A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

(#litres_trial_promo) Jewish tradition has identified “Salem” with Jerusalem, though this is by no means certain,

(#litres_trial_promo) and the meeting was thought to have taken place at the spring of En Rogel (known today as Bir Ayyub: Job’s Well) at the conjunction of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys.

(#litres_trial_promo) En Rogel was certainly a cultic site in ancient Jerusalem and seems to have been associated with the coronation of the kings of the city. Local legend made Melchizedek the founder of Jerusalem, and its kings were seen as his descendants.

(#litres_trial_promo) Later, as we see in the Hebrew psalms, the Davidic kings of Judah were told at their coronation: “You are a priest of the order of Melchizedek, and for ever,”

(#litres_trial_promo) so they had inherited this ancient title, along with many other of the Jebusite traditions about Mount Zion. The story of Melchizedek’s meeting with Abraham may have been told first at the time of King David’s conquest of the city to give legitimacy to his title: it shows his ancestor honoring and being honored by the founder of Jerusalem.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the story also shows Abraham responding with courtesy to the present incumbents of the city, offering Melchizedek a tithe of his booty as a mark of homage, and accepting the blessing of a foreign god. Again, the story shows respect for the previous inhabitants of Jerusalem and a reverence for their traditions.

Melchizedek’s god was called El Elyon, “God Most High,” a title later given to Yahweh once he had become the high god of Jerusalem. El Elyon was also one of the titles of Baal of Mount Zaphon.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the ancient world, deities were often fused with one another. This was not regarded as a betrayal or an unworthy compromise. The gods were not seen as solid individuals with discrete and inalienable personalities but as symbols of the sacred. When people arrived in a new place, they would often merge their own god with the local deity. The incoming god would take on some of the characteristics and functions of his or her predecessor. We have seen that in the imagination of Israel, Yahweh, the god of Moses, became one with El Shaddai, the god of Abraham. Once the Israelites arrived in Jerusalem, Yahweh was also linked to Baal El Elyon, who was almost certainly worshipped on Mount Zion.

Jerusalem does not figure at all in the stories of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which became absolutely central to their faith. The biblical account of these events has mythologized them, bringing out their spiritual, timeless meaning. It does not attempt to reproduce them in a way that would satisfy the modern historian. It is essentially a story of liberation and homecoming that has nourished Jews in many of the darkest moments of their long and tragic history; the message of the Exodus also inspires Christians who are struggling with injustice and oppression. Even though Jerusalem plays no part in the story, the Exodus traditions would become significant in the spirituality of the Israelites on Mount Zion. The incidents can also be seen as versions of the Near Eastern creation and combat myths, except that instead of taking place in primordial time they are seen to happen in the mundane world and what comes into being is not a cosmos but a people.

(#litres_trial_promo) The combat myths of Baal and Marduk ended with the construction of a city and a temple: the Exodus myth concludes with the building of a homeland. During these years, Israel passed from a state of chaos and nonbeing to a divinely established reality. Instead of splitting the carcass of a sea-monster to create the world, as Marduk did, Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds to let his people escape from Pharaoh and his pursuing army. Instead of slaying the demonic hordes, like Marduk, Yahweh drowned the Egyptians. As always the new creation depended upon the destruction of others—a motif that would frequently recur in the future history of Jerusalem. Finally the people of Israel had passed through the divided waters to safety and freedom. In all cultures, immersion signified a return to the primal waters, the original element, an abrogation of the past and a new birth.

(#litres_trial_promo) Water thus had the power to restore—if only temporarily—the pristine purity of the beginning. Their passage through the Sea of Reeds made Israel Yahweh’s new creation.

Next the Israelites traveled to the holy mountain of Sinai. There, in the time-honored way, Moses climbed to meet his god on the summit, and Yahweh descended in the midst of a violent storm and volcanic eruption. The people kept their distance, as instructed: the sacred could be dangerous for the uninitiated and, at least in the Israelite tradition, could be approached only by a carefully instructed elite. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh made Israel his own people, and as a seal of this covenant, he gave Moses the Torah, or Law, which included the Ten Commandments, though, as we shall see, the Torah would not become central to the religious life of Israel until after the exile to Babylon.

Finally, before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land, the Israelites had to undergo the ordeal of a forty-year sojourn in the desert. This was no romantic interlude. The Bible makes it clear that the people constantly complained and rebelled against Yahweh during these years: they longed for what seemed, in retrospect, the easier life they had enjoyed in Egypt. In the Near East the desert was associated with death and primeval chaos. We have seen that Mot, the Syrian god of the desert, was also the voracious god of the Abyss, the dark void of death and mortality. Desert was thus a sacred area that had, as it were, gone awry and become demonic.

