A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

This book traces the explosive history of Jerusalem, and the atrocities that have been committed in its name. But it also shows that for centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims were able to live amicably together there. Peaceful coexistence in the Holy City is not an impossible dream. If Jerusalem has become the symbolic heart of the conflict that now threatens the whole world, a solution is a matter of the highest importance. It will require imagination and commitment to find a solution to the problem of Jerusalem; everybody will have to make sacrifices; everybody will have to compromise in the interests of peace. But people were able to share the Holy City once, and they can therefore do it again.

Introduction (#ulink_a8f95bfb-0e90-5b63-87b5-a2d79cc09246)

In Jerusalem, more than in any other place I have visited, history is a dimension of the present. Perhaps this is so in any disputed territory, but it struck me forcibly the first time I went to work in Jerusalem in 1983. First, I was surprised by the strength of my own reaction to the city. It was strange to be walking around a place that had been an imaginative reality in my life ever since I was a small child and had been told tales of King David or Jesus. As a young nun, I was taught to begin my morning meditation by picturing the biblical scene I was about to contemplate, and so conjured up my own image of the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, or the Via Dolorosa. Now that I was going about my daily business among these very sites, I discovered that the real city was a far more tumultuous and confusing place. I had, for example, to take in the fact that Jerusalem was clearly very important to Jews and Muslims too. When I saw caftaned Jews or tough Israeli soldiers kissing the stones of the Western Wall or watched the crowds of Muslim families surging through the streets in their best clothes for Friday prayers at the Haram al-Sharif, I became aware for the first time of the challenge of religious pluralism. People could see the same symbol in entirely different ways. There was no doubting the attachment of any of these people to their holy city, yet they had been quite absent from my Jerusalem. Still, the city remained mine as well: my old images of biblical scenes were a constant counterpoint to my firsthand experience of twentieth-century Jerusalem. Associated with some of the most momentous events of my life, Jerusalem was somehow built into my own identity.

Yet as a British citizen, I had no political claim to the city, unlike my new colleagues and friends in Jerusalem. Here again, as Israelis and Palestinians presented their arguments to me, I was struck by the vivid immediacy of past events. All could cite, in sometimes minute detail, the events leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 or the Six-Day War in 1967. Frequently I noted how these depictions of the past centered on the question of who had done what first. Who had been the first to resort to violence, the Zionists or the Arabs? Who had first noticed the potential of Palestine and developed the country? Who had lived in Jerusalem first, the Jews or the Palestinians? When they discussed the troubled present, both Israelis and Palestinians turned instinctively to the past, their polemic coursing easily from the Bronze Age through the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Again, when Israelis and Palestinians proudly showed me around their city, the very monuments were drawn into the conflict.

On my first morning in Jerusalem, I was instructed by my Israeli colleagues how to spot the stones used by King Herod, with their distinctively beveled edges. They seemed ubiquitous and a perpetual reminder of a Jewish commitment to Jerusalem that could be dated back (in this case) to the first century BCE—long before Islam appeared on the scene. Constantly, as we passed construction crews in the Old City, I was told how Jerusalem had been utterly neglected by the Ottomans when they had ruled the city. It had come to life again only in the nineteenth century, thanks, largely, to Jewish investment—look at the windmill built by Sir Moses Montefiore and the hospitals funded by the Rothschild family. It was due to Israel that the city was thriving as never before.

My Palestinian friends showed me a very different Jerusalem. They pointed out the splendors of the haram al-Sharif and the exquisite madāris, Muslim schools, built around its borders by the Mamluks as evidence of the Muslim commitment to Jerusalem. They took me to the shrine of Nebī Musa near Jericho, built to defend Jerusalem against the Christians, and the extraordinary Umayyad palaces nearby. When we drove through Bethlehem once, my Palestinian host stopped the car beside Rachel’s roadside tomb to point out passionately that the Palestinians had cared for this Jewish shrine for centuries—a pious devotion for which they had been ill rewarded.

