Israel was not yet a kingdom; rather, the Book of Judges recounts, it was a confederation of tribes ruled by elders who were now challenged by a new enemy: the Philistines, part of the Sea Peoples, who originated in the Aegean. They conquered the coast of Canaan, building five rich cities where they wove clothes, crafted red and black pottery, and worshipped their many gods. The Israelites, hill shepherds from little villages, were no match for these sophisticated Philistines whose infantry wore Greek-style breastplates, greaves (leg armour) and helmets, and deployed close-combat weapons that challenged the cumbersome chariotry of the Egyptians.
The Israelites elected charismatic warlords – the Judges – to fight Philistines and Canaanites. At one point, a much neglected verse of the Book of Judges claims the Israelites took and burned Jerusalem; if so, they did not manage to keep the stronghold.
At the Battle of Ebenezer in about 1050 BC, the Philistines crushed the Israelites, destroyed their shrine at Shiloh, captured the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred symbol of Yahweh, and advanced into the hill country around Jerusalem. Faced with annihilation and wishing to be ‘like other nations’, the Israelites decided to elect a king, chosen by God.3 They turned to their ageing prophet, Samuel. Prophets were not predictors of the future but analysts of the present –propheteia in Greek means the interpreting of the will of the gods. The Israelites needed a military commander: Samuel chose a young warrior, Saul, whom he anointed with holy oil. Ruling from a hilltop citadel at Gibeon (Tell al-Ful), just three miles north of Jerusalem, this ‘captain over my people Israel’ justified his selection by defeating the Moabites, Edomites and Philistines. But Saul was not suited to the throne: ‘an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.’
Samuel, faced with a mentally unstable king, secretly looked elsewhere. He sensed the blessing of genius among the eight sons of Jesse of Bethlehem: David, the youngest, ‘was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the Lord said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he.’ David was also ‘cunning in playing, a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters’. He grew up to be the most remarkable yet rounded character in the Old Testament. The creator of sacred Jerusalem was a poet, conqueror, murderer, adulterer, the essence of the holy king and the flawed adventurer.
Samuel brought young David to court where King Saul appointed him as one of his armour-bearers. When the king was haunted by madness, David showed his first god-given gift: he played the harp ‘so Saul was refreshed’. David’s musical talents are an important part of his charisma: some of the Psalms ascribed to him may even be his.
The Philistines advanced to the valley of Elah. Saul and his army faced them. The Philistines produced a brobdingnagian champion, Goliath from Gath,* whose full armour contrasted with the flimsy gear of the Israelites. Saul feared a pitched battle so he must have been relieved, if sceptical, when David demanded a shot at beating Goliath. David chose ‘five smooth stones out of the brook’ and, wielding his sling, he ‘slang it and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead’.† He beheaded the fallen champion and the Israelites pursued the Philistines all the way to their city of Ekron. Whatever its truth, the story signifies that as a boy David made his name as a warrior.*
Saul promoted David but the women in the streets sang ‘Saul hath slain his thousands; David, his ten thousands.’ Saul’s son Jonathan befriended David and his daughter Michal loved him. Saul allowed them to marry but was tormented by jealousy: he twice tried to kill his son-in-law with a javelin. Princess Michal saved David’s life by letting him down from a palace window, and he was later granted asylum by the priests of Nob. The king pursued him, killing all the priests except one, but David escaped again, living on the run as the leader of 600 brigands. Twice he crept up on the sleeping king but spared his life, leading Saul to weep: ‘Thou art more righteous than I.’
Finally David defected to the Philistine King of Gath who granted him his own city domain, Ziklag. The Philistines again invaded Judah and defeated Saul on Mount Gilboa. His son Jonathan was killed and the king himself fell on his sword.
3
THE KINGDOM AND THE TEMPLE
DAVID: THE ROYAL CITY
A young man appeared at David’s camp claiming to have killed Saul: ‘I have slain the Lord’s anointed.’ David killed the messenger and then lamented Saul and Jonathan in timeless poetry:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Ye daughters of Israel, weepover Saul who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel … Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions … How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!4
At this dark hour, the southern tribes of Judah anointed David as king with Hebron as his capital, while Saul’s surviving son, Ishbosheth, succeeded Saul to rule the northern tribes of Israel. After a seven-year war, Ishbosheth was murdered and the northern tribes too anointed David as king. The monarchy was united yet the split between Israel and Judah was a schism healed only by David’s charisma.
Jerusalem, known as Jebus after its Jebusite inhabitants, stood just south of Saul’s stronghold, Gibeon. David and his army advanced on the citadel of Zion, facing the formidable fortifications which have been recently uncovered around the Gihon Spring.* Zion was said to be impregnable and how David captured it is a mystery. The Bible portrays the Jebusites lining the walls with the blind and the lame, a warning to any attacker of what would befall him. But the king somehow penetrated the city – through what the Hebrew Bible calls a zinnor. This may be a water-tunnel, one of the network now being excavated on the Ophel hill, or it may be the name of some magical spell. Either way, ‘David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David.’