(#litres_trial_promo) It remained a place of utter desolation in the Israelite imagination: there was no nostalgia for the wilderness years of the Exodus, as some biblical critics have imagined. Instead, the prophets and biblical writers recalled that God had made Israel his people “in the howling wilderness of the desert”;

(#litres_trial_promo) the desert was “a land unsown” where “no one lives”; it was “void of human dwelling,” the land of “no-kingdom-there,”

(#litres_trial_promo) It constantly threatened to encroach on the settled land and reduce it to the primal no-thingness. When they imagined the destruction of a city, Israelites saw it reverting to desert and becoming once again “the plumb-line of emptiness,” the haunt of pelicans, hedgehogs, and satyrs, where there was “no man at all.”

(#litres_trial_promo) For forty years—a phrase that is used simply to denote a very long time indeed—the Israelites had to struggle through this demonic realm, entering a state of symbolic extinction before their God brought them home.

God had not entirely deserted his people in the wilderness, however. Like other nomadic peoples, the Israelites possessed a portable symbol of their link with the divine realm which kept them in being. Where the Australian Aborigines carried a sacred pole, the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant, a shrine that would be of great importance to them in Jerusalem. Most of the descriptions of the Ark in the Bible come from the later sources, so it is difficult to guess what it was originally like. It seems to have been a chest which contained the tablets of the Law and was surmounted by two golden cherubim: their outstretched wings formed the back of a throne for Yahweh.

(#litres_trial_promo) We know that an empty throne was often used as a symbol for the divine: it invited the god to sit among his worshippers. Henceforth the Throne would come to stand as a symbol of the divine Presence in the Jewish tradition. The Ark was thus an outward sign of Yahweh’s presence. It was carried by members of the tribe of Levi, who were the appointed priestly caste of Israel: Aaron, Moses’s brother, was the chief priest. Originally the Ark seems to have been a military palladium, since its sacred power—which could be lethal—provided protection against Israel’s enemies. J tells us that when the Israelites began their day’s march, the cloud representing Yahweh’s presence would descend over the Ark and Moses would cry: “Arise, Yahweh, may your enemies be scattered!” At night, when they pitched tent, he would cry: “Come back, Yahweh, to the thronging hosts of Israel!”

(#litres_trial_promo) The Ark enclosed the Israelites in a capsule of safety, as it were; it rendered the Abyss of the desert habitable because it kept them in touch with the sacred reality.

We know very little about the early life of Israel in Canaan. P believes that once they had settled in the hill country, the Israelites set up a tent for the Ark in Shiloh: P imagined Yahweh giving very precise instructions about this tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai. If the Ark was indeed originally enshrined in a tent, Yahweh was very like El, who also lived in a tent-shrine, was the source of law, and, when he appeared as El Sabaoth (“El of Armies”), was enthroned on cherubim. In the Book of Samuel, however, the Ark seems to have been housed in the Hekhal (or cult hall) of a more conventional temple in Shiloh.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Israelites seem to have worshipped at a number of other temples, in Dan, Bethel, Mizpah, Oprah, and Gibeon, as well as at outdoor bamoth. Some Israelites would have worshipped other gods, alongside Yahweh, who was felt to be a foreign deity who had not yet properly settled in Canaan. He was still associated with the southern regions of Sinai, Paran, and Seir. They imagined him leaving this territory, when his people were in trouble, and riding on the clouds to come to the help of his people: this is how he appears in some of the earliest passages of the Bible.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Israelites may even have developed a liturgy which reenacted the theophany of Mount Sinai, with braying trumpets reproducing the thunder and incense recreating the thick cloud that had descended on the mountaintop. These elements would also later appear in the Jerusalem cult. The ceremony thus imitated the decisive appearance of Yahweh on Sinai, and this symbolic reenactment would have created a sense of Yahweh’s presence among his people yet again.

(#litres_trial_promo) Unlike most of the Near Eastern gods, therefore, Yahweh was at first regarded as a mobile deity who was not associated with one fixed shrine. Yet the Israelites also commemorated their liberation from Egypt. Over the years the old spring festival was used to recall the Israelites’ last meal in Egypt, when the Angel of Death passed them by but slew all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. Eventually, this family feast would be called Passover (Pesaḥ).

By about 1030 BCE, the people of the northern hill country had a strong sense of kinship and solidarity. They thought of themselves as a distinct people with a common ancestry. They had been ruled till then by a series of “judges” or chieftains, but eventually they aspired to establish a monarchy like the other peoples of the region. The biblical authors have mixed feelings about this move. They show Samuel, the last of the judges, as bitterly opposed to the idea: he warns the people of the oppression and cruelty that a king would inflict upon them.

(#litres_trial_promo) But in fact the creation of the Kingdom of Israel was a natural and, perhaps, an inevitable development.