One word kept recurring throughout. Even the most secular Israelis and Palestinians pointed out that Jerusalem was “holy” to their people. The Palestinians even called the city al-Quds, “the Holy,” though the Israelis scornfully waved this aside, pointing out that Jerusalem had been a holy city for Jews first, and that it had never been as important to the Muslims as Mecca and Medina. But what did the word “holy” mean in this context? How could a mere city, full of fallible human beings and teeming with the most unholy activities, be sacred? Why did those Jews who professed a militant atheism care about the holy city and feel so possessive about the Western Wall? Why should an unbelieving Arab be moved to tears the first time he stood in the Mosque of al-Aqsā? I could see why the city was holy to Christians, since Jerusalem had been the scene of Jesus’s death and resurrection: it had witnessed the birth of the faith. But the formative events of both Judaism and Islam had happened far away from Jerusalem, in the Sinai Peninsula or the Arabian Hijaz. Why, for example, was Mount Zion in Jerusalem a holy place for Jews instead of Mount Sinai, where God had given the Law to Moses and made his covenant with Israel? Clearly, I had been wrong to assume that the holiness of a city depended upon its associations with the events of salvation history, the mythical account of God’s intervention in the affairs of humanity. It was to find out what a holy city was that I decided to write this book.

What I have discovered is that even though the word “holy” is bandied around freely in connection with Jerusalem, as though its meaning were self-evident, it is in fact quite complex. Each one of the three monotheistic religions has developed traditions about the city that are remarkably similar. Furthermore, the devotion to a holy place or a holy city is a near-universal phenomenon. Historians of religion believe that it is one of the earliest manifestations of faith in all cultures. People have developed what has been called a sacred geography that has nothing to do with a scientific map of the world but which charts their interior life. Earthly cities, groves, and mountains have become symbols of this spirituality, which is so omnipresent that it seems to answer a profound human need, whatever our beliefs about “God” or the supernatural. Jerusalem has—for different reasons—become central to the sacred geography of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This makes it very difficult for them to see the city objectively, because it has become bound up with their conception of themselves and the ultimate reality—sometimes called “God” or the sacred—that gives our mundane life meaning and value.

There are three interconnected concepts that will recur in the following pages. First is the whole notion of God or the sacred. In the Western world, we have tended to view God in a rather anthropomorphic and personalized manner, and as a result, the whole notion of the divine frequently appears incoherent and incredible. Since the word “God” has become discredited to many people because of the naïve and often unacceptable things that have been asserted and done in “his” name, it may be easier to use the term “sacred” instead. When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with the natural world, but that it also goes beyond. However we choose to define it—it has been called God, Brahman, or Nirvana—this transcendence has been a fact of human life. We have all experienced something similar, whatever our theological opinions, when we listen to a great piece of music or hear a beautiful poem and feel touched within and lifted, momentarily, beyond ourselves. We tend to seek out this experience, and if we do not find it in one setting—in a church or synagogue, for example—we will look elsewhere. The sacred has been experienced in many ways: it has inspired fear, awe, exuberance, peace, dread, and compelling moral activity. It represents a fuller, enhanced existence that will complete us. It is not merely felt as a force “out there” but can also be sensed in the depths of our own being. But like any aesthetic experience, the sense of the sacred needs to be cultivated. In our modern secular society, this has not always been a priority, and so, like any unused capacity, it has tended to wither away. In more traditional societies, the ability to apprehend the sacred has been regarded as of crucial importance. Indeed, without this sense of the divine, people often felt that life was not worth living.

This is partly because human beings have always experienced the world as such a painful place. We are the victims of natural disasters, of mortality, extinction, and human injustice and cruelty. The religious quest has usually begun with the perception that something has gone wrong, that, as the Buddha put it, “Existence is awry.” Besides the common shocks that flesh is heir to, we all suffer personal distress that makes apparently unimportant setbacks overwhelmingly upsetting. There is a sense of abandonment that makes such experiences as bereavement, divorce, broken friendship, or even losing a beloved object seem, sometimes, part of an underlying and universal ill. Often this interior dis-ease is characterized by a sense of separation. There appears to be something missing from our lives; our existence seems fragmented and incomplete. We have an inchoate feeling that life was not meant to be thus and that we have lost something essential to our well-being—even though we would be hard put to explain this rationally. This sense of loss has surfaced in many ways. It is apparent in the Platonic image of the twin soul from which we have been separated at birth and in the universal myth of the lost paradise. In previous centuries, men and women turned to religion to assuage this pain, finding healing in the experience of the sacred. Today in the West, people sometimes have recourse to psychoanalysis, which has articulated this sense of a primal separation in a more scientific idiom. Thus it is associated with memories of the womb and the traumatic shock of birth. However we choose to see it, this notion of separation and a yearning for some kind of reconciliation lies at the heart of the devotion to a holy place.

