A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

The Temple built by Solomon on Mount Zion gave pilgrims and worshippers an experience of God. In the following chapter, we will see that many of them hoped to have a vision of Yahweh there. Instead of being cast adrift in the world, like the builders of Babel, many of them felt that they had come home when they entered Yahweh’s Temple. As a symbol of the sacred, the Temple was also the source of the world’s fertility and order.

(#litres_trial_promo) But, as in the other countries of the Near East, its great sanctity was inseparable from the pursuit of what we would today call “social justice.” This is an important point. Now that they had a monarchy of their own, the people of Israel and Judah naturally adopted the local ideal of sacral kingship. The king was Yahweh’s mashiach, his “anointed one.” On the day of his coronation on Zion, God’s “holy mountain,” God adopted him as his son.

(#litres_trial_promo) His palace was next to the Temple, and his throne of judgment was beside Yahweh’s throne in the Devir. His task was to impose the rule of God and to ensure that God’s own justice prevailed in the land. The psalms tell us that the king had to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need, and crush their oppressors.”

(#litres_trial_promo) If this justice prevailed, there would be peace, harmony, and fertility in the kingdom.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yahweh would provide them with the security which was so earnestly and continually sought for in the ancient world: because Zion was now Yahweh’s heritage, it was, therefore, “God-protected for ever.”

(#litres_trial_promo) But there could be no security and no shalom if there was no justice in Zion.

The ideal is expressed in three words which recur constantly in the Jerusalem psalms: mishpat, tzedek, and shalom.

(#litres_trial_promo) The word mishpat is a legal term meaning “judgment” or “verdict,” but it also denotes the harmonious rule of Yahweh on Mount Zion. When the Ark of the Covenant was carried into the Devir, Yahweh was enthroned on his holy mountain and he was henceforth the real King of Jerusalem, the earthly king being merely his human representative. The human king’s task was to impose tzedek. In Canaan, tzedek (justice, righteousness) was an attribute of the sun god, who brought hidden crimes to light, righted the wrongs done to the innocent, and watched over the world as a judge. Once Yahweh had been enthroned on Zion, tzedek became his attribute too: he would see that justice was done in his kingdom, that the poor and vulnerable were protected, and that the strong did not oppress the weak. Only then would Zion become a city of shalom, a word that is usually translated as “peace,” but has as its root meaning “wholeness,” “completeness”—that sense of wholeness and completeness which people sought in their holy places. Hence shalom includes all manner of well-being: fertility, harmony, and success in war. The experience of shalom negated the anomie and alienation that is the cause of so much human distress on earth. It was, as we have seen, also a sense of the peace which is God. But Jerusalem could not be a holy city of shalom if there was no tzedek or “righteousness” in the land. All too often, the people of Israel would forget this. They would concentrate on the holiness and integrity of Jerusalem; they would fight for its purity. But, as the prophets reminded them, if they neglected the pursuit of justice, this would inevitably entail the loss of shalom.

By building his Temple and enthroning Yahweh on Zion, Solomon was in Canaanite terms formally taking possession of the land in the name of the Davidic dynasty. Yahweh was now the ruler of Jerusalem, and because Israel was his people, the land became theirs. Baal’s palace on Mount Zaphon had made the surrounding territory his inalienable heritage; now Zion belonged to Yahweh, as his eternal inheritance. The Temple and Yahweh’s enthronement, therefore, were the basis for Solomon’s claim to Jerusalem as the eternal heritage of the House of David. The construction of the Temple was an act of conquest, a means of occupying the Promised Land with divine backing. The edifice proclaimed that Israel’s days of wandering had come to an end; the people of the United Kingdom had finally come home and established themselves in a place where they could live in close intimacy with the divine.

Yet Solomon was ultimately a disappointment. The Deuteronomist historian, writing in the sixth century BCE, regarded him as an idolater. Solomon built shrines to the gods of all his foreign wives in Jerusalem; he also worshipped the gods of his neighbors: Astarte, goddess of Sidon; Milcom, the god of Ammon; and Chemosh, the god of Moab. There were altars to Milcom and Chemosh in the hills to the east of Jerusalem.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was because of this infidelity, D believed, that the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah disintegrated after Solomon’s death. But D was writing from an entirely different perspective. By the sixth century, the Israelites were becoming true monotheists; they were beginning to believe that Yahweh was the only god and that all other deities were false. But Solomon and his subjects did not yet share that belief. Just as nobody found it strange that the Temple was full of pagan imagery, so too the other shrines and temples that Solomon built in Jerusalem would probably have been regarded as a courtesy to his wives. They did not affect Yahweh’s position. He was still the King of Zion and presided over the lesser gods in their smaller establishments, rather as the psalmists depicted him presiding over the other gods in the Divine Council.