(#litres_trial_promo) The great powers in Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt were in eclipse at this time, and other, smaller states had appeared to fill the power vacuum: Ammon, Moab, Edom. The Israelites found themselves surrounded by aggressive competitors who were eager to conquer the Canaanite highlands. Ammonites and Moabites infiltrated their territory from the east and the Philistines harried them from the west. On one occasion the Philistines sacked and destroyed the city of Shiloh, carrying off the Ark of the Covenant as a war trophy. They quickly returned it, however, once they experienced the deadly power of this palladium. Now that it was no longer protected by a shrine or a temple, the Israelites also found the sanctity of the Ark frightening, so they lodged it in a private house in Kireath-Jearim, on the border of their land.

(#litres_trial_promo) All this political turbulence probably convinced the Israelites that they needed the strong leadership of a king, and, reluctantly, Samuel anointed Saul of the tribe of Benjamin as the first King of Israel.

Saul ruled over a larger territory than any previous king in Canaan. It included the whole of the central highlands, on both sides of the Jordan, north of the city-state of Jerusalem, which was still ruled by the Jebusites. (See map.) In the Bible, Saul is a tragic figure: deserted by his God for daring to take initiative in a cultic matter, prey to paralyzing bouts of depression, and slowly watching his power ebb away. Yet even in this critical narrative, we can see that Saul’s achievements were considerable. Ruling from Gibeon, which contained the most important Yahwist temple in Israel, Saul steadily increased his territory, and the people of the hills joined him voluntarily. For nearly twenty years he was able to hold his kingdom against his enemies, until he and his son Jonathan were killed by the Philistines at the battle of Mount Gilboa in about 1010 BCE. After his death, he was eulogized in some of the most moving poetry in the Bible:

Saul and Jonathan, loved and lovely,

neither in life, nor in death, were divided.

Swifter than eagles were they,

stronger were they than lions.

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This lament was sung not by one of Saul’s loyal followers but by a rebel who had fled his court. David had been a highly privileged warrior in Saul’s kingdom: he had been the intimate friend of Jonathan and had been given the hand of Michal, Saul’s daughter. He was the only one who could bring comfort to Saul in his depression, soothing away his despair with song and poetry. Yet, the biblical historians tell us, Saul had become jealous of David’s popularity and prestige, and David had to run for his life. First he had lived with a band of partisans as hapiru in the deserted hills to the south of Jerusalem. Finally he had allied himself with the Philistines, the deadly enemies of Israel. When he heard of Saul’s death, David of the tribe of Judah was living in the Negev town of Ziklag, which had been given to him by his new overlord, Achish, King of Gath.

(#litres_trial_promo) David is one of the most complex characters in the Bible. Poet, musician, warrior, rebel, traitor, adulterer, terrorist, he was certainly no paragon, even though—later—he would be revered as Israel’s ideal king. After Saul’s death, Ishbaal, the surviving son of Saul, ruled his father’s northern Kingdom of Israel, while David established a kingdom for himself in the sparsely inhabited southern hills, with a capital at Hebron. The Philistines may have encouraged this venture, since they would thus, through their vassal, have a toehold in the highlands. But David was playing a double game and had larger ambitions.

In Jerusalem, the Jebusites thus found themselves uncomfortably surrounded by two rival kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel, ruled by Ishbaal, in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah, ruled by David, in the south. But Ishbaal was a weak ruler: his kingdom was probably smaller than Saul’s had been, and he antagonized his most important commander, who defected to David. Eventually, seven and a half years after David had been crowned king in Hebron, Ishbaal was murdered, and the assassins fled to David’s court. David’s hour had come. He carefully dissociated himself from Ishbaal’s death by having his murderers executed. As the husband of Saul’s daughter Michal, he had a tenuous claim to the throne of the Kingdom of Israel. Soon representatives of the tribes of the northern kingdom came to David, made a treaty with him in the Temple of Yahweh in Hebron, and anointed him King of Israel. David was now ruler of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. But in the middle of his territory was the Jebusite city-state of Jerusalem, which he intended to make his capital.

3 CITY OF DAVID (#ulink_d18982ad-17ce-53bd-9846-7ce013e0db33)

THE JEBUSITES were convinced that David would never be able to conquer their city. Jerusalem may not have been the most venerable or powerful of the Canaanite city-states, but, compared with David’s upstart kingdom, it was of considerable antiquity, was powerfully fortified, and, over the years, had earned the reputation of being impregnable. When David’s troops arrived at the foot of the Ophel, the Jebusites jeered contemptuously: “You will not get in here. The blind and the lame will hold you off.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps they even paraded the blind and the lame of the city on the walls, as was the custom of the Hittite army, to warn any soldier who dared to penetrate the stronghold of his fate.

(#litres_trial_promo) But David refused to be intimidated. The first man to strike down a Jebusite, he vowed, would become the commander of his army. His old comrade Joab, son of Zeruiah, took up the challenge, possibly by climbing up “Warren’s Shaft,” the water conduit that led from the Gihon Spring into the city.

