A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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inner world met the outer world. There was a sense of homecoming:
The sparrow has found its home at last,
the swallow a nest for its young—
your altars, Yahweh Sabaoth.15
The imagery of rest and of the establishment of a permanent abode had been present in the discourse about the Temple ever since David had first suggested the idea of a house for Yahweh in Jerusalem.16 The cult of the Temple had helped the people of Judah to attach themselves to the world. The creation myths insisted that everything in the universe had its appointed place. The seas had been bounded by Yahweh to prevent them from overwhelming the dry land. Now Yahweh was in his special place on Zion, and that had made it a secure home for the Judahites. They too, as a holy people, were in their specially appointed place. Outside the walls of the city were destructive enemies who could reduce their world to formless chaos, but within this enclave the people could create their own world. The sense of joy and belonging that the Zion temple evoked expressed their satisfaction at being, emotionally and physically, in the right place. Attendance at the Temple was not a dreary duty. The psalmist “yearns and pines” for Yahweh’s courts; his whole being sings for joy there.17 Pilgrims felt empowered by having found an orientation; they felt liberated from the endless flux of relativity and meaninglessness. Their mythology spoke of the long years of wandering in the wilderness, where human beings could not hope to live. Now in the Temple, the still point of the turning world, pilgrims could feel fully alive, experiencing existence at its most intense: a single day in the courts of the Temple was worth a thousand elsewhere.18
Still, this did not mean that Yahweh was the only god who was worshipped in Jerusalem. The Deuteronomist historian judges the kings of Israel and Judah according to a single criterion: good kings are those who promote the worship of Yahweh alone and suppress the shrines, cult places (bamoth), and matzevot (standing stones) of rival deities; bad kings are those who encourage these foreign cults. The result is that, despite D’s long narrative, we know very little about events in Jerusalem during this period, since we hear almost nothing about the kings’ other activities. And even in telling us of the kings who were true to Yahweh alone, D cannot conceal the fact that under these rulers as well other cults continued to flourish in the city. Thus King Jehoshaphat (870–848) is praised for his fidelity to Yahweh alone, yet D is forced to admit that the bamoth of other gods still functioned. Furthermore, Jehoshaphat had no problem about marrying his son Jehoram to Princess Athaliah, daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of Israel, who was a devout worshipper of Baal. She brought his Phoenician cult with her to Jerusalem and built a temple for him in the city, which was served by the Sidonian priest Mattan.
The marriage of Jehoram and Athaliah may have sealed a treaty whereby the Kingdom of Judah became the vassal of Israel: henceforth both Jehoshaphat and Jehoram fought on Israel’s side in its campaigns against Damascus. The ninth and eighth centuries saw a new prosperity in the Near East. Even Judah’s fortunes improved, since Jehoshaphat won striking victories against Moab, Ammon, and Seir. But a fresh danger was arising. From their capital in Nineveh, the kings of Assyria, in what is now Iraq, were building an empire of unprecedented power and strength. Their chief ambition was to expand westward towards the Mediterranean coast and, in an attempt to prevent this Assyrian advance, Israel and Damascus stopped fighting each other and united in a coalition with other small states of Anatolia and the steppes. But this coalition was defeated in 863 at the battle of Qarqar on the River Orontes. Both Israel and Damascus were forced to become vassals of Assyria. The Kingdom of Judah, however, was too insignificant to interest the Assyrians and maintained its independence.
Yet these were not peaceful years in Jerusalem. When Queen Athaliah became regent after the death of her son in 841, she tried to wipe out the Davidic dynasty by killing, so she thought, all the legitimate heirs to the throne. Some six years later, the Temple priests and the rural aristocracy organized a coup and crowned Jehoash—Athaliah’s infant grandson, who had managed to escape the carnage—in the Temple. They then executed Athaliah and pulled down her temple to Baal. The city was also threatened by external foes: Jehoash had to make a substantial payment from the Temple treasury to prevent the King of Damascus from attacking Jerusalem, and during the reign of a later king of Judah, Amaziah (796–81), the army of Israel sacked the royal palace and the Temple in Jerusalem, demolishing part of the city wall before returning to Samaria. Yet this did not diminish the people’s faith in Zion’s impregnability. Indeed, under King Uzziah (781–40), 19 the city went from strength to strength despite the fact that the king was smitten with leprosy. The walls damaged in the Israelite attack were repaired, and the old citadel on the Millo was replaced with a new fortress between the city and the Temple, called the Ophel. Jerusalem became an industrial center, and the population increased: it seems that the city had begun to spread beyond the walls down into the Tyropoeon Valley and onto the Western Hill opposite Mount Zion. At this point, Assyria was in a state of temporary eclipse and had been forced to retreat from the region, so the Kingdom of Israel also enjoyed a period of affluence and de facto independence.
Yet this prosperity led to social disorders: the more sensitive people became acutely aware of an unacceptable gulf between rich and poor, and prophets arose in both the northern and the southern kingdoms to fulminate against injustice and oppression. At their coronation, the kings of the Near East vowed to protect the poor and the vulnerable, but people seemed to have lost sight of this ideal. Ever since Abraham had entertained his god at Mamre, Yahwism had indicated that the sacred could be encountered in one’s fellow human beings as well as in temples and holy places. Now the new religions that were beginning to develop all over the civilized world during this period (which historians call the Axial Age) all insisted that true faith had to be characterized by practical compassion. The religion of Yahweh was also beginning to change to meet the new circumstances of the people. The Hebrew prophets began to insist on the prime importance of social justice: it was all too easy for a religious symbol such as the Temple to become a fetish, an end in itself and an object of false security and complacency.
None of the prophets of the Axial Age was as devoted to the Jerusalem Temple as Isaiah, who received his prophetic call in the sanctuary in 740, the year of King Uzziah’s death. Isaiah was a member of the royal family and must also have been a priest, since he was standing in the Hekhal, watching the clouds of incense fill the hall and listening to the great cultic shout, when he suddenly saw through the imagery of the Temple to the fearful reality behind it. He perceived Yahweh seated on his heavenly throne symbolized by the Ark, surrounded by the seraphim. The Temple was a place of vision, and now Isaiah became aware as never before of the sanctity that radiated from the Devir to the rest of the world: “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh Sabaoth,” cried the seraphim, “his glory fills the whole world.”20
The Temple was therefore crucial to Isaiah’s vision. The holy mountain of Zion was the center of the earth, because it was the place where the sacred reality had erupted into the mundane world of men and women to bring them salvation. The Zion cult had celebrated Yahweh’s universal kingship, and now Isaiah looked forward to the day when “all the nations” would stream to “the mountain of the Temple of Yahweh,” urging one another to make the aliyah to Jerusalem: “Come, let us go up to the Temple of the God of Jacob.”21 It would be a universal return to the Garden of Eden, where all creatures would live in harmony, the wolf with the lamb, the panther with the kid, the calf and the lion cub.22 The holy mountain of Jerusalem would see the creation of a new world order and the recovery of that lost wholeness for which humanity yearns. Isaiah’s vision of the New Jerusalem has never been forgotten. His hope for an anointed king, a Messiah, to inaugurate this era of peace laid the foundations of the messianic hope that would inspire monotheists in all three of the religions of Abraham. Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all see Jerusalem as the