If Solomon failed, it was probably because he did not pursue tzedek. The political economy of his kingdom was weak. Empires fall when they have outrun their resources, and despite Solomon’s alleged riches, the nation was stretched beyond its limits. Solomon had bought costly building materials from Hiram, King of Tyre, and could not repay his debt. He was therefore obliged to cede twenty towns to Tyre, probably in western Galilee. Despite his powerful army, Solomon could not hold on to the territory he had inherited from David. First Edom and then Damascus fell away and regained their independence. But even more serious was the dissatisfaction and malaise within the kingdom itself. David had favored his own Kingdom of Judah and had nearly lost the allegiance of the Kingdom of Israel in consequence. Solomon did not learn from this. It seems that he exploited Israel, treating it as conquered territory instead of as an equal partner. He divided the northern part of the country into twelve administrative units, each of which was obliged to provision the court for one month a year and provide men for the corvée. There is no mention of any similar arrangement for the southern Kingdom of Judah.

(#litres_trial_promo) Furthermore, people were bitterly resentful of the corvée itself. Forced labor was a fact of life in the ancient world: David had also resorted to conscription, and nobody had objected. Solomon, however, needed a vast amount of manpower for his huge building program. This damaged the economy, since the buildings themselves were not productive and the corvée took the men away from the land and the cities where the wealth of the country was produced. Worse, the conscription represented a glaring injustice. We are told that thirty thousand of the men of Israel were forced into the corvée, but we read of no such conscription in Judah.

(#litres_trial_promo) The people of Israel were angry, and some dreamed of breaking away from Jerusalem.

We have seen that the cult of justice in the ancient world was not a pious dream, but rooted in sound political sense. Kingdoms had fallen because of social unrest. We have seen that Ugarit was destroyed in the thirteenth century because its system placed too great a burden on the peasantry. Solomon’s kingdom would also disintegrate because the king had not dealt equitably with his subjects—it was a salutary lesson for his successors. Solomon was aware that his kingdom was in danger. In the last years of his life, we read that Jeroboam, one of the Israelite officers of the corvée, fell afoul of the king. It was said that one of the northern prophets had foretold that Solomon’s kingdom would be split in two and that Jeroboam would rule the ten northern tribes of Israel.

(#litres_trial_promo) It seems likely, therefore, that Jeroboam was planning an insurrection. Solomon tried to have him assassinated, but Jeroboam fled to Egypt, taking refuge in the court of Pharaoh Shishak. He did not have to remain long in exile. Shortly afterward, Solomon died, after a long reign of forty years, in about 930 BCE. He was buried with his father in the ’Ir David and was succeeded by his son Rehoboam. Immediately the disaster that Solomon had feared struck the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah.

4 CITY OF JUDAH (#ulink_0078f842-481d-54eb-be06-5d885f1b6c48)

REHOBOAM INHERITED an impoverished and alienated kingdom. His rule was accepted in Judah, but the northern Kingdom of Israel had been drained dry by Solomon’s ambitious building program, which had yielded little income and had required a conscription that deprived large areas of the country of productive labor. When Rehoboam went to meet the elders of Israel at Shechem to have his rule ratified there, they told him that they would accept him as king only if he reduced the burden of taxation and conscription. It was a difficult decision: if Rehoboam granted this request, he would have to renounce the imperial dream of his grandfather David forever and accept a lower standard of living for his court. Few rulers would have made this choice, and it is not surprising that Rehoboam rejected the advice of his older and more experienced counselors in favor of the hard-line policy of his younger henchmen, who could see that reduced taxation in Israel would mean a drastic decline in their own lifestyle. Rehoboam returned to the elders of Israel with a contemptuous answer: “My father beat you with whips; I am going to beat you with loaded scourges.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Immediately the elders seceded from the United Kingdom, the master of the corvée was stoned to death, and Rehoboam was forced to hurry back to safety in Jerusalem.

