Yet Solomon’s own magnificence came first. He took seven years to finish the Temple, and thirteen to build his own palace, which was larger. There had to be silence in God’s house, so ‘there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house’: his Phoenician craftsmen dressed the stones, carved the cedar and cypress, and crafted the silver, bronze and gold decorations in Tyre before shipping them to Jerusalem. King Solomon fortified Mount Moriah by expanding the old walls: henceforth the name ‘Zion’ described both the original citadel and the new Temple Mount.
When all was finished, Solomon assembled the people to watch the priests bear the acacia wood chest of the Ark of the Covenant from its tent on the citadel of Zion, the City of David, to the Temple on Mount Moriah. Solomon sacrificed at the altar and then the priests took the Ark into the Holy of Holies and placed it beneath the wings of the two immense gold cherubim. There was nothing in the Holy of Holies except the cherubim, and the Ark, and nothing within the Ark – just 4 by 2 feet – except the tablets of Moses’ law. Its holiness was such that it was not designed for public worship: In this emptiness resided the austere, imageless divinity of Yahweh, an idea unique to the Israelites.
As the priest came out, the ‘cloud’ of the Divine Presence, ‘the glory of the Lord, filled the house of the Lord.’ Solomon consecrated the Temple before his people, declaring to God: ‘I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide for ever,’ God replied to Solomon, ‘I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father.’ This became the first of the festivals that developed into the great pilgrimages of the Jewish calendar: ‘three times a year did Solomon offer burnt offerings upon the altar’. At that moment, the concept of sanctity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world found its eternal home. Jews and the other Peoples of the Book believe that the Divine Presence has never left the Temple Mount. Jerusalem would become the superlative place for divine-human communication on earth.
SOLOMON: THE DECLINE
All the ideal Jerusalems, new and old, celestial and temporal, were based on the Bible’s description of Solomon’s city. But there is no other source to confirm it, and nothing has been found of his Temple.
This is less surprising than it sounds. It is impossible to excavate the Temple Mount for political and religious reasons, but even if such excavations were allowed we would probably find no traces of Solomon’s Temple because it was obliterated at least twice, cut down to bedrock at least once and remodelled countless times. Yet the Temple is plausible in size and design even if the biblical writers exaggerated its splendour. Solomon’s Temple was a classic shrine of its time. The Phoenician temples, on which Solomon’s was partly based, were thriving corporations run by hundreds of officials, temple prostitutes whose fees contributed to corporate income, and even in-house barbers for those who dedicated their hair to their gods. The layout of Syrian temples, discovered all over the region, along with their sacred paraphernalia such as their lavers, were very similar to the biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Sanctuary.
Its bounty of gold and ivory is completely credible. A century later, the kings of Israel reigned from sumptuous palaces in nearby Samaria where their ivory has been found by archaeologists. The Bible says Solomon dedicated 500 gold shields to the Temple in an era when other sources prove that gold was plentiful – imported from Ophir, the Egyptians also mined it in Nubia. Just after Solomon’s death, the pharaoh Sheshonq was paid off with the Temple’s treasury of gold when he threatened Jerusalem. King Solomon’s mines were long thought to be mythical, but copper mines have been found in Jordan that were working during his reign. The size of his army, too, was feasible given that we know a king of Israel would field 2,000 chariots just over a century later.*12
Solomon’s magnificence may be exaggerated, but his decline rings only too true: the king of wisdom became an unpopular tyrant who funded his monumental extravagances through high taxes and the ‘chastisement of whips’. To the disgust of the monotheistic biblical authors, writing two centuries later, Solomon prayed to Yahweh and other local gods, and furthermore he ‘loved many strange women’.
Solomon faced rebellions from Edom in the south and Damascus in the north, while his general, Jeroboam, started to plan a revolt among the northern tribes. Solomon ordered Jeroboam’s assassination but the general fled to Egypt where he was backed by Sheshonq, the Libyan pharaoh of a resurgent empire. The Israelite kingdom was tottering.
4
THE KINGS OF JUDAH
930–626 BC
REHOBOAM VERSUS JEROBOAM: THE SPLIT
When Solomon died in 930 BC after a reign of forty years, his son Rehoboam summoned the tribes to Shechem. The northerners chose the general, Jeroboam, to tell the young king that they would no longer tolerate Solomon’s taxes, ‘I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips,’ replied the brash Rehoboam, ‘I will chastise you with scorpions.’ The ten northern tribes rebelled, anointing Jeroboam as king of a new breakaway kingdom of Israel.
