A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

(#litres_trial_promo) Duly chastened, the Golah went back to work.

The foundations of the Second Temple were finally laid by the autumn of 520. On the feast of Sukkoth, they were rededicated in a special ceremony. The priests processed into the sacred area, followed by the Levites, who were singing psalms and clashing cymbals. But some of them were old enough to remember the magnificent Temple of Solomon, and when they saw the modest site of its successor they burst into tears.

(#litres_trial_promo) From the very start, the Second Temple was a disappointment and an anticlimax for many of the people. Haggai tried to boost morale: he assured them that the Second Temple would be greater than the old. Soon Yahweh would rule the world, as Second Isaiah had foretold. Zerubbabel would be the Messiah, ruling all the Goyim on Yahweh’s behalf.

(#litres_trial_promo) Haggai’s colleague Zechariah agreed. He looked forward to the day when Yahweh would come back to dwell on Zion and establish his reign through the two messiahs: Zerubbabel the king and Joshua the priest. It was important not to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, so that the city would be able to accommodate the vast numbers of people who would shortly flock to live there.

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But not everybody shared this vision of an open city. As soon as the people of Samerina, in the old northern Kingdom of Israel, found that work on Yahweh’s new Temple was seriously under way, they came to Zerubbabel and offered their services. The Chronicler tells us that they were the descendants of the foreigners who had been settled in the country by the Assyrians in 722. Some would also have been Israelites, members of the ten northern tribes, and others Judaeans, the children of those who had stayed behind in 586. Naturally these Yahwists wished to help with the rebuilding of Zion. Zerubbabel, however, brusquely refused.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Golah alone constituted the “true” Israel; they alone had been commissioned by Cyrus to rebuild the Temple. Thereafter these other Yahwists were seen not as brothers but as “enemies,” known collectively as the Am Ha-Aretz, the “people of the land.” In Babylon, Ezekiel and P had seen all the twelve tribes as members of Israel and worthy of holiness. Only the Goyim, the gentile nations, were excluded from the sacred area. But the returning exiles had an even narrower perspective. The Am Ha-Aretz were regarded as “strangers,” but the exiles were not prepared to welcome them into their city as the Holiness Code had enjoined. Consequently, instead of bringing peace to the country, the new Jerusalem became a new bone of contention in the Holy Land. The biblical authors tell us that henceforth the Am Ha-Aretz “set out to dishearten and frighten the Judaeans from building any further.”

(#litres_trial_promo) They tried to enlist the support of Persian officials, and on one occasion in about 486 the governor of Samerina wrote to warn King Xerxes that the Judaeans were building the walls of Jerusalem without permission. In the ancient world, this was usually regarded as an act of rebellion against the imperial power, and the work was forcibly stopped until Cyrus’s original decree was discovered in the royal archive at Ecbatana.

Meanwhile the building of the Second Temple continued slowly. We hear no more of Zerubbabel after his rejection of the Am Ha-Aretz. Perhaps the messianic hopes of Haggai and Zechariah had alarmed the Persian government. He could have been removed from office when King Darius passed through the country in 519. No member of the House of David was appointed peha of the subprovince of Judah again. But despite the failure of this messianic dream, the immigrants did succeed in completing their Temple on 23 Adar (March) 515. It was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, of course, to ensure continuity with its sacred traditions. It also reproduced the old tripartite plan of Ulam, Hekhal, and Devir. It was separated from the city by a stone wall: a double gateway led into an outer court surrounded by various offices, storehouses, and apartments for the priests, which were built into the walls. Another wall separated this courtyard from an inner court where the altar of sacrifice stood, made of white, unhewn stone. This time, however, there was no royal palace on the Zion acropolis, since Judah no longer had a king. Another crucial difference was that the Devir was now empty, as the Ark of the Covenant had vanished without trace. The vacancy symbolized the transcendence of Yahweh, who could not be represented by any human imagery, but others may have felt that it reflected his seeming absence from this new Temple. The extravagant hopes of the Second Isaiah were not fulfilled. If Yahweh’s “glory” did come and take up residence in the Devir, nobody would have known it. There was no dramatic revelation to the Goyim, and the gentile nations did not troop to Jerusalem in chains. There was a new sense of God’s immense distance from the world, and in these first years of the Second Temple the very idea that the transcendent Deity could dwell in a house seemed increasingly ridiculous:

Thus says Yahweh:

With heaven my throne

and earth my footstool

what house could you build me?

what place could you make for my rest?