Henceforth the kingdoms of Israel and Judah went their separate ways. Jeroboam became King of Israel, establishing a capital at Tirza and making the old shrines of Bethel and Dan royal temples. Later King Omri of Israel (885–74) built a new capital at Samaria, which became the most elegant and luxurious city in the region. The Kingdom of Israel was far larger and wealthier than Judah: it was close to the major roads and included most of the territory owned by the most prosperous of the old city-states. By contrast, the Kingdom of Judah was isolated and lacking in resources, consisting almost entirely of steppe and mountainous land that was difficult to farm. Naturally the kings of Judah bitterly regretted the loss of Israel and accused the northern kingdom of apostasy, though all that had happened was the restoration of the status quo ante, before the union under David. For some fifty years after the collapse of the United Kingdom, Israel and Judah were at war, and as the weaker state, Judah was particularly vulnerable. Rehoboam was able to secure Jerusalem from an attack by Pharaoh Shishak, who had tried to establish a presence in Canaan, only by making him a substantial payment from the Temple treasury. During the reign of King Asa of Judah (911–870), the armies of Israel actually reached Ramah, five miles north of Jerusalem. This time the king saved the city by appealing to the Aramaean Kingdom of Damascus, which attacked Israel from the rear. Henceforth Israel was embroiled in a series of bloody territorial wars with Damascus and left Judah alone.

Beset on all sides by powerful enemies who sought to overthrow their kingdom, the people of Judah increasingly turned for help to Yahweh of Zion. We know that, in common with other people in the ancient Near East, they tended to identify their enemies—Israel, Egypt, or, later, Damascus—with the primal forces of chaos. Like the sea or the desert, these earthly enemies could easily overturn the fragile security of their state and reduce the little world that had been created in Judah to the kind of desolate waste that was thought to have prevailed before the gods had established the habitable earth. This may seem a fanciful idea, but we still talk in similar terms today when we speak of our enemies as occupying an “evil empire” which could reduce “our world” to chaos. We still tend to perceive life as a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, fearing a return to the “barbarism” that could overthrow everything that “we” have created. We have our own rituals—memorial services, wreath-laying, processions—which are designed to evoke an emotional response and make past battles present to us. We vividly recall the time when “we” seemed to stand alone against a hostile world. We feel hope, pride, and renewed commitment to continue the struggle. The people of ancient Jerusalem had similar stratagems, based on the old Canaanite mythology which they had made their own.

Instead of looking back to their own battles, they commemorated Yahweh’s struggle against the forces of chaos at the beginning of time. In their temples throughout the Near East, the battles of such gods as Marduk and Baal were commemorated annually in elaborate ceremonies, which were at one and the same time an exultant celebration of the divine victory and an attempt to make this power available in the present, since only a heavenly warrior, it was thought, could establish the peace and security on which their city depended. The rituals of the ancient world were not simply acts of remembrance: they reproduced the mythical stories in such a way that they were felt to occur again, so that people experienced the eternal, unseen struggle at the heart of existence and participated in the primordial divine conquest of the chaos-monsters. Again, as in the building of a temple, likeness was experienced as identity. Imitating these divine battles in symbolic dramas brought this action into the present or, more properly, projected the worshippers into the timeless world of myth. The rituals revealed the harsh reality of existence, which seemed always to depend upon pain and death, but also made it clear that this struggle would always have a creative outcome. After emerging victoriously from his mortal encounters with Yam and Mot, Baal had been enthroned on Mount Zaphon, which had become his home forever. From Zaphon, Baal had established the peace, fertility, and order which his enemies had sought to overcome. When this victory was commemorated in Ugarit, the king took Baal’s place, anointed like his heavenly prototype for the task of establishing peace, fruitfulness, and justice in his realm. Each autumn, Baal’s enthronement was celebrated in the month of Ethanim, and this festival made the divine energies which had been unleashed in those primal struggles at the dawn of time available in Ugarit for another year.

Before Solomon’s Temple was built in Jerusalem, there was, as far as we know, little or no interest in Yahweh as a creator-god. The myths of the Exodus showed him creating a people, not the cosmos. But once he had been ritually enthroned in the Devir on Mount Zion, his cult took on many of the aspects of the worship of Baal El Elyon which had preceded it. Possibly under the influence of Zadok, Jebusite ideas fused with the old Israelite mythology. Like Baal, Yahweh was now said to have battled with the sea monster Lotan, who became “Leviathan” in Hebrew.