This capture may just have been a palace coup. David did not slaughter the Jebusites; instead he co-opted them into his cosmopolitan court and army. He renamed Zion the City of David, repaired the walls and summoned the Ark of the Covenant (recaptured in battle) to Jerusalem. Its awesome sanctity killed one of those moving it, so David placed it with a trusted Git until it was safe to bear. ‘David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.’ Donning the sacerdotal loincloth, ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might.’ In return, God promised David, ‘thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever’. After the centuries of struggle, David was declaring that Yahweh had found a permanent home in a holy city.5
Michal, Saul’s daughter, mocked her husband’s half-naked submission to God as a display of vulgar vanity.6 While the earlier books of the Bible are a mixture of ancient texts and backdated stories written much later, the rounded, unheroic portrait of David, buried within the second Book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings, reads so vividly that it may have been based on the memoir of a courtier.
David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah. He brought the golden shields of his conquered enemies to Jerusalem, where he built himself a palace, importing cedarwood from his Phoenician allies in Tyre. David is said to have conquered a kingdom that stretched from Lebanon to the borders of Egypt, and eastwards into today’s Jordan and Syria, even placing a garrison in Damascus. Our only source for David is the Bible: between 1200 and 850 BC, the empires of Egypt and Iraq were in eclipse and left meagre royal records, but they also left a power vacuum. David certainly existed: an inscription found in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel dating from the ninth century BC shows that the kings of Judah were known as the House of David, proving that David was the kingdom’s founder.
Yet David’s Jerusalem was tiny. At this time, the city of Babylon, in today’s Iraq, covered 2,500 acres; even the nearby town of Hazor covered 200. Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just enough to house about 1,
200 people around the citadel. But the recent discoveries of fortifications above the Gihon Spring prove that David’s Zion was much more substantial than previously thought, even if it was very far from an imperial capital.* David’s kingdom, conquered with his Cretan, Philistine and Hittite mercenaries, is plausible too, however exaggerated by the Bible, and was only a tribal federation held together by his personality. The Maccabees would, much later, show how dynamic warlords could quickly conquer a Jewish empire during an imperial power vacuum.
One evening, David was relaxing on the roof of his palace: ‘he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is this not Bathsheba?’ The woman was married to one of his non-Israelite mercenary captains, Uriah the Hittite. David summoned her and ‘she came in unto him and he lay with her’, making her pregnant. The king ordered his commander Joab to send him her husband back from the wars in present-day Jordan. When Uriah arrived, David ordered him to go home to ‘wash thy feet’ though he really intended that Uriah should sleep with Bathsheba to cover up her pregnancy. But Uriah refused so David ordered him to take this letter back to Joab: ‘Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle … that he may be smitten.’ Uriah was killed.
Bathsheba became David’s favourite wife, but the prophet Nathan told the king the story of a rich man who had everything but still stole a poor man’s only lamb. David was appalled by the injustice: ‘the man that hath done this thing shall surely die!’ ‘Thou art that man,’ replied Nathan. The king realized that he had committed a terrible crime. He and Bathsheba lost their first child born of this sin – but their second son, Solomon, survived.7
Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show: his sons struggled for the succession. His eldest, Amnon, may have expected to succeed David but the king’s favourite was Amnon’s half-brother, the spoiled and ambitious Absalom, with his lustrous head of hair and a physique without blemish: ‘in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty’.
ABSALOM: RISE AND FALL OF A PRINCE
After Amnon lured Absalom’s sister Tamar to his house and raped her, Absalom had Amnon murdered outside Jerusalem. As David mourned, Absalom fled the capital and returned only after three years. The king and his favourite were reconciled: Absalom bowed to the ground before the throne and David kissed him. But Prince Absalom could not rein in his ambition. He paraded through Jerusalem in his chariot and horses with fifty men running before him. He undermined his father’s government – ‘Absalom stole the heart of Israel’ – and set up his own rebel court at Hebron.