The second concept we must discuss is the question of myth. When people have tried to speak about the sacred or about the pain of human existence, they have not been able to express their experience in logical, discursive terms but have had recourse to mythology. Even Freud and Jung, who were the first to chart the so-called scientific quest for the soul, turned to the myths of the classical world or of religion when they tried to describe these interior events, and they made up some new myths of their own. Today the word “myth” has been rather debased in our culture; it is generally used to mean something that is not true. Events are dismissed because they are “only” myths. This is certainly true in the debate about Jerusalem. Palestinians claim that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the Jewish kingdom founded by King David and that no trace of Solomon’s Temple has been found. The Kingdom of Israel is not mentioned in any contemporary text but only in the Bible. It is quite likely, therefore, that it is merely a “myth.” Israelis have also discounted the story of the Prophet MuḤammad’s ascent to heaven from the haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem—a myth that lies at the heart of the Muslim devotion to al-Quds—as demonstrably absurd. But this, I have come to believe, is to miss the point. Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way. Mythology has been well defined as an ancient form of psychology, because it describes the inner reaches of the self which are so mysterious and yet so fascinating to us. Thus the myths of “sacred geography” express truths about the interior life. They touch on the obscure sources of human pain and desire and can thus unleash very powerful emotions. Stories about Jerusalem should not be dismissed because they are “only” myths: they are important precisely because they are myths.

The Jerusalem question is explosive because the city has acquired mythical status. Not surprisingly, people on both sides of the present conflict and in the international community frequently call for a rationalized debate about rights and sovereignty, divorced from all this emotive fiction. It would be nice if this were possible. But it is never safe to say that we have risen above our need for mythology. People have often tried to eradicate myth from religion in the past. Prophets and reformers in ancient Israel, for example, were extremely concerned to separate their faith from the mythology of the indigenous Canaanites. They did not succeed, however. The old stories and legends surfaced again powerfully in the mysticism of Kabbalah, a process that has been described as the triumph of myth over the more rational forms of religion. In the history of Jerusalem we shall see that people turned instinctively toward myth when their lives became particularly troubled and they could find no consolation in a more cerebral ideology. Sometimes outer events seemed so perfectly to express a people’s inner reality that they immediately assumed mythical status and inspired a burst of mythologized enthusiasm. Two such events have been the discovery of the Tomb of Christ in the fourth century and the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967. In both cases, the people concerned thought they had left this primitive way of thinking far behind, but the course of events proved too strong for them. The catastrophes which have befallen the Jewish and the Palestinian people in our own century have been of such magnitude that it has not been surprising that myth has once again come to the fore. For good or ill, therefore, a consideration of the mythology of Jerusalem is essential, if only to illuminate the desires and behavior of people who are affected by this type of spirituality.

The last term that we must consider before embarking on the history of Jerusalem is symbolism. In our scientifically oriented society, we no longer think naturally in terms of images and symbols. We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. This has changed the religious experience for many people in the West, a process that, as we shall see, began in the sixteenth century. We tend to say that something is only a symbol, essentially separate from the more mysterious reality that it represents. This was not so in the premodern world, however. A symbol was seen as partaking in the reality to which it pointed; a religious symbol thus had the power of introducing worshippers to the sacred realm. Throughout history, the sacred has never been experienced directly—except, perhaps, by a very few extraordinary human beings. It has always been felt in something other than itself. Thus the divine has been experienced in a human being—male or female—who becomes an avatar or incarnation of the sacred; it has also been found in a holy text, a law code, or a doctrine. One of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine has been a place. People have sensed the sacred in mountains, groves, cities, and temples. When they have walked into these places, they have felt that they have entered a different dimension, separate from but compatible with the physical world they normally inhabit. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem has been such a symbol of the divine.

This is not something that happens automatically. Once a place has been experienced as sacred in some way and has proved capable of giving people access to the divine, worshippers have devoted a great deal of creative energy to helping others to cultivate this sense of transcendence. We shall see that the architecture of temples, churches, and mosques has been symbolically important, often mapping out the inner journey that a pilgrim must take to reach God. Liturgy and ritual have also heightened this sense of sacred space. In the Protestant West, people have often inherited a mistrust of religious ceremonial, seeing it as so much mumbo-jumbo. But it is probably more accurate to see liturgy as a form of theater, which can provide a powerful experience of the transcendent even in a wholly secular context. In the West, drama had its origins in religion: in the sacred festivals of ancient Greece and the Easter celebrations in the churches and cathedrals of medieval Europe. Myths have also been devised to express the inner meaning of Jerusalem and its various shrines.

