The Arab victor of 1948 King Abdullah of Jordan waves to crowds in Jerusalem, but he paid with his life. His assassin lies dead in the Aqsa mosque. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein of Jordan prepares for war in 1967: he reluctantly and disastrously placed his forces under Egyptian command.
Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.
Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.
* The Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to rule Canaan at this time but it is not clear whether they actually did. They may have used these pottery symbols to curse the defiant rulers of their enemies or to express their aspirations. The theories about these fragments have changed several times, showing how archaeology is as much interpretative as scientific. It was long believed that the Egyptians smashed these vases or figures to curse or execrate the places named on them – hence they are known as the Execration texts.
* These are some of the 380 letters, written in Babylonian on baked clay tablets, by local chieftains to the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352–1336), who instituted the worship of the sun, instead of the traditional pantheon of numerous Egyptian gods: he changed his name to Akhenaten. The royal archive of his foreign ministry, the House of Correspondence of Pharaoh, was discovered in 1887 at his new capital Akhetaten, now El-Amarna, south of Cairo. One theory suggests that the Habiru were the early Hebrews/Israelites, yet the word actually appears all over the Middle East at this time to describe these marauders – the word simply means ‘vagrant’ in Babylonian. It is possible that the Hebrews descended from a small group of Habiru.
* The Creation appears twice in Genesis 1.1–2.3 and 2.4–25. There are two genealogies of Adam, two flood stories, two captures of Jerusalem, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. There are many anachronisms – for example, the presence of Philistines and Arameans in Genesis when they had not yet arrived in Canaan. Camels as beasts of burden appear too early. Scholars believe the early Biblical books were written by separate groups of writers, one who emphasized El, the Canaanite god, and another who stressed Yahweh, the Israelite one God. yet invaluable source, often the only one available to us – and it is also, effectively, the first and paramount biography of Jerusalem.
* When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, only the high priest, once a year, could utter the tetragram YHWH, and Jews, even today, are forbidden to say it, preferring to use Adonai (Lord), or just HaShem (the unspeakable Name)
† The Israelite invasion of Canaan is a battlefield of complex, usually unprovable theories. But it seems that the storming of Jericho, whose walls were crumbled by Joshua’s trumpets, is mythical: Jericho was more ancient than Jerusalem. (In 2010, the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 10,000th anniversary – though the date is random.) However, Jericho was temporarily uninhabited and there is no evidence of collapsed walls. The Conquest Hypothesis is hard to take literally since the fighting (as recounted in the Book of Joshua) usually takes place in such a small area. Indeed Bethel near Jerusalem is one of the few conquered towns in the Book of Judges that was actually destroyed in the thirteenth century. The Israelites may have been far more peaceful and tolerant than they claimed.
* Just as the word ‘Philistine’ has, thanks to the Bible, entered the language to describe a lack of culture (despite their cultural sophistication), so the people of Gath, known at ‘Gits’, also entered the vernacular. But the Philistines gave their name to the land which became the Roman Palestina, hence Palestine.
† The sling was not then a child’s toy but a powerful weapon: slingers are shown in inscriptions in Beni Hasan in Egypt standing beside the archers in battle. Royal inscriptions in Egypt and Assyria show contingents of slingers were regular units of the imperial armies of the ancient world. It is believed skilled slingers could project specially smoothed stones the size of tennis balls at 100–150mph.
* Was ‘David’ a nom de guerre or regal name? The Bible tells the Goliath story twice, and in the second version it names the Israelite boy-hero as Elhanan: was this David’s real name?
* This is the world’s most excavated archaeological site. The present dig around the Spring by Professor Ronny Reich is the twelfth on this site and has revealed the Canaanite fortifications described in chapter one. In 1867, the English archaeologist Charles Warren discovered a shaft leading from Ophel down to the spring. It was long believed that Warren’s Shaft was man-made and that Jerusalemites lowered buckets to get water. But the most recent dig has changed all that: it seems Warren’s Shaft was natural. In fact, the water flowed to a man-made rock-cut pool, guarded by an enormous tower and walls.
* The scale of David’s city is now much debated between the minimalists who claim that it was just a chieftain’s small citadel and the maximalists who embrace the imperial capital of traditional Bible stories. Until the Tel Dan inscription was uncovered, the extreme minimalists even hinted that David himself never existed, pointing to the lack of any archaeological evidence except the Bible. In 2005 Dr Eilat Mazor announced that she had discovered King David’s palace. This was widely doubted, but her excavations do seem to have uncovered a substantial tenth-century public building, which, along with the Canaanite fortifications and stepped structures, would have formed David’s citadel.
* The pyramid known as Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley was first mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela in AD 1170 and it does not date from 1000 BC. It is actually a first-century BC tomb. In the Middle Ages, the Jews, banned from the city and even from the Western Wall, prayed close to the Pillar. Even into the early twentieth century, passing Jews used to spit or throw stones at it to signify their disgust for Absalom’s disloyalty.