The people flocked to the rising sun, Absalom. But now David regained some of his old spirit: he seized the Ark of the Covenant, the emblem of God’s favour, and then abandoned Jerusalem. While Absalom established himself in Jerusalem, the old king rallied his forces. ‘Deal gently for my sake with the young man,’ David told his general, Joab. When David’s forces massacred the rebels in the forest of Ephraim, Absalom fled on a mule. His gorgeous hair was his undoing: ‘and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.’ When the dangling Absalom was spotted, Joab killed him and buried the body in a pit instead of beneath the pillar the rebel prince had built for himself.* ‘Is the young man Absalom safe?’ the king asked pathetically. When David heard that the prince was dead, he lamented: ‘Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’8 As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an altar there. There may already have been a shrine in Jerusalem whose rulers are described as priest-kings. One of the original inhabitants of the city, Araunah the Jebusite, owned land on Moriah which suggests that the city had expanded from the Ophel onto the neighbouring mountain. ‘So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ David planned a temple there and ordered cedarwood from Abibaal, the Phoenician King of Tyre. It was the crowning moment in his career, the bringing together of God and his people, the union of Israel and Judah, and the anointment of Jerusalem herself as the holy capital. But it was not to be. God told David: ‘Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war and hast shed blood.’
Now that David was ‘old and stricken’, his courtiers and sons intrigued for the succession. Another son Adonijah made a bid for the throne, while a lissom concubine, Abishag, was brought in to distract David. But the plotters underestimated Bathsheba.9
SOLOMON: THE TEMPLE
Bathsheba claimed the throne for her son Solomon. David called in Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, who escorted Solomon on the king’s own mule down to the sacred Gihon Spring. There he was anointed king. The trumpet was blown and the people celebrated. Adonijah, hearing the celebrations, sought refuge in the sanctuary of the altar, and Solomon guaranteed his life.10
After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites and cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was the authors of the Bible, writing four centuries afterwards to instruct their own times, who made the imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king. He was buried in the City of David.* His son was very different. Solomon would finish that sacred mission – but he started his reign, in about 970 BC, with a bloody settling of scores.
Bathsheba, the queen mother, asked Solomon to allow his elder half-brother, Adonijah, to marry King David’s last concubine, Abishag. ‘Ask for him the kingdom too?’ replied Solomon sarcastically, ordering the murder of Adonijah and a purge of his father’s old guard. This story is the last from the court historian of David but it is also really the first and only glimpse of Solomon as a man, for he becomes the inscrutably wise and splendid stereotype of a fabulous emperor. Everything Solomon had was bigger and better than any ordinary king: his wisdom generated 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs, his harem contained 700 wives and 300 concubines, and his army boasted 12,000 cavalry and 1,400 chariots. Those expensive showpieces of military technology were housed in his fortified towns, Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, while his fleet was anchored at Ezion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba.11
Solomon traded with Egypt and Cilicia in spices and gold, chariots and horses. He shared trading expeditions to Sudan and Somalia with his Phoenician ally King Hiram of Tyre. He hosted the Queen of Sheba (probably Saba, today’s Yemen), who came to Jerusalem ‘with a very great train with camels that bore spices and very much gold and precious stones’. The gold came from Ophir, probably India; the bronze from his own mines. His wealth embellished Jerusalem: ‘The king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the vale, for abundance.’ The most telling mark of his international prestige was his marriage to a pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaohs almost never married their daughters to foreign princes – especially not parvenu Judaeans only recently graduated from hill shepherd chieftains. Yet once-haughty Egypt was in such shameful chaos that Pharaoh Siamun raided Gezer not far from Jerusalem and, perhaps finding himself exposed far from home, offered the spoils to Solomon along with his daughter, an unthinkable honour at any other time. But the Temple of Jerusalem, planned by his father, was his masterpiece.
The ‘house of God’ was to stand right next to Solomon’s royal palace in an imperial-sacred acropolis, described in the Bible, that boasted halls and palaces of astonishing grandeur covered in gold and cedarwood, including the House of the Forest of Lebanon and the Hall of Pillars where the king adjudicated.
This was n
ot just an Israelite achievement. The Phoenicians, who lived in independent city states along the Lebanese coast, were the most sophisticated artisans and seafaring traders of the Mediterranean, famed for their Tyrian purple from which they derived their name (phoinix, meaning purple) and for creating the alphabet. King Hiram of Tyre provided not only the cypress and cedarwood but also the craftsmen who carved the silver and gold ornamentation. Everything was ‘pure gold’.
The Temple was not just a shrine, it was the home of God himself, a complex made up of three parts, standing about 33 by 115 feet, in a walled enclosure. First there was a gateway with two bronze pillars, Yachin and Boaz, 33 feet high, decorated with pomegranates and lilies, that led into a huge pillared courtyard open to the skies and surrounded on three sides with two-storey chambers that may have contained the royal archives or treasury. The portico opened into a sacred hall: ten golden lamps stood along walls. A golden table for shewbread was placed in front of an incense altar for sacrifices, a water pool and wheeled lavers with bowls on top for purification, and a bronze pool known as the Sea. Steps led up towards the Holy of Holies,* a small chamber guarded by two winged cherubim, 17 feet high, made of olive wood covered with gold foil.