One of these myths is what the late Romanian-American scholar Mircea Eliade has called the myth of eternal return, which he found in almost all cultures. According to this mode of thought, all objects that we encounter here on earth have their counterpart in the divine sphere. One can see this myth as an attempt to express the sense that our life here below is somehow incomplete and separated from a fuller and more satisfactory existence elsewhere. All human activities and skills also have a divine prototype: by copying the actions of the gods, people can share in their divine life. This imitatio dei is still observed today. People continue to rest on the Sabbath or eat bread and drink wine in church—actions which are meaningless in themselves—because they believe that in some sense God once did the same. The rituals at a holy place are another symbolic way of imitating the gods and entering their fuller and more potent mode of existence. The same myth is also crucial to the cult of the holy city, which can be seen as the replica of the home of the gods in heaven; a temple is regarded as the reproduction of a particular deity’s celestial palace. By copying its heavenly archetype as minutely as possible, a temple could also house the god here on earth.

In the cold light of rational modernity, such myths appear ridiculous. But these ideas were not worked out first and then applied to a particular “holy” location. They were an attempt to explain an experience. In religion, experience always comes before the theological explanation. People first felt that they had apprehended the sacred in a grove or on a mountain peak. They were sometimes helped to do so by the aesthetic devices of architecture, music, and liturgy, which lifted them beyond themselves. They then sought to explain this experience in the poetic language of mythology or in the symbols of sacred geography. Jerusalem turned out to be one of those locations that “worked” for Jews, Christians, and Muslims because it did seem to introduce them to the divine.

One further remark is necessary. The practices of religion are closely akin to those of art. Both art and religion try to make some ultimate sense of a flawed and tragic world. But religion is different from art because it must have an ethical dimension. Religion can perhaps be described as a moral aesthetic. It is not enough to experience the divine or the transcendent; the experience must then be incarnated in our behavior towards others. All the great religions insist that the test of true spirituality is practical compassion. The Buddha once said that after experiencing enlightenment, a man must leave the mountaintop and return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This also applies to the spirituality of a holy place. Crucial to the cult of Jerusalem from the very first was the importance of practical charity and social justice. The city cannot be holy unless it is also just and compassionate to the weak and vulnerable. But sadly, this moral imperative has often been overlooked. Some of the worst atrocities have occurred when people have put the purity of Jerusalem and the desire to gain access to its great sanctity before the quest for justice and charity.

All these underlying currents have played their part in Jerusalem’s long and turbulent history. This book will not attempt to lay down the law about the future of Jerusalem. That would be a presumption. It is merely an attempt to find out what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have meant when they have said that the city is “holy” to them and to point out some of the implications of Jerusalem’s sanctity in each tradition. This seems just as important as deciding who was in the city first and who, therefore, should own it, especially since the origins of Jerusalem are shrouded in such obscurity.

1 ZION (#ulink_a8b8578a-1914-594c-a0eb-6ac8b76a54e0)

WE KNOW NOTHING about the people who first settled in the hills and valleys that would eventually become the city of Jerusalem. In tombs on the Ophel hill, to the south of the present walls of the Old City, pottery vessels have been found which have been dated to 3200 BCE. This was the time when towns had begun to appear in other parts of Canaan, the modern Israel; in Megiddo, Jericho, Ai, Lachish, and Beth Shan, for example, archaeologists have unearthed temples, houses, workshops, streets, and water conduits. But there is as yet no conclusive evidence that urban life had begun in Jerusalem at that period. Ironically, the city which would be revered as the center of the world by millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims was off the beaten track of ancient Canaan. Situated in the highlands, which were difficult to settle, it was outside the hub of the country. Development in the Early Bronze Age was mainly confined to the coastal plain, the fertile Jezreel Valley, and the Negev, where the Egyptians had established trade depots. Canaan was a potentially rich country: its inhabitants exported wine, oil, honey, bitumen, and grain. It also had strategic importance, linking Asia and Africa and providing a bridge between the civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Phoenicia, and Mesopotamia. But even though the springs around the Ophel hill had always attracted hunters, farmers, and temporary settlers—flints and shards have been found there dating from the Paleolithic Age—Jerusalem, as far as we know, played no part in this early florescence.

In the ancient world, civilization was always a precarious achievement. By about 2300 BCE there were virtually no cities left in Canaan. Because of either climatic change, foreign invasion, or internecine warfare, urban life disappeared. It was also a time of upheaval and instability throughout the Near East. Egypt saw the destruction of what is known as the Old Kingdom (c. 2613–2160 BCE). The Akkadian dynasty of Mesopotamia was overthrown by the Amorites, a Western Semitic people who established a capital at Babylon. Urban sites were abandoned throughout Asia Minor, and Ugarit and Byblos, on the Phoenician coast, were destroyed. For reasons that we do not understand, Syria remained unscathed and nearby towns in northern Canaan, such as Megiddo and Beth Shan, managed to survive longer than their southern neighbors. Yet in all these regions the struggle to create an ordered environment where people could lead a more secure and fulfilled life continued. New cities and new dynasties appeared and old settlements were restored. By the beginning of the second millennium the old towns of Canaan were inhabited once more.