* Several hundred years later, John Hyrcanus, the Maccabean king, was said to have plundered David’s tomb to pay off a foreign conqueror. Two thousand years after that, during the Crusader Kingdom, workmen repairing the Cenacle on Mount Zion, where Jesus took his last supper, discovered a room that they thought was David’s tomb. This became a site revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But the real site of David’s tomb remains a mystery.
* Where was the Holy of Holies? This is now a politically explosive question and an intractable challenge for any Israeli–Palestinian peace deal sharing Jerusalem. There are many theories, depending on the size of the Temple Mount which was later extended by Herod the Great. Most scholars believe it stood atop the rock within the Islamic Dome of the Rock. Some argue that this mysterious yellow, twisted cavern was originally a burial cave of around 2000 BC, and there seem to be folk memories of this: when exiles returned from Babylon around 540 BC, they were said to have found Araunah the Jebusite’s skull. The Mishnah, the compilation of oral Jewish traditions of the second century ad, calls it the Tomb of the Abyss, hollowed for ‘fear of any grave in the depths’. The Muslims called it the Well of Souls. Jews and Muslims believe this was where Adam was created and Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. It is likely that in AD 691, the caliph Abd al-Malik chose the site for the Dome at least partly to create an Islamic successor to the Temple. Jews regard the Rock as the foundation stone of the Temple.
* The Bible cites the fortresses of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor as Solomon’s store-cities. But in the debates of the twenty-first century, revisionists, led by Professor Israel Finkelstein, argue that they are actually Syrian-style palaces built a hundred years later, leaving Solomon without any buildings. Other archaeologists challenge the revisionist dating. The black-onred pottery found at these sites belongs in the late tenth century
BC, roughly the time of Solomon’s reign and Pharaoh Sheshonq’s invasion, nine years after the king’s death, while exciting new analysis of the buildings suggests they were indeed huge, tenth-century stables, and therefore plausibly evidence of Solomon’s cavalry power and Mediterranean horse-trading operations. The debate continues.
* The Kings of Israel and Judah marched together against Mesha, the rebellious Moabite king who, in a stele, declared that he sacrificed his own son and successfully repelled the invaders. Almost 3,000 years later, in 1868, some Bedouin showed a German missionary a black basalt stone which unleashed an archaeological race between Prussia, France and England, whose agents intrigued to win this prestigious imperial prize. One tribe of Bedouin tried to destroy the stone, but finally the French won. It was worth the struggle. Sometimes contradicting, sometimes confirming the Bible, Mesha admits that Israel had conquered Moab but states that he rebelled against King Ahab and then defeated Israel and Judah – which (according to the latest translation) he calls ‘House of David’, again confirming David’s existence. He then boasts that he took from a captured Israelite town ‘the vessels of Yahweh,’ the first mention of the Israelite God outside the Bible.
* The Bible portrays King Jehu of Israel as the restorer of Yahweh and smasher of the idols of Baal. But the Bible is more interested in his relations with God than in the power politics now revealed by archaeology: Jehu probably had help from Damascus because its king Hazael left the stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel boasting that he had defeated previous kings of the House of Israel and the House of the David, the archaeological proof that King David existed. But Jehu also had to become a vassal of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. On the Black Obelisk, found at Nimrud, now in the British Museum, Jehu makes his low obeisance to Shalmaneser who sits, with his braided beard, diadem, embroidered robes and sword, before the winged symbol of Assyrian power, sheltered by a parasol held by a courtier. ‘I received’, says Shalmaneser, ‘silver, gold, a gold bowl, a gold vase, gold buckets, tin, a staff, hunting spears.’ This kneeling Jehu is the first historical image of an Israelite.
* The ancient Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq claim descent from the Ten Tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians as well as from those deported later by the Babylonians. The latest genetic research proves that these Jews were indeed separated from other Jewish communities around 2,500 years ago. Yet the quest for these vanished Israelites has spawned a thousand fantasies and theories: the Ten Tribes have been ‘discovered’ in various unlikely places – from the Native Americans of North America to the English.
* Two new suburbs developed outside the walled City of David and the Temple Mount: the Makhtesh in the Tyropaean Valley that ran between Mount Moriah and the western hill, and another, the Mishneh, on the western hill itself, today’s Jewish Quarter. High officials were buried in the tombs around the city: ‘This is [the tomb] of [ … ]yahu, the Royal Steward,’ reads a tomb in Silwan village. ‘There is no gold or silver here, only his bones and the bones of his slavewife – cursed be anyone who opens this tomb.’ The curse did not work: the tomb was plundered and is today a chicken coop. But this royal steward may actually have been Hezekiah’s courtier criticized by Isaiah for building a grandiose tomb: the name could, read ‘Shebnayahu’.
