experienced the pain of severance and dislocation, the exiles turned to the ancient myths to imagine a return to the place where they were supposed to be.

Yet Ezekiel was not simply clinging to the past but shaping a new vision for the future. As he contemplated the city of Yahweh Sham, he created a new sacred geography. The Temple in the middle of the city was a replica of Solomon’s Temple, which was now in ruins. Its vestibule (Ulam), cult hall (Hekhal), and inner sanctum (Devir) represented the gradations of holiness: each zone was more sacred than the last.

(#litres_trial_promo) As of old, the sacred could only be approached in stages and not everybody was to be permitted to approach the inner circles of sanctity. This concept would be central to Ezekiel’s vision and would form the basis of his new map of the ideal world. The Temple differed from Solomon’s in two important respects, however. The palace of the king was no longer next door to the Temple, and the Temple buildings were now surrounded by two walled courts.

(#litres_trial_promo) The holiness of Yahweh was to be segregated more carefully than before from the profane world. God was becoming a more transcendent reality, more radically separate (kaddosh) from the rest of mundane existence. J, the first biblical writer, had imagined Yahweh sitting and talking with Abraham as a friend, but for Ezekiel, a man of the Axial Age, the sacred was a towering mystery that was overwhelming to humanity. But despite the essential “otherness” of the divine reality, it was still the center of the world of men and women and the source of their life and potency, a reality that was symbolized in Ezekiel’s vision by the paradisal river. Ezekiel now described the Promised Land in a way that bore no relation to its physical geography. Unlike the city of Jerusalem, for example, Yahweh Sham was in the very center of the Land, which was far bigger than the joint kingdoms of Israel and Judah had ever been, stretching as far as Palmyra in the north and to the Brook of Egypt in the west.

(#litres_trial_promo) Ezekiel was not attempting a literal description of his homeland but was creating an image of a spiritual reality. The divine power radiates from the city of Yahweh Sham to the land and people of Israel in a series of concentric circles, each zone diluting this holiness as it gets farther from the source. The Temple is the nucleus of the world’s reality; the next zone is the city which enfolds it. Surrounding the city and Temple is a special area, occupied by the sacred personnel: the king, priests, and Levites. This district is holier than that occupied by the rest of the twelve tribes of Israel, who inhabit the rest of this sacred territory. Finally, beyond the reach of this holiness, is the rest of the world, occupied by the other nations (Goyim).

(#litres_trial_promo) Just as God is radically separate from all other beings, so too Israel, the holy people grouped around him, must share his holy segregation and live apart from the pagan world. It was an image of the kind of life that some of the exiles were trying to establish for themselves in Babylon.

We do not know whether Ezekiel intended this vision as a blueprint for the earthly Jerusalem. It was clearly utopian: at this point, the city, Temple, and much of the land were in ruins and there seemed no hope that they would ever be rebuilt. Ezekiel’s model could have been designed as a mandala, an object of contemplation. When his mysterious visionary guide shows him this new temple, he does not tell him that this is the way the next Temple must be built. The vision has quite another function:

Son of man, describe this Temple to the House of Israel, to shame them out of their filthy practices. Let them draw up the plan, and if they are ashamed of their behavior, show them the design and plan of the Temple, its exits and entrances, its shape, how all of it is arranged, the entire design and all its principles.

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If they wanted to live in exile as they had in Jerusalem, with Yahweh in their midst, the Judaean exiles had to make themselves into a sacred zone, so to speak. There must be no dangerous fraternizing with the Goyim and no flirting with Marduk and other false gods. The House of Israel must make itself into a house for the God who had chosen to dwell among them. By meditating on this idealized cultic map, the Israelites would learn the nature and meaning of holiness, where every person and object had its place. They must find a center for their lives and a new orientation. It must have been consoling for the exiles, who must frequently have felt marginal in Babylon, to realize that they were closer to the center of reality than their pagan neighbors, who were not even on the map. A displaced people would have found this new description of where they really stood profoundly healing.