We know very little about life in Canaan at this period. No central government developed in the country. Each town was autonomous, having its own ruler and dominating the surrounding countryside, rather as in Mesopotamia, where civilization had begun. Canaan remained an intensely regional country. There was no large-scale trade or industry, and there were such sharp differences of terrain and climate that the various districts tended to remain distinct and cut off from one another. Few people lived in the highlands, the Judaean steppes, or the Jordan Valley, where the river was not navigable and led nowhere. Communications were difficult, and people did not travel much from one part of the country to another. The main road linking Egypt and Damascus went up the coast from Gaza to Jaffa and then cut inland to avoid the swamps around Mount Carmel toward Megiddo, the Jezreel Valley, and the Sea of Galilee. Naturally these regions remained the most densely populated, and it was this area which interested the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty when they began to extend their influence northward toward Syria during the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE. Canaan, which the Egyptians called “Retinu,” did not actually become a province of Egypt, but the pharaohs dominated the country politically and economically. Sesostris III, for example, did not hesitate to march up the coastal road to subdue local rulers who were becoming too powerful and independent. Even so, the pharaohs showed relatively little interest in other parts of Canaan, and despite the general Egyptian overlordship, towns such as Megiddo, Hazor, and Acco developed into fortified city-states. By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had also begun to penetrate the hill country and built cities there. Shechem became the most powerful of these fortified highland towns: in area it may have been as large as thirty-seven acres, and it controlled a considerable part of the countryside. Cities, such as Hebron and Jerusalem, also developed in the southern hills.

This is the point when Jerusalem can be said to have entered history. In 1961 the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered a wall, nearly six and a half feet thick, running along the eastern slope of the Ophel hill with a large gate near the Gihon Spring. She concluded that this town wall continued around the southern end of the hill and along the western slope. In the north it disappeared under a later city wall. Kenyon also found pottery between the wall and the rock scarp which dated to about 1800 BCE. The city was most vulnerable in the north, and later the citadel of Zion was built there; it is possible that there was also a fortress in the north of the city during the eighteenth century BCE. The walls were built quite low down the eastern slope of the Ophel, possibly to include access to an underground tunnel to the Gihon Spring.

(#litres_trial_promo) The British engineer Charles Warren had discovered this tunnel in 1867: it started at an opening in the rock within the city, descended obliquely, and then plunged vertically to meet the water which had been conveyed from the Gihon by means of another horizontal tunnel. Jugs and pitchers could be lowered down the shaft during a siege. Similar devices have been discovered at Megiddo, Gezer, and Gibeon. Kenyon believed that the shaft was in use during the Bronze Age, but her theory has been disputed: some doubt that the inhabitants would have had the technological skill to build such a system at this stage. But recent geological findings indicate that “Warren’s Shaft,” as it is known, is not entirely man-made; it is a natural sinkhole along a joint in the limestone, which the ancient Jerusalemites could well have modified and enlarged.

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Settlers were probably attracted to the Ophel because of its proximity to the Gihon. The site also had strategic advantages, lying at the point where the foothills of the highlands give way to the Judaean desert. The Ophel could not support a large population—the city covered an area of little more than nine acres—but three steep valleys gave the settlers formidable protection: the Kidron Valley to the east, the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) to the south, and the Central Valley, now largely silted up, which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus called the Tyropoeon Valley, to the west.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even though the town was not one of the most important cities of Canaan, it seems to have come to the attention of the Egyptians. In 1925, sherds were bought in Luxor which, when reassembled, made up about eighty dishes and vases inscribed with an ancient hieratic script. When this was deciphered, the texts were found to contain the names of countries, towns, and rulers alleged to be the enemies of Egypt. These vases would then be smashed in a rite of sympathetic magic designed to bring about the downfall of the recalcitrant vassals. The vases have been dated to the reign of Pharaoh Sesostris III (1878–1842 BCE); they include the names of nineteen Canaanite cities, one of which is “Rushalimum.” This is the first mention of the city in any historical record. The text also names two of its princes, Yq’rm and Shashan. In another of these so-called Execration Texts, thought to have been inscribed a century later, “Rushalimum” is cursed again, but this time the city appears to have only one ruler. From this slender shred of evidence, some scholars have inferred that during the eighteenth century, Jerusalem, like the rest of Canaan, had evolved from a tribal society with a number of chieftains to an urban settlement governed by a single king.