* In 1880, Jacob Eliahu, aged sixteen, son of Jewish converts to Protestantism, invited a school friend to dive the length of the Siloam Tunnel. They were both fascinated by the biblical story of 2 Kings 20.20: ‘And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?’ Jacob started from one end and his friend from the other, feeling the workers’ ancient chisel-marks with their fingers. When the marks changed direction Jacob realized he was at the place where the two teams had met and there he found the inscription. He emerged at the other end to find that his friend had long since given up; and he terrified the local Arabs who believed the Tunnel contained a djinn or dragon. When he told his headmaster, word spread and a Greek trader crept into the Tunnel and roughly cut out the inscription, breaking it. But the Ottoman police caught him; and the inscription is now in Istanbul. Jacob Eliahu then joined the evangelical American Colonists and was adopted by the Colony’s founding family, the Spaffords. Jacob Spafford became a teacher at their school, instructing his pupils about the Tunnel, never mentioning that he was the boy who had found the inscription.
* There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: ‘It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!’ These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical ‘moloch’, the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses.
* Josiah’s reforms were a vital stepin the development of Judaism. Two tiny silver scrolls were found in a Valley of Hinnom tomb of this period: inside was etched the priestly prayer of Numbers 6.24–6 which remains part of the Jewish service today. ‘For YHWH is our restorer and rock. May YHWH bless you and keepyou and make his face shine.’
* Royal courtiers lived and worked atopthe City of David. An archive of forty-five bullae – clay seals hardened by being burned in the destruction of the city – has been found in a house there, which archaeologists call the House of the Bullae. This was obviously a secretariat of the king: one bulla bears the inscription ‘Gemaraiah son of Shaphan’, the name of the royal scribe of King Jehoiakim in the Book of Jeremiah. Some time during the crisis, the king died, to be succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin.
* Shattered sherds bearing messages – known as ostraca – have been found by archaeologists buried in layers of ashes at the city gate of the fortress of Lachish: they give a human glimpse of the unstoppable Babylonian advance. Lachish and another fortress, Azekah, held out the longest, communicating with each other and Jerusalem by fire-signals. At Lachish, the beleaguered Judaean commander Yaush received reports from his outposts as they were gradually destroyed. His officer Hoshayahu soon noted that the fire-signals no longer came from Azekah. Then Lachish too was destroyed in heavy fighting.
* Nothing has been found of the Temple – except the tiny ivory head of a sceptre or staff used in processions, carved into the shape of a pomegranate, dating from the eighth century and inscribed: ‘Belonging to the house of holiness’ (though some claim this fragment is not authentic). But Jeremiah was surprisingly accurate: Nebuchadnezzar’s henchmen set up headquarters at the city’s Middle Gate to organize Judah, and their names in the Book of Jeremiah are confirmed by a text found in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar appointed a royal minister, Gedaliah, as puppet ruler over Judah, but as Jerusalem was in ruins he ruled from Mizpah to the north, advised by Jeremiah. Judaeans rebelled and murdered Gedaliah, and Jeremiah had to flee to Egypt, where he vanishes from the story.
* Between 586 and 400 BC, the mysterious writers of the Bible, scribes and priests living in Babylon, refined and collated the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah in Hebrew, combining the different traditions of God, Yahweh and El. The so-called Deuteronomists retold the history and recast the law to show the fecklessness of kings and the supremacy of God. And they incorporated
stories inspired by Babylon such as the Flood, so similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of Abraham in nearby Ur and of course the Tower of Babel. The Book of Daniel was written over a long period: some parts were definitely written in the early Exile, other parts later. We do not know if there was an individual named Daniel or whether he is a composite. But the book is also full of historical confusions that archaeologists have clarified with the helpof the evidence found in Babylon during nineteenth-century excavations.
* One of Cyrus’ decrees of tolerance, later found inscribed on a cylinder, won him the soubriquet Father of Human Rights, and a copy now stands at the entrance of the United Nations in New York. But he was no liberal. For instance, when the Lydian capital of Sardis rebelled, he slaughtered thousands of its inhabitants. Cyrus himself believed in Ahura Mazda, the winged Persian god of life, wisdom and light in whose name the prophet of the Aryan Persians, Zoroaster, had decreed that life was a battle between truth and lie, fire versus darkness. But there was no state religion, just this polytheistic vision of light and dark that was not incompatible with Judaism (and later Christianity). Indeed the Persian word for heaven –paridaeza – became our own ‘paradise.’ Their priests – the magi – gave us the word ‘magic’, and the three eastern priests said to have heralded the birth of Christ.
† This is a biblical exaggeration. Many thousands chose to live as Jews in Iraq and Iran. Babylonian Jews remained a rich, powerful and numerous community under the Seleucids, Parthians and Sassanids upto the Abbasid caliphate and the Middle Ages. Babylon became a centre of Jewish leadershipand learning almost as important as Jerusalem until the Mongol invasion. The community recovered under the Ottomans and British. But persecutions started in the 1880s in Baghdad (which was said to be one third Jewish) and intensified under the Hashemite monarchy. In 1948, there were 120,000 Jews in Iraq. When the shah was overthrown in 1979, there were 100,000 Iranian Jews. The majority of both communities emigrated to Israel. Twenty-five thousand Iranian Jews and a mere fifty Iraqi Jews remain today.