We can see a little more clearly what this holy lifestyle involved when we examine the Priestly writings (“P”) that were also begun in exile. P’s work appears throughout the Pentateuch but is especially apparent in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. P rewrote the history of Israel from the priestly perspective, and he has much in common with Ezekiel, who, it will be remembered, was also a priest. When P described the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and codified the laws that God was supposed to have given them on Mount Sinai, he imagined a similar series of graded zones of holiness. In the heart of the Israelite camp in the wilderness was the Tabernacle, the tent-shrine that housed the Ark of the Covenant and the “glory” of Yahweh. This was the holiest area, and only Aaron, the high priest, was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. The camp was also holy, however, and had to be kept clear of all pollution because of the Presence in its midst. Outside the camp was the godless realm of the desert. Like Ezekiel, P also saw Yahweh as a mobile god. In his portable shrine, he was continually on the move with his people. P never mentioned Jerusalem. This is partly because his narrative ends before the Israelites enter the Promised Land and long before the city was captured by King David. But, unlike the Deuteronomists, P did not seem to have envisaged a special “place” where Yahweh could set his name. In P’s vision, Yahweh has no fixed abode: his “glory” comes and goes and his “place” is with the community. For P, Israel became a people when Yahweh decided to live among them. He believed that this accompanying Presence was as important as the Law: he made Yahweh reveal the plan of his portable Tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as he revealed the Torah. Again, P’s was a consoling vision: it assured the exiles that Yahweh could be with his people wherever they were, even in the chaos of exile. Had he not already moved about with them in the desolate wasteland of Sinai?

The priests of Jerusalem had probably always had their own esoteric law: P’s chronicle was an attempt to popularize this and make it available to the laity. Because their old world had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the exiles had to build a new one. The creation was central to P’s vision, but he jettisoned the old combat myths, which were so closely associated with temples and fixed holy places. Instead he concentrated on the essence of those stories: the ordering of chaos to create a cosmos. In P’s creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, Yahweh brings the world into being without fighting a mortal battle with Leviathan, the sea monster. Instead, he peacefully separates one element of the primal tohu vohu from all others. Thus he separates night from day, light from darkness, sea from dry land. Boundaries are set up and each component of the cosmos is given its special place. The same separation and creative ordering can be discerned in the Torah, as described by P. When the Israelites were commanded to separate milk from meat in their diet or the Sabbath from the rest of the week, they were imitating Yahweh’s creative actions at the beginning of time. It was a new type of ritual and imitatio dei which did not require a temple or an elaborate liturgy but could be performed by men and women in the apparently humdrum ordering of their daily lives. By this ritual repetition of the divine creativity, they were building a new world and bringing order to their disrupted and dislocated lives in exile.

Many of the commandments (mitzvoth) are concerned with putting things in their correct place. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown that the beings and objects labeled “unclean” in the priestly code have stepped outside their proper category and invaded a realm that is not their own. “Filth” is something in the wrong place, whether an alien god in Yahweh’s temple or mildew on clothes, something which has left the world of nature and penetrated the realm of human culture. Death is the greatest impurity of all, since it is the most dramatic reminder of the fragility of culture and our inability to control and order the world.

(#litres_trial_promo) By living in an ordered cosmos, Israelites would build the kind of world imagined by Ezekiel, centered on the God in their midst. While the Temple had stood in Jerusalem, it had given them access to the sacred. Now the mitzvoth would restore the intimacy that Adam and Eve had enjoyed with Yahweh when he had walked with them in the Garden. By means of the mitzvoth, the exiled Judaeans would create a new holy place which kept the confusion and anomaly of chaos at bay. But P was not simply concerned with ritual purity: crucial to his Holiness Code were the mitzvoth relating to the treatment of other human beings. Alongside the laws about worship and agriculture in the Holy Land are such stern commandments as these:

You must not steal nor deal deceitfully or fraudulently with your neighbor.…

You must not be guilty of unjust verdicts. You must neither be partial to the little man nor overawed by the great.…

You must not slander your own people, and you must not jeopardize your neighbor’s life.

You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart.…

You must not exact vengeance, nor must you bear a grudge against the children of your people. You must love your neighbor as yourself.

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If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him … You must count him as one of your countrymen and love him as yourself-—for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.

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Social justice had always been the concomitant to the devotion to a holy place and to temple ritual: in the Canaanite myths, the Zion cult and the oracles of the prophets. P goes further: there must be not only justice but love, and this compassion must also extend to people who do not belong to the House of Israel. The Goyim might be off Ezekiel’s map of holiness, but they must be included in the ambit of Israel’s love and social concern.

As the memory of the Temple became idealized in exile, the priests acquired a new prestige. Both P and Ezekiel stressed the role of the priesthood in the community. Originally there had been no priestly caste in Israel; David and Solomon had both performed priestly functions. But gradually the Temple service and the interpretation of the Law had been assigned to the tribe of Levi, who were supposed to have carried the Ark in the wilderness. Ezekiel narrowed this down still further. Because the Levites had condoned the idolatry in the Temple, they were demoted to a subsidiary role. Henceforth they would perform only menial tasks in the new Temple, such as preparing the animals for sacrifice, singing in choir, and keeping watch at the Temple gates. Only those priests who were direct descendants of Zadok would be allowed to enter the Temple buildings and perform the liturgy.