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Here we should pause to consider the name of the city. It seems to have incorporated the name of the Syrian god Shalem, who was identified with the setting sun or the evening star. Canaan may have been dominated politically by Egypt, but in cultural and religious affairs the chief influence was Syria. In Hazor, Megiddo, and Shechem, temples of this period have been unearthed that have clearly been built on a Syrian model. They are constructed according to the same basic plan as the king’s palace, underlining the fact that all rule was seen to derive from the gods. The laity were forbidden to enter the Hekhal, or cult hall, just as they were denied access to the king’s presence. They could glimpse the god’s effigy, which was placed in a niche at the end of the hall, from the courtyard, through the open doors of the Hekhal. No Bronze Age temple has been unearthed in Jerusalem, but the city’s name shows that the inhabitants were also open to Syrian religion. The names of the Jerusalem princes in the Execration Texts indicate that, like the people of Syria, the Jerusalemites were of Western Semitic origin and shared the same worldview.

The name “Rushalimum” can probably be translated as “Shalem has founded.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In the ancient world of the Near East and the Mediterranean, settlement and town-planning were regarded as divine enterprises. The Ophel hill would have appealed to the first colonists because of its water supply and its strategic advantages, but the name of the city shows that the initiative came from the god. At this date, all cities were regarded as holy places, an alien concept for us in the modern West, where the city is often experienced as a godforsaken realm in which religion has an increasingly marginal role. But long before people began to map their world scientifically, they had evolved a sacred geography to define their place in the universe emotionally and spiritually. Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the study of sacred space, pointed out that reverence for a holy place preceded all other speculation about the nature of the world.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is to be found in all cultures and was a primordial religious conviction. The belief that some places were sacred, and hence fit for human habitation, was not based on an intellectual investigation or on any metaphysical speculation into the nature of the cosmos. Instead, when men and women contemplated the world about them, they were drawn irresistibly to some localities which they experienced as radically different from all others. This was an experience that was basic to their view of the world, and it went far deeper than the cerebral level of the mind. Even today our scientific rationalism has not been able to replace the old sacred geography entirely. As we shall see, ancient conceptions of holy topography still affect the history of Jerusalem and have been espoused by people who would not normally consider themselves religious. Men and women have formulated this perception of sacred space in different ways over the centuries, but in their discussion of the special status of a city such as Jerusalem certain themes tend to recur, indicating that they speak to some fundamental human need.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even those who have no interest in any of the traditionally holy cities and have no belief in the supernatural often have special places to which they like to repair. Such sites are “sacred” to us because they are inextricably bound up with our conception of ourselves; they may be associated with a profound experience that transformed our lives, with memories of early childhood, or with a person who was important to us. When we visit such places, we can perhaps recall the experience of enhanced life that we once had there, an experience which momentarily convinced us that despite the distressing and arbitrary nature of much of our mundane existence, it had some ultimate meaning and value, even if we would find it hard to explain this insight in rational terms.

In the ancient world, just as in traditional societies in our own day, people tried to explain their sacred geography by saying that the world had been created by the gods. It was not, therefore, neutral territory: the landscape had something to say to humanity. When they regarded the cosmos, men and women discerned a level of existence which transcended the frailties and limitations that impeded their own lives. This represented a fuller and more powerful dimension, a reality that was at one and the same time other than they and yet deeply familiar. To express their sense of affinity with the sacred realm, they often personified it, imaging it forth in gods and goddesses with personalities similar to their own. Because they sensed this divine element in the natural world, these deities were also associated with the sun, the wind, or the life-giving rain. People told stories about these deities which were not intended to describe events that had actually happened but were a tentative attempt to express the mystery that they experienced in the world. Above all, men and women wanted to live as closely as possible to this transcendent reality. To say that they sought the meaning of life could be misleading, since the phrase suggests a clear formula that sums up the human condition. In fact, the goal of the religious quest has always been an experience, not a message. We want to feel truly alive and to fulfill the potential of our humanity, living in such a way that we are in tune with the deeper currents of existence. This search for superabundant life—symbolized by the potent, immortal gods—has informed all great religions: people wanted to get beyond the mortality and triviality of mundane experience to find a reality that would complement their human nature. In the ancient world, men and women felt that without the possibility of living in contact with this divine element, life was insupportable.

