Jerusalem: The Biography

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 not 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.

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.