(#litres_trial_promo) This injunction would be the cause of much future strife in Jerusalem, and it is ironic that the authentic traditions of Israel were to be enshrined in the House of Zadok the Jebusite. The more exclusive nature of the priesthood reflected the growing transcendence of God, whose sanctity was more dangerous than ever to the uninitiated and unwary. Both P and Ezekiel gave detailed instructions regarding the behavior of the priests in the sanctuary of Yahweh. When they entered the Hekhal, for example, they must change their clothes, since they were passing to a realm of sanctity that demanded a higher standard of purity. The high priest alone was permitted to enter the Devir, and that only once a year.

(#litres_trial_promo) The new regulations enhanced the Israelites’ sense of the holiness of Yahweh, who was a reality that was entirely separate from all other beings and could not be approached in the same way.

It is a striking fact that these elaborate descriptions of the sanctuary, its liturgy, and the priesthood were evolved at a time when there was no hope of their being implemented. The Temple was in ruins, but the most creative exiles imagined it as a fully functioning institution and drew up an intricate body of legislation to regulate it. In Chapter 8 we shall see that the rabbis did the same. Thus the most detailed Jewish texts regarding sacred space and the sanctity of Jerusalem describe a situation that no longer existed at the time of writing. “Jerusalem” had become an internalized value for the exiled Judaeans: it was an image of a salvation that could be achieved far from the physical city in the desolate territory of Judah. At about the same time in India, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, discovered that it was possible to enter into the ultimate reality by the practice of meditation and compassion: it was no longer essential to walk into a temple or other sacred area to attain this transcendent dimension. In the spirituality of the Axial Age it was sometimes possible to bypass the symbols and experience the sacred in the depths of the self. We have no idea how their contemporaries understood the writings of Ezekiel and P. Doubtless they hoped that one day the Temple would be rebuilt and Jerusalem restored to them. Yet it remains true that when they finally had the chance to return to Jerusalem, most of the exiles elected to stay in Babylon. They did not feel that their physical presence in Jerusalem was necessary, since they had learned to apprehend the values of Zion in a new way. The religion that we know as Judaism originated not in Judaea but in the diaspora and would be conveyed to the Holy Land in the future by such emissaries from Babylon as Nehemiah, Ezra, and Hillel.

Ezekiel and P had both been able to look beyond the earthly symbols of their faith to the eternal reality to which they pointed. Neither mentioned Jerusalem directly in their vision of the future, and P concluded his narrative on the threshold of the Promised Land. Their vision was essentially utopian, and perhaps they did not expect it to be fulfilled in their own lifetime. Their attitude to Jerusalem may have been similar to its use in the Passover seder today, where the words “Next year in Jerusalem!” always refer to the future messianic age and not to the earthly city. When Ezekiel imagined the return to Zion, he looked forward to a spiritual transformation: Yahweh would give his people “a new heart” and “a new spirit.” In the same way, Jeremiah had foretold that one day the Law would no longer be inscribed on stone tablets but deep in the hearts of the people.

(#litres_trial_promo) If they did look forward to a redemption, the architects of the new Judaism did not believe that it would be accomplished by a political program alone. They understood that salvation meant more than a new Temple and a new city: these could only be symbols of a more profound liberation.

Yet suddenly it seemed that political redemption was at hand. It might indeed be possible for the Judaean exiles to return to the land of their fathers and rebuild Jerusalem. People in Babylon who were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the rule of King Nabonidus, the successor of Nebuchadnezzar, were watching the career of Cyrus II, the young King of Persia, with much interest. Since 550, when he had conquered the Kingdom of Medea, he had been steadily building a vast empire for himself, and by 541 Babylon was entirely surrounded by Cyrus’s territory. The priests of Marduk were especially heartened by Cyrus’s propaganda, since they felt that Nabonidus had neglected their cult. Cyrus, on the other hand, promised that he would restore the temples of the empire and honor the gods. He would rebuild the ruined cities and restore a universal peace in his domains. This message also appealed to the anonymous Judaean prophet who is usually known as Second Isaiah. He hailed Cyrus as the Messiah: he had been anointed by Yahweh for the special task of rebuilding Jerusalem and its Temple. Second Isaiah turned instinctively to the old myths and liturgy of Zion. Through his instrument Cyrus, Yahweh would initiate a new creation and a new exodus. He would overcome the current enemies of Israel as he had once overcome Leviathan and Rahab, and the Judaean exiles would return to Zion through the desert, which had lost its demonic power.