(#litres_trial_promo) He had tamed the primal waters of chaos, which would otherwise have flooded the earth, and had “marked the bounds it was not to cross and made it fast with a bolted gate.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Like Marduk, he had split another sea monster—this one called Rahab—in two when he laid the foundations of the world.

(#litres_trial_promo) Later these myths of a violent creation were replaced by P’s calm and peaceful account of the establishment of primal order in the first chapter of Genesis. But the Bible shows that the people of Judah also had stories that conformed more closely to the spirituality of their neighbors and that in times of crisis they turned readily to this “pagan” mythology. The combat myth was consoling because it proclaimed that however powerful the forces of destruction, order would always prevail. It would not do so automatically, however. Priests and kings had a responsibility to renew this primal victory annually in their Temple in order to bring the embattled city of Jerusalem an infusion of divine power. Their task was to put their people in touch with the great mystery that sustained the world, face up to the unavoidable terror of existence, and learn to see that what appeared to be frightening and deadly had a positive aspect. Life and order would triumph over violence and death; fertility would follow a period of drought and sterility, and the threat of extinction would be averted because of the divine power in their midst.

The early psalms show how thoroughly the people of Judah had absorbed this spirituality. Sometimes they are simply a restatement of the old myths of Ugarit:

Yahweh is great and supremely to be praised:

in the city of our God

is his holy mountain, its peak as it rises

is the joy of the whole world.

Mount Zion is the heart of Zaphon,

the city of the Great King,

here among her palaces

God proved to be her fortress.

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Yahweh would fight for Jerusalem, just as Baal had fought for his heritage at Ugarit: his presence made the city an inviolable enclave against the enemies that lurked without. Jerusalemites were told to admire the fortifications of Zion—“counting her towers, admiring her walls, reviewing her palaces”—as the people of Uruk had admired the bastions built by Gilgamesh. After their tour of inspection, they would conclude that “God is here!”

(#litres_trial_promo) At the beginning of time, Yahweh had set up boundaries to keep everything in its proper place: walls and security arrangements had a similar religious value in keeping the threat of extinction and chaos at bay. The city could never fall: Yahweh was the citadel of his people and would break the bow and snap the spear of their foes.

(#litres_trial_promo) They would not even have to fear if the whole cosmic order crashed around them: God was their shelter and strength. The people of Judah need not worry if the mountains tumbled into the sea and the waters roared and heaved.

(#litres_trial_promo) Within their city, Yahweh had established a haven of shalom: wholeness, harmony and security. In the Jerusalem liturgy, the people saw the old Exodus myths in the context of Yahweh’s creation of the world. He had made himself the king of the whole earth when he had defeated Leviathan and Rahab, and he sustained it in being. Liberating the people from Egypt revealed his plans for the whole of humanity.

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Critics have attempted to reconstruct the liturgy from the psalms, but their more detailed claims are probably extravagant. We know very little about the Jerusalem cult in this early period. Yet there does seem to have been a focus on Yahweh’s kingship on Mount Zion. It is likely that the feast of Sukkoth was a celebration of his enthronement on the sacred mountain during the dedication of the Temple by King Solomon. Just as Baal’s return to his palace on Mount Zaphon after the defeat of Mot had restored fertility to the land, Yahweh ensured the fertility of Zion and its environs, and this too was celebrated in this ancient agricultural festival. With music, applause, and acclamation, Yahweh was felt to rise up to his throne in the Devir, accompanied by the blast of trumpets.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps the braying instruments, the cultic shout, and the clouds of incense filling the Temple reproduced the theophany on Mount Sinai, when Yahweh appeared to his people in the midst of a volcanic eruption.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps there was a procession from the Gihon to the Temple, which retraced Yahweh’s first journey up Mount Zion. He was experienced in this liturgy as so great a force that he was not only King of Zion but “the Great King of the whole world.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He was acquiring preeminence over other deities:

For you are Yahweh

Elyon over the world

far transcending all the other gods.

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Long before the Israelites developed the formal doctrine of monotheism, the rituals and ceremonies on Mount Zion had begun to teach the people of Judah at an emotional if not a notional level that Yahweh was the only god who counted.