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All people could do was to hope against hope that Yahweh would condescend to come down to meet them.

Instead of being drawn to splendid temples as in the past, Yahweh was more attracted these days by a “humbled and contrite spirit.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The cult of the First Temple had been noisy, joyful, and tumultuous. Worship in the Second Temple tended to be quiet and sober. In exile, the Golah had become aware that its own sins had been responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, and the cult reflected the “broken and crushed heart” of the Golah. This was especially apparent in the new festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the chief priest symbolically laid the sins of the people onto a goat, which was then driven out into the desert. But this enabled Israel to approach the sacred once more. Yom Kippur was the one day in the year when the chief priest entered the Devir as the people’s representative. The element of expiation was also evident in the sacrifices that were offered daily in the Temple court. The people would bring bulls, sheep, goats, or pigeons as “guilt” or “sin” offerings, according to their means. They would lay their hands on the animal’s head as a symbol of its surrender to Yahweh. After the beast had been killed, parts of it were given to the person who offered it, and he or she would share it with family and friends. The communion feast on earth mirrored the restored harmony with the divine.

Even though Yahweh never returned to Zion in the way that Second Isaiah had predicted, people continued to dream of the day when he would create “a new heaven and a new earth” in Jerusalem. The old hopes did not die, and Jerusalem became a symbol of that final salvation: integration, harmony, intimacy with God, and a return to paradise. The New Jerusalem would be like no other city: everybody would live a long and happy life there; everybody would be settled in his own place. There would be no weeping in the city, and the pain of the past would be forgotten. The gentiles would be astonished by the city of peace, which would establish life as it had been meant to be.

(#litres_trial_promo) But other people were more disillusioned. There were social problems in the city, some prophets pointed out, and the inhabitants still flirted with the old paganism.

(#litres_trial_promo) There were worries about the new exclusive attitude of the Golah: should not the City of God be open to everybody, as Zechariah had suggested? Perhaps Jerusalem should open its doors to foreigners, outcasts, and eunuchs—people regarded as “unclean” by the priests. Yahweh had proclaimed, “My house will be a house of prayer for all the peoples”: one day he would bring these outsiders into the city and let them sacrifice to him on Mount Zion.

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Yet in the fifth century, there seemed little chance of Jerusalem’s becoming a cult center for either Judaeans or gentiles. The city was still largely in ruinous condition and underpopulated. Jerusalem might even have suffered fresh damage in 458 during the disturbances that broke out all over the Persian empire when King Xerxes ascended the throne. In about 445 the news of the city’s plight reached Susa, the Persian capital, and shocked the community of Judaeans there. One of the leading members of this community was Nehemiah, who held the post of cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I. He was so distressed to hear of the humiliation of the Golah in Jerusalem, whose walls were still in ruins, that he wept for several days in penitence for the sins that his people and family had committed, which had caused this calamitous state of affairs. Then he begged the king to allow him to go to Judah and rebuild the city of his ancestors. The king granted his request and appointed Nehemiah the peha of Judah, giving him letters of recommendation to the other governors in the region and promising him access to timber and other building materials from the royal park.

(#litres_trial_promo) Artaxerxes probably hoped that Nehemiah would be able to bring stability to Judah: a reliable Persian bastion so near to Egypt would enhance the security of his empire.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah consist of a number of unrelated documents, which an editor has attempted to string together. He thought that Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries and makes Ezra arrive in Jerusalem before Nehemiah. But there are good reasons for dating Ezra’s mission much later, in 398, during the reign of King Artaxerxes II.

(#litres_trial_promo) So Nehemiah probably set out from Susa in about 445. He would have regarded his post as a religious challenge, since the building of fortifications had long been a sacred duty in the Near East. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he stayed in the city incognito for three days and then went out secretly one night to ride around the walls. He paints a grim picture of the old fortifications “with their gaps and burned-out gates.” At one point he could not even find a path for his horse.

(#litres_trial_promo) The next day he made himself known to the elders, urging them to put an end to this shame and indignity. The whole city responded in a massive cooperative effort, priests and laity working side by side, and managed to erect new walls for the city in a record fifty-two days. It was a dangerous task. By this time relations with the Am Ha-Aretz had seriously deteriorated, and Nehemiah constantly had to contend with the machinations of some of the local dynasts: Sanballat, governor of Samerina; Tobiah, one of his officials; and Gershen, governor of Edom. The situation was so tense that the builders constantly feared attack: “each did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other. And as each builder worked, he wore his sword at his side.”