Rehoboam remained king of Judah; he was David’s grandson and he possessed the Temple of Jerusalem, the home of Yahweh. But the more experienced Jeroboam, who made his capital at Shechem, faced up to this: ‘If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto Rehoboam King of Judah and they shall kill me.’ So he built two mini-temples at Bethel and Dan, traditional Canaanite shrines. Jeroboam’s reign was long and successful, but he could never match Rehoboam’s Jerusalem.
The two Israelite kingdoms were sometimes at war with each other, sometimes close allies. For around four centuries after 900 BC, the Davidic dynasty ruled Judah, the small rump around the royal Temple city of Jerusalem, while the much richer Israel became a local military power in the north, usually dominated by charioteer generals who seized the throne in bloody coups. One of these usurpers killed so many of the ruling family that ‘he left him not one that pisseth against a wall’. The authors of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, writing two centuries later, were not concerned with personal detail or strict chronology but judged the rulers by their loyalty to the one God of Israel. Fortunately, however, the Dark Age was over: the inscriptions of the empires of Egypt and Iraq now illuminate – and often confirm – the furiously righteous pontifications of the Bible.
Nine years after Solomon’s death, Egypt and history returned to Jerusalem. The pharaoh Sheshonq, who had encouraged the breakup of the Israelite united monarchy, marched up the coast, swerving inland towards Jerusalem. The Temple was rich enough to make such a detour lucrative. King Rehoboam had to buy off Sheshonq with the Temple treasury – Solomon’s gold. Attacking both Israelite kingdoms, the pharaoh devastated Megiddo on the coast where he left an inscription on a stele boasting of his conquests: a tantalizing fragment survives. On his return, he advertised his successful raid at his Temple of Amun in Karnak. A hieroglyphic text at Bubastis, then the pharaoh’s capital, shows that soon afterwards Sheshonq’s heir Osorkon dedicated 383 tons of gold to his temples, probably the loot from Jerusalem. Sheshonq’s invasion is the first biblical event confirmed by archaeology.
After fifty years of fighting, the two Israelite kingdoms made peace. King Ahab of Israel had made a prestigious marriage to a Phoenician princess, who became the Bible’s arch-monstress, a corrupt tyrant and worshipper of Baal and other idols. Her name was Jezebel and she and her family came to rule Israel – and Jerusalem. They brought butchery and disaster to both.13
JEZEBEL AND DAUGHTER, QUEEN OF JERUSALEM
Jezebel and Ahab had a daughter named Athaliah whom they married to king Jehorah of Judah: she arrived in a Jerusalem that was thriving – Syrian merchants traded in their quarter, a Judaean fleet sailed the Red Sea and the Canaanite idols had been expelled from the Temple. But Jezebel’s daughter did not bring luck or happiness.
The Israelites had flourished only while the great powers were in abeyance. Now in 854,
Assyria, based around Nineveh in modern Iraq, rose again. When the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III started the conquest of the Syrian kingdoms, Judah, Israel and Syria formed a coalition to resist him. At the Battle of Karkar, King Ahab, fielding 2,000 chariots and 10,000 infantry and backed by the Judaeans and the various Syrian kings, halted the Assyrians. But afterwards, the coalition fell apart. The Judaeans and Israelites fought with the Syrians; their subject peoples rebelled.* King Ahab of Israel was killed by an arrow – ‘dogs licked up his blood’. A general named Jehu rebelled in Israel, slaughtered the royal family – stacking the heads of Ahab’s seventy sons in a heap at the gate of Samaria, and assassinated not only the new king of Israel but the visiting king of Judah too. As for Queen Jezebel, she was tossed out of her palace window, to be pulverized under chariot-wheels.*
Jezebel’s carcass was fed to the dogs in Israel but in about 841 BC, Jezebel’s daughter, Queen Athaliah, seized power in Jerusalem, killing all the Davidian princes (her own grandchildren) that she could find. Only one baby prince, Jehoash, was saved. The second Book of Kings – and some new archaeological finds – here deliver the first glimpse of life in Jerusalem.14
The princeling was hidden in the Temple complex while Jezebel’s half-Phoenician, half-Israelite daughter attracted cosmopolitan trade and Baalist worship to her small mountain capital. An exquisite ivory dove perched atop a pomegranate, less than an inch high, was found in Jerusalem, it was probably used to decorate a piece of furniture in a grand Jerusalem house. Phoenician clay seals – known as bullae, the headed notepaper of the day – have been found around the rock pool below the City of David with images of their ships and holy totems such as a winged sun over a throne, along with 10,000 fishbones, probably imported from the Mediterranean by these ocean-going traders. But Athaliah was soon as hated as Jezebel. Her idolatrous priests set up Baal and other gods in the Temple. After six years, the Temple’s priest called Jerusalem’s grandees to a secret meeting and revealed the existence of the little prince, Jehoash – to whom they immediately swore loyalty. The priest armed the guards with the spears and shields of King David, still stored in the Temple, and then publicly anointed the child, crying ‘God save the king’ and blowing trumpets.