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Hence, as Eliade has shown, they would settle only in places where the sacred had once manifested itself, breaking down the barrier that divided the gods from humanity. Perhaps the god Shalem had revealed himself on the Ophel hill and thus made the place peculiarly his own. People could journey there, knowing that it was possible to make contact with the god in the city that he had marked out for himself. But the sacred did not only erupt into the mundane world in apparitions and epiphanies. Anything that stood out from its surroundings and ran counter to the natural order could be a hierophany, a revelation of the divine. A rock or a valley that was particularly beautiful or majestic might indicate the presence of the sacred because it could not easily be fitted into its surroundings. Its very appearance spoke of something else.

(#litres_trial_promo) The unknown, the alien, or even the perfect seemed to the men and women of archaic societies to point to something other than themselves. Mountains which towered above the earth were particularly potent symbols of transcendence; by climbing to the summit, worshippers could feel that they had ascended to a different plane, midway between heaven and earth. In Mesopotamia, the great temple-towers known as ziggurats were designed to resemble hills; the seven levels of these huge stone ladders represented the seven heavens. Pilgrims thus imagined themselves climbing through the cosmos and at the top they could meet their gods.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Syria, a more mountainous region, there was no need to create artificial hills: real mountains were experienced as sacred places. One which would be very important in the history of Jerusalem would be Mount Zaphon, the present Jebel al-Aqra, twenty miles north of Ugarit at the mouth of the Orontes.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Canaan too, Mounts Hermon, Carmel, and Tabor were all revered as holy places. As we know from the Hebrew psalms, Mount Zion to the north of the Ophel hill in Jerusalem was also a sacred site. It is impossible for us to see the mountain’s natural contour, since it has been concealed by the vast platform built by King Herod in the first century BCE to house the Jewish Temple. But in its natural state, Mount Zion may have stood out dramatically from the surrounding hills in such a way that it seemed to embody the sacred “other” and marked the place out as “holy.”

Once a spot had been experienced as sacred, it was radically separate from its profane environs. Because the divine had been revealed there, the place became the center of the earth. This was not understood in any literal, geometric manner. It would not matter to the inhabitants of Jerusalem that nearby Hebron was also regarded as a sacred “center.” Nor when psalmists or rabbis later claimed that Mount Zion was the highest place in the world were they at all disturbed by the fact that the Western Hill, on the other side of the Tyropoeon Valley, was obviously higher than Zion. They were not describing the physical geography of the city but its place on their spiritual map. Like any other sacred hill where the divine had revealed itself, Zion was felt to be exalted because people felt closer to heaven there. It was “the center” of their world for the same reason: it was one of the places where it was possible to make contact with the divine that alone gave reality and point to their lives.

In archaic societies, people would settle only in places where such contact was possible. Eliade noted that the Australian Achilpa tribe became entirely disoriented when the sacred pole which they carried around with them on their travels was broken. It represented their link with the sacred: once it had been broken, the Achilpa simply lay down to die.

(#litres_trial_promo) We are meaning-seeking creatures, and once we have lost our orientation, we do not know how to live or to place ourselves in the world. That was why cities in the ancient world were built around shrines and temples which housed the divine Presence. The sacred was the most solid reality and gave substance to our more fragmented existence. The sacred could be experienced as frightening and “other.” The German historian Rudolph Otto explained in his classic book The Idea of the Holy that it could sometimes inspire dread and horror. Yet it was also fascinans, exerting an irresistible attraction because it was recognized as profoundly familiar and something that was essential to humanity. Only by associating themselves with this more potent reality could human beings ensure that their societies would survive. Civilization was fragile: cities could disappear almost overnight, as they did in Palestine during the Early Bronze Age. They could not hope to endure if they did not share to some degree the more potent and effective life of the gods.

Sometimes this search for the sacred and the cult of a holy place was associated with the nostalgia for paradise. Almost every culture has a myth of a golden age at the dawn of time, when communication with the gods was easy and intimate. The divine was felt not as a distant, eruptive force but as a fact of daily life. Humanity enjoyed enhanced powers: there was no death, no sickness, no disharmony. People longed to return to this state of primal bliss and harmony, feeling that this is what life should have been like had it not been for some original lapse.