(#litres_trial_promo) There was no attempt to fortify the old Mishneh suburb on the Western Hill. Nehemiah’s city simply comprised the old ’Ir David on the Ophel. From the biblical text we can see the way it was organized. The markets were ranged along the western wall of the city; the priests and temple servants lived next to the Temple on the site of the old Ophel fortress. Artisans and craftsmen inhabited the southeastern quarters, while the military were concentrated in the northern district, where the city was most vulnerable. Nehemiah also built a citadel, probably northeast of the Temple on the site later occupied by the Hasmonean and Herodian fortresses. On 25 Elul (early September) 445 the new walls were dedicated: Levites and choristers from the surrounding villages were divided into two huge choirs and processed in contrary directions around the new walls, singing psalms, before filing together into the Temple courts; the music and shouts of rejoicing could be heard from miles away.

Nehemiah had brought new hope to Jerusalem, but it was still not much of a city. No new families were growing up there, and the people were reluctant to move in. Constantly fearing attack from the Am Ha-Aretz, the citizens had to organize themselves into a watch to guard the new gates. Nehemiah managed to bring the population up to about ten thousand by organizing a lottery whereby every tenth man had to move into the city.

(#litres_trial_promo) The settlers who “volunteered” in this way were regarded as performing a pious action. During Nehemiah’s twelve years in Jerusalem, the city gradually superseded Mizpah as the capital of the province: he built a residence for the peha in Jerusalem. Gradually the city became the center of the life of the Golah in Judah. But there was a power struggle going on within Jerusalem itself: some of the priests had close links with the Am Ha-Aretz, including Sanballat, who seems to have been the most dangerous of Nehemiah’s opponents. He also had to curb the greed of some of the wealthier citizens, who were seizing the sons and daughters, vineyards and fields of the poor, when they proved unable to pay off their loans with interest. With considerable popular support, Nehemiah forced the nobles and officials to take a solemn oath to stop charging interest.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was an attempt to make Jerusalem a refuge for the poor once again, but it naturally antagonized the upper classes, who tended to turn more and more to their allies in the neighboring territory. There seems to have been considerable tension in the country. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gershen could see perfectly well that fortifying the city was a bid for political control and preeminence.

In his second term of office, which began in about 432, Nehemiah also made new legislation to prevent members of the Golah from marrying the local people. He expelled the chief priest Eliashib, who was married to Sanballat’s daughter; Eliashib took up residence in Samaria, where he was probably joined by other malcontents from the priestly caste. The question of mixed marriage became an increasingly contentious issue in Jerusalem. Nehemiah’s legislation was not designed to ensure the purity of the race in the twentieth-century sense but was an attempt to express the new sacred geography developed in exile by such prophets as Ezekiel in social terms: the Golah must live apart from the Goyim, as befitted God’s holy people. In Babylon, the exiles had been concerned to preserve a distinct Judaean identity, centered on the presence of Yahweh in Israel. The same centripetal pull was also evident in social life. The Torah obliged the people of Israel to marry beyond the basic family unit, but it was considered better to marry people who were as closely related as was legally possible. People inside the family were regarded as acceptable marriage partners, while those outside were undesirable. These series of concentric circles stopped at the border of Israel: the Goyim, who were off the holiness map, were literally beyond the pale.

(#litres_trial_promo) A marriage “outside” was equivalent to leaving the sacred enclave and going out into the godless wilderness, where the scapegoat was dispatched on Yom Kippur. It was an attempt to make Israel a “holy” and separate people and defined the Judaean identity by marking out the people who were “outside” and “not-like-us.” But in Judah, the Golah were being asked to reject people who had once been members of the Israelite family but had now been pushed into the role of strangers and enemies.

During the fifth century, the exiles in Babylon had been engaged in a remarkable religious reform, which resulted in the religion of Judaism. The question of identity was still crucial: the exiles had stopped giving their children Babylonian names, preferring such names as Shabbetai, which reflected their new religious symbols. The Torah now played a central role in their religious lives and had taken the place of the Temple. By observing the mitzvoth, the Judaeans of Babylon could make themselves a sacred community which enshrined the divine Presence and established God’s order on earth. But that meant that the ordinary Jews had to be instructed in the intricacies of the Torah by experts. One of these was Ezra, who “had devoted himself to the study of the Law of Yahweh, to practicing it and to teaching Israel its laws and customs.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He may also have been the minister for Jewish affairs at the Persian court. In 398 he was sent by Artaxerxes II to Judah with a fourfold task. He was to accompany a party of Jews who wished to return to their homeland; he would take gifts from the Jewish community in Babylon to the Temple; once he had arrived in Judah, he was “to conduct an inquiry into the situation in Judah and Jerusalem on the basis of the law of [their] god”; and finally, he had to instruct the Jews in the Levant in this law.