The Queen heard ‘the noise of the guard and the people’ and rushed through the acropolis from the palace into the neighbouring Temple, now packed with people. ‘Treason! Treason!’ she cried, but the guards seized her, dragged her off the holy mountain and killed her outside the gates. The priests of Baal were lynched, their idols smashed.
King Jehoash ruled for forty years until about 801 when he was defeated in battle by the Syrian king, who marched on Jerusalem and forced him to pay out ‘all the gold in the treasures’ of the Temple. He was murdered. Thirty years later, a king of Israel raided Jerusalem and plundered the Temple. From now on the growing wealth of the Temple made it a tempting prize.15
Yet Jerusalem’s remote prosperity was no match for Assyria, energized under a new king: that carnivorous empire was again on the march. The kings of Israel and of Aram-Damascus tried to put together a coalition to resist the Assyrians. When King Ahaz of Judah refused, the Israelites and Syrians besieged Jerusalem. They could not break through the newly fortified walls, but King Ahaz despatched the Temple treasury and an appeal for help to Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria. In 732, the Assyrians annexed Syria and ravaged Israel. In Jerusalem, King Ahaz agonized over whether to submit to Assyria or fight.
ISAIAH: JERUSALEM AS BEAUTY AND HARLOT
The king was advised by Isaiah, prince, priest and political consigliere, to wait: Yahweh would protect Jerusalem. The king, said Isaiah, would have a son named Emmanuel – meaning ‘God with us’ – ‘For unto us a child is born’ who would be ‘the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’, bringing ‘peace without end’.
There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah – one of them wrote over 200 years later – but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted upand his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.’
Isaiah loved the ‘holy mountain’, which he saw as a beautiful woman, ‘the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem’, sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and ‘Jerusalem is ruined’, there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone ‘upon every dwelling-place’, preaching loving-kindness: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.’ Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’
This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings – from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog – derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history.* The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah.16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill.* The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, would become the Bible.
When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his moment had come: he joined a new coalition against Assyria and prepared for war. But, unfortunately for the Judaeans, the new Great King of Assyria was a warlord of apparently endless confidence and energy: his name was Sennacherib.
He called himself ‘King of the World, King of Assyria’ at a time when the titles were synonymous. Assyria ruled from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus. Its landlocked heartland in today’s Iraq was defended by mountains to the north and the Euphrates in the west but was vulnerable to attack from south and east. The empire res
embled a shark that could survive only by constant consumption. For the Assyrians, conquest was a religious duty. Each new king swore at his accession to expand what they called ‘the land of God Ashur’ – the country was named after its patron god. The kings were both high priests and commanders who led their 200,000-strong armies in person, and like the tyrants of modern times, they cowed their subjects using not just terror but vast deportations of peoples from one end of the empire to another.
The body of Sennacherib’s father was never recovered from the battlefield, a terrible sign of divine displeasure, and the empire started to break up. But Sennacherib smashed all the rebellions and when he recaptured Babylon, he destroyed the entire city. But once order was restored, he tried to consolidate, extravagantly rebuilding his capital Nineveh, city of Ishtar, goddess of war and passion, with canals irrigating its gardens and his massive Palace Without Rival. The Assyrian kings were avid propagandists, whose triumphalist decorations on the walls of their palaces advertised Assyrian victories and the gruesome deaths of their enemies – mass-impalings, flayings and beheadings. The courtiers of conquered cities paraded through Nineveh wearing the heads of their kings on ghoulish necklaces around their necks. But their depredations were probably no more vicious than other conquerors: the Egyptians, for example, collected the hands and penises of their enemies. Ironically Assyria’s most brutal era was over; Sennacherib preferred to negotiate if possible.
Sennacherib buried records of his achievements in the foundations of his palaces. In Iraq, archaeologists have found the remains of his city, revealing Assyria at its apogee, made rich by conquest and agriculture, administered by scribes whose records were preserved in royal archives. Their libraries contained collections of omens to aid royal decision-making, and of incantations, rituals and hymns to maintain divine support, but also tablets of literary classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Worshipping many gods, revering magical figurines and spirits and calling upon the power of divination, the Assyrians studied medicine, writing prescriptions on tablets that read: ‘If the man is suffering from the following symptoms, the problem is …Take the following drugs …’