(#litres_trial_promo) We do not know exactly how David conquered Jerusalem: the biblical text is both incomplete and obscure. But his conquest of the city proved to be a watershed, and its effects still reverberate today. A city which had hitherto been of only secondary importance in Canaan had been drawn into the ambit of the tradition that would eventually become historical monotheism. This would make it one of the most sacred—and hence one of the most disputed—places in the world.

David could not have foreseen this. When he conquered the city in about the year 1000 BCE, he would simply have been relieved to have overcome this alien Jebusite enclave in the heart of his United Kingdom and to have found a more suitable capital for himself. The union of Israel and Judah was fragile. The northern kingdom still regarded itself as a distinct entity, and the people would have had mixed feelings about submitting to David, the erstwhile traitor. To have continued to rule from Hebron would have been unwise, since it would have allied David too clearly with his own southern Kingdom of Judah. The old city-state of Jerusalem, however, was neutral territory, as it had belonged to neither Israel nor Judah and had no connection with any of the old tribal traditions. Because David had conquered the city with his own troops, it became, according to the custom of the region, his personal property, and he renamed it ’Ir David: City of David.

(#litres_trial_promo) It would thus remain neutral, unaffiliated with either Judah or Israel, and David could treat the city and its environs as his own royal domain. There were also strategic advantages. Jerusalem was well fortified and more central than Hebron. High up in the hill country, it would be secure from sudden attack by the Philistines, by the tribes of Sinai and the Negev, or by the new kingdoms of Ammon and Moab on the east bank of the River Jordan. In his new capital, David was now undisputed king of a continuous stretch of land in the hill country, the largest unified state ever achieved in Canaan.

What was David’s capital like? By the standards of today, the city was tiny, comprising some fifteen acres and consisting, like other towns in the area, of little more than a citadel, a palace, and houses for the military and civil personnel. It could not have accommodated many more than two thousand people. The Bible does not tell us that David conquered the city, however: our authors emphasize that he captured “the fortress of Zion” and that he went to live in “the citadel.”

(#litres_trial_promo) There is a passage in the Book of Joshua which calls Jerusalem “the flank of the Jebusites,” suggesting that the city of “Jerusalem” may have been seen as separate from “the fortress of Zion.”

(#litres_trial_promo) David may thus have simply seized control of the Jebusite citadel in what amounted to a military coup d’état. The Bible makes no mention of a massacre of the population of Jerusalem like those described in the Book of Joshua. Nor is there any hint that the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem were driven out of the city and replaced by Yahwists. It is not impossible, then, that David’s conquest was merely a “palace coup” by means of which he and a few of his closest associates replaced the Jebusite king and his immediate entourage, leaving the Jebusite city and its population intact. We can only speculate but, as we have seen, the first time Jerusalem is mentioned in the Bible, the author tells us that Jebusites and Judahites were still living in the city side by side.

Thus, David, who was famous for his wholesale slaughter of Philistines and Edomites, may well have been a just and merciful conqueror of Jerusalem. He not only treated the existing inhabitants of the city with respect but even worked closely with them, incorporating them into his own administration. Joshua would have torn down the altars of the Jebusites and trampled on their sacred symbols. But there is no record of David interfering in any way with the local cult. Indeed, we shall see that Jebusite religious ideas and enthusiasms were actually brought into the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem. J sees David as another Abraham: he believes that David’s kingdom fulfilled the ancient promises, since the descendants of Abraham had indeed become a mighty nation and had inherited the Land of Canaan.

(#litres_trial_promo) But David was also like Abraham in honoring the faith of the people of the country.

In the ’Ir David, there was, therefore, a creative interaction of Jebusite and Israelite traditions. Araunah, who may have been the last Jebusite king, was allowed to keep his estate outside the city walls on the crest of Mount Zion. David also took over the old Jebusite administration. The Canaanite city-states had developed a political and fiscal bureaucracy over the centuries, whereas the Israelites and Judahites of the hill country would have had neither the experience nor the expertise to administer a city-state. Most of them were probably illiterate. It made sense, therefore, to keep the old administration and to make use of the Jebusite officials, who would be able to help him to keep the city running smoothly and to ensure that David enjoyed good relations with his new Jebusite subjects. David’s behavior in Jerusalem indicates that the Israelites did not yet consider it a sacred duty to hold aloof from the people of the country: that would not become the norm in Israel until after the Babylonian exile. When the Egyptians controlled Canaan, they had probably taught the people their methods of administration: in the Bible we see that the Davidic and Solomonic court was identical to that of Egypt. It had a grand vizier, a secretary for foreign affairs, a recorder in charge of internal matters, and a “king’s friend.” So the system that was in place during the Amarna period was still operating during the reign of David’s son Solomon. Some of Solomon’s officials had non-Semitic names,