(#litres_trial_promo) The laws of other subject peoples were under review at this time. Artaxerxes was supporting the cult of the Jewish Temple, which was central to the life of the province of Judah. He had to be sure that it was compatible with the interests and security of the empire. As a legal expert in Babylon, Ezra may have worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between the Torah and the Persian legal system, and Artaxerxes needed to be certain that this law was also operating in Judah. Ezra would promulgate the Torah in Jerusalem and make it the official law of the land.

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The biblical writer sees Ezra’s mission as a turning point in the history of his people. Ezra’s journey to Judah is described as a new exodus and Ezra himself, the lawgiver, as a new Moses. He arrived in Jerusalem in triumph, but was appalled by what he found: priests and Levites were still colluding with the Am Ha-Aretz and continued to take foreign wives. The people of Jerusalem were chastened to see the emissary of the king tear his hair and sit down in the street in the posture of mourning for a whole day. Then he summoned all the members of the Golah to a meeting in Jerusalem: anybody who did not attend would be cast out of the community and have his property confiscated. On New Year’s Day (September/October), Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and, standing on a wooden dais and surrounded by the leading citizens, he read the Law to the assembled crowd, explaining it as he went along.

(#litres_trial_promo) We have no idea what he actually read to them: was it the whole of the Pentateuch, the Book of Deuteronomy, or the Holiness Code? Whatever its content, Ezra’s Law was clearly a shock to the people, who had obviously never heard it before. They were so tearful that Ezra had to remind them that this was a festival day, and he read aloud the passage from the Torah which commanded the Israelites to live in special booths during the month of Sukkoth, in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the wilderness. He sent the people into the hills to pick branches of myrtle, olive, pine, and palm, and soon Jerusalem was transformed by the leafy shelters that appeared all over the city. The new festival had replaced the old Jebusite rites of Sukkoth; now a new interpretation linked it firmly to the Exodus traditions. There was a carnival atmosphere in the city during the next seven days, and every evening the people assembled to listen to Ezra’s exposition of the Law.

The next assembly was a more somber occasion.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was held in the square in front of the Temple, and the people stood trembling as the torrential winter rains deluged the city. Ezra commanded them to send away their foreign wives, and special committees were set up to examine individual cases. Women and children were sent away from the Golah to join the Am Ha-Aretz. Membership of Israel was now confined to the descendants of those who had been exiled to Babylon and to those who were prepared to submit to the Torah, which had now become the official law code of Jerusalem. The lament of the people who had now become outcasts may have been preserved for us in the book of Isaiah:

For Abraham does not own us

and Israel does not acknowledge us;

yet you, Yahweh, yourself are our father.…

We have long been like people who do not rule,

people who do not bear your name.

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A ruthless tendency to exclude other people would henceforth become a characteristic of the history of Jerusalem, even though this ran strongly counter to some of Israel’s most important traditions. As one might expect, there were many people who opposed this new tendency. They did not want to sever all relations with the people of Samerina and the surrounding countries. They feared that Jerusalem would become parochial and introverted and that the city would suffer economically. But others responded to the new legislation with enthusiasm. We know very little about Jerusalem in the generations succeeding Ezra, but within the next eight generations the Law had become as central as the Temple to the spirituality of the people of Judah. When these two sacred values were imperiled, there was a crisis in Jerusalem which nearly resulted in the city’s losing its new Jewish identity.

6 ANTIOCH IN JUDAEA (#ulink_6101b63e-1872-5d40-8fc3-03b84ecd81bc)

WHEN ALEXANDER OF MACEDON defeated Darius III, King of Persia, beside the River Issus in October 333 BCE, the Jews of Jerusalem were shocked, because they had been loyal vassals of Persia for over two hundred years. Josephus Flavius, the first-century Jewish historian, tells us that the high priest refused at first to submit to Alexander because he had taken a vow to remain loyal to the last Persian king but, as a result of a dream, capitulated when Alexander promised that throughout his empire the Jews would continue to be governed according to their own Law.