(#litres_trial_promo) Today we may no longer believe in an earthly paradise or a Garden of Eden, but the yearning for something different from the flawed present persists. There is an innate conviction that life was not meant to be like this: we hanker for what might have been, mourn the transitory nature of earthly existence, and feel outraged by death. We are haunted by a sense of more perfect relationships and imagine a world of harmony and wholeness, where we would feel completely in tune with our surroundings, instead of having to battle against them. This longing for an inaccessible paradise that remains irretrievably lost surfaces today in popular songs, in fiction, and in the utopian fantasies of philosophers, politicians, and advertisers. Psychoanalysts associate this nostalgia with the pain of separation we experienced at birth, when we were ejected violently and forever from our mother’s body. Today many people seek this paradisal harmony in art, drugs, or sex; in the ancient world, men and women sought it by living in a place where, they believed, the lost wholeness could be recovered.

We have no direct information about the religious life in Jerusalem during the eighteenth century BCE, however. In fact, after the Execration Texts there is no further mention of Jerusalem for some time. It was a time of prosperity in Canaan. During the seventeenth century, the pharaohs were too preoccupied with domestic affairs to bother about “Retinu,” and the country prospered. There were no more aggressive Egyptian campaigns; local culture could flourish. Some towns of Canaan became full city-states: architecture, furniture, pottery, and jewelry have been unearthed at such sites as Megiddo, Hazor, and Shechem. But no pottery from the seventeenth to the fifteenth century has been found in Jerusalem. For all we know, the city may even have ceased to exist during these years.

It is not until the fourteenth century BCE that we can be certain that the site was inhabited again. By that time, Egypt had managed to reassert its presence in Canaan. The pharaohs were now in conflict with the new Hittite empire in Anatolia and the Hurrian Kingdom of Mittani in Upper Mesopotamia. They needed to ensure that Canaan, an important transit country, was firmly under their control. In 1486, Pharaoh Thutmose III had put down a rebellion of Canaanite and Syrian princes at Megiddo and reduced “Retinu” to a mere dominion of Egypt. The country was divided into four administrative districts, and the princes of the city-states of Canaan became vassals of the pharaoh. They were bound to him by a personal oath and forced to pay heavy tribute. In return they seem to have expected more help and support than the pharaoh was actually prepared to give. Yet the princes still enjoyed a fair measure of independence: Egypt did not have the means to control the country completely. The princes could raise armies, fight against one another, and annex new territory for themselves. But other great powers were beginning to be interested in Canaan. Hurrians from the Kingdom of Mitanni had started to establish themselves in the country by the beginning of the fifteenth century. They are the people who are called “Hivites” or “Horites” in the Bible. Unlike the local people, they were of Aryan stock, and though they did not come as conquerors, they exerted such strong influence that the Egyptians started to call Canaan “Huru” or “Hurrian Land.” The Hurrians often gained positions of power in the city-states; they lived alongside the native population and taught them their Akkadian language, which became the official diplomatic tongue, and cuneiform writing.

Hurrian influence was strong in Jerusalem,

(#litres_trial_promo) which emerges in the fourteenth century as one of the city-states of Canaan—albeit one of lesser importance than Hazor or Megiddo. Its territory now extended as far as the lands of Shechem and Gezer. Its ruler was Abdi-Hepa, whose name is Hurrian. Our knowledge of Jerusalem at this point is derived from the cuneiform tablets discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt in 1887 CE, which seem to have been part of the royal archives of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1386–49 BCE) and his son Akhenaten (1350–34 BCE). They consist of about 350 letters from the princes of Canaan to the pharaoh, their overlord, and show that the country was in turmoil. The city-states were at war with one another: Prince Lab’ayu of Shechem, for example, was pursuing a ruthlessly expansionist policy and had extended his territory as far north as the Sea of Galilee and westward as far as Gaza. The princes also complained of internal enemies and begged the pharaoh for help. It also appears that Egypt, then at war with the Hittites, gave them little support. The unrest in Canaan probably did not displease the pharaoh, since it meant that the city-states were unable to take a united stand against Egyptian hegemony.

Six of the Amarna letters are from Abdi-Hepa of Jerusalem, who does not appear to have been one of the more successful rulers of Canaan. He protests his loyalty to the pharaoh in extravagant terms, plangently appealing for help against his enemies—help that was not forthcoming. Abdi-Hepa could make no headway against Shechem and in the end lost all his allies. There were also uprisings in the city of Jerusalem itself. Yet Abdi-Hepa did not want Egyptian troops to be sent to Jerusalem. He had already suffered enough at the hands of the poorly trained and inadequately supplied Egyptian soldiers, who, he complained, had actually broken into his palace and tried to kill him. Instead he asked the pharaoh to send reinforcements to Gezer, Lachish, or Ashkelon. Unless help came from Egypt, the land of Jerusalem would surely fall to his enemies.

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