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This return would have implications for the whole of humanity: the returning exiles would be the pioneers of a new world order. Once they had returned to Jerusalem, they would at once rebuild the Temple and the “glory” of Yahweh would return to its holy mountain. Once again, he would be enthroned in his own city “in the sight of all the nations.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The Jerusalem liturgy had long proclaimed that Yahweh was not only the king of Israel but the king of the whole world. Now, thanks to Cyrus, this was about to become a demonstrable reality. The other gods were cowering in terror: Bel and Nebo—important Babylonian deities—were cringing; their effigies were being carted off ignominiously on the backs of common beasts of burden.

(#litres_trial_promo) Those foreign gods who had seemed to lord it over Yahweh had been made redundant. Henceforth all the nations of the world—Egypt, Cush, Sheba—would be forced to submit to Israel, dragged to Jerusalem in chains and forced to admit:

With you alone is God, and he has no rival:

there is no other god.

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The Zion liturgy had always asserted that Yahweh was the only god who counted; with Second Isaiah that insight had developed into an unequivocal monotheism. As the setting for this world triumph, Jerusalem would be more glorious than ever before. It would glitter with precious stones: rubies on the battlements, crystal on the gates, and the city walls would be encrusted with jewels—a splendor that amply demonstrated the integrity and sanctity of the city within.

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These hopes were brought one step nearer to fulfillment in the autumn of 539, when Cyrus’s army defeated the Babylonians at Opis on the River Tigris. A month later, Cyrus entered Babylon and was enthroned as the representative of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila. At once he carried out what he had promised. Between September and August 538, all the effigies of the Assyrian gods which had been captured by the Babylonians were returned to their native cities and their temples were rebuilt. At the same time, Cyrus issued a decree stating that the Temple of Jerusalem should be rebuilt and its vessels and cultic furniture restored. Cyrus’s Persian empire was run along entirely different lines from the empires of Assyria and Babylon. He gave his subjects a certain autonomy because it was cheaper and more efficient: there would be less resentment and rebellion. Rebuilding the temples of the gods was one of the chief duties of any king, and Cyrus probably believed that he would not only earn the gratitude of his subjects but also win divine favor.

Accordingly, some months after his coronation in Babylon, Cyrus handed over the gold and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had confiscated from the Jerusalem Temple to one Sheshbazzar, a “prince” (nasi) of Judah. He set out with 42,360 Judaeans, together with their servants and two hundred singers, for the Temple.

(#litres_trial_promo) If the returning exiles had left Babylon with the prophecies of the Second Isaiah ringing in their ears, they must have come down to earth very quickly when they arrived in Judah. Most of them had been born in exile and had grown up amid the magnificence and sophistication of Babylonia. Judah must have seemed a bleak, alien place. There could be no question of building a new Temple immediately. First the returning exiles had to establish a viable community in the desolation. Few of them actually stayed in Jerusalem, which was still in ruins, and the majority settled in more comfortable parts of Judah and Samerina. Some of those who stayed may have settled in the old city, while others established themselves in the countryside south of Jerusalem, which had remained uninhabited since 586.

We hear nothing more about the Golah, the community of exiles, until 520, the second year of the reign of Darius, King of Persia. By this time Sheshbazzar was no longer in charge of the Golah in Judah: we have no idea what happened to him. The building work had come to a standstill, but enthusiasm revived when, shortly after Darius’s accession, Zerubbabel, the grandson of King Jehoiachin, arrived in Jerusalem from Babylon with Joshua, the grandson of the last chief priest to officiate in the old Temple. Zerubbabel had been appointed high commissioner (peha) of the province of Judah. He was the representative of the Persian government, but he was also a scion of the House of David, and this put new heart into the Golah. All the immigrants gathered together in Jerusalem to build a new altar on the site of the old, and when it was finished, they began to offer sacrifice and observe the traditional festivals there. But then the building stalled again. Life was still a struggle in Jerusalem: the harvests had been bad, the economy deplorable, and it was difficult to be enthusiastic about a Temple when there was not enough to eat. But in August 520 the prophet Haggai told the immigrants that their priorities were all wrong. The harvests could not improve until the Temple had been built: the House of Yahweh had always been the source of the fertility of the Promised Land. What did they mean by building houses for themselves and leaving Yahweh’s dwelling place in ruins?