A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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for Jerusalem to withstand the power of Assyria. Once Sennacherib, the new king, had quelled the revolts in Babylon and other parts of Mesopotamia, he began to move westward toward Jerusalem. Egypt sent no troops, Transjordan and Phoenicia went down like dominoes before the Assyrian army, and finally, Sennacherib’s soldiers arrived outside the city. Hezekiah sent gifts and tribute in an attempt to stave off the disaster, but to no avail. The prophet Micah, a disciple of Isaiah, foretold that Jerusalem would soon be reduced to a heap of rubble and Zion would become a plowed field.30 But Isaiah still insisted that all was not lost: Yahweh, the fortress of Zion, would protect his city. Reliance upon diplomacy and military preparations had indeed proved futile, but Yahweh’s presence would repel the enemy.31 And, against all odds, Isaiah’s predictions were dramatically fulfilled. We are not sure what happened. The Chronicler simply says that Yahweh sent his “angel” to destroy the Assyrian army and Sennacherib was forced to return home.32 The most reasonable explanation was that the Assyrians were decimated by plague, but nobody in Jerusalem wanted to hear prosaic facts. They naturally saw this deliverance as a miracle. Yahweh had indeed proved to be a mighty warrior who had brought salvation to his people, as the cult had always proclaimed.
This extraordinary event had a fatal effect upon the politics of Jerusalem. In former years, such kings as Rehoboam and Asa had saved their city by natural diplomacy. They did not believe that the cult of Yahweh on Zion permitted them to throw caution to the winds; on the contrary, they had a duty to fight with every weapon in their power against their enemy, joining their effort to the titanic struggle of Yahweh. But later generations of Jerusalemites felt that the impregnability of their city was such that they would be saved by miraculous intervention—a form of religiosity that reduces spirituality to magic. Hezekiah was hailed as a hero after Sennacherib’s retreat, but his reckless policy had brought his country to the brink of ruin. In the Assyrian annals, Sennacherib claimed that he had plundered forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled cities and innumerable villages; a large percentage of the population had been deported and Hezekiah had lost almost all his territory. Jerusalem was once again a small city-state. It was a hard legacy for his small son Manasseh, who came to the throne in 698 and ruled in Jerusalem for fifty-five years. The biblical writers regard Manasseh as the worst king Jerusalem ever had. To distance himself from Hezekiah, he entirely reversed his father’s religious policies, seeking Judah’s greater integration within the region and abandoning a dangerous particularity. He set up altars to Baal and reestablished the bamoth in the countryside. The practice of human sacrifice was instituted in the Valley of Hinnom, which henceforth retained an aura of horror. An effigy of Asherah was installed in the Temple, possibly in the Devir itself, and in the courtyard Manasseh built houses for the sacred prostitutes. Zion was now dedicated to the fertility cult of Asherah; there were also altars to other astral deities.33 The most fervent Yahwists were naturally appalled by these measures, but they were probably acceptable to some of the people. We know from the prophet Hosea that the fertility cult of Baal had been widespread in the northern kingdom before 722. But for over 270 years, Yahweh had been the Elyon in Jerusalem, and to the prophets who predicted dire punishments this dethronement was rank apostasy and gross ingratitude for the deliverance of 701. Yet Manasseh probably believed that it was essential to appease Assyria and to abjure the Yahwistic chauvinism of his father. His long reign gave Judah time to recuperate and Manasseh was able to recover some of the territory that Hezekiah had lost.
Manasseh’s most severe critics were probably the Deuteronomist reformers, who were developing a new form of Yahwism during his reign and who looked askance at the cult of Zion. They may well have come to Jerusalem from the northern kingdom after the catastrophe of 722. They would then have seen the old temples of Israel cast down by the Assyrians, and could no longer believe that a man-made shrine could be a link between heaven and earth and save the people from their enemies. To many people in the Axial Age, the sacred was experienced as an increasingly distant reality: a new gulf had opened between heaven and earth. The Deuteronomists found it inconceivable that God could live in a human building. When D described the dedication of the Jerusalem Temple by King Solomon, he put on the king’s lips words which struck at the base of the Zion cult. “Yet will God really live with men on the earth?” Solomon muses incredulously. “Why, the heavens and their own heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built!”34 God dwelt in heaven, and it was only his “name”—a shadow of himself-—that was present in our world. For the Deuteronomists, the Zion cult depended too heavily on the old Canaanite mythology. They wanted a religion that was based on history, not on symbolic stories that had no basis in fact. In many ways, they are closer to us today in the modern West. They did not believe, for example, that Israel’s claim to the land of Canaan rested on Yahweh’s enthronement on Mount Zion. Instead, they developed the story of Joshua’s divinely inspired conquest of Canaan to show that Israel had won the land, with the help of God, by force of arms. The feast of Sukkoth, they insisted, was just a harvest festival; it did not celebrate Yahweh’s enthronement on Mount Zion.35
Above all, the Deuteronomists wanted the Israelites to worship Yahweh alone and to turn their backs on all other gods. Northern prophets, such as Elijah and Hosea, had long preached this message, but ever since the days of King Solomon there had been a tradition of syncretism in Jerusalem. As far as the Deuteronomists were concerned, the policies of Manasseh were the last straw. They believed that at the time of the Exodus the Israelites had undertaken to worship Yahweh alone and in Chapter Twenty-four of the Book of Joshua they showed the Israelites formally ratifying this choice in a covenant treaty. Under the tutelage of Joshua, they had cast away all alien gods and given their hearts to Yahweh instead. The Deuteronomists were not yet monotheists: they believed that other gods existed, but thought that Israel had been called to worship Yahweh alone.36
We have seen that the experience of the liturgy in the Jerusalem Temple had already brought some of the people of Judah to this point. The Zion ritual proclaimed that Yahweh alone was king and superior to other gods. But in the eyes of the Deuteronomists, the Zion cult was flawed and inauthentic. They did not want to abolish temples altogether: they were too central to religion in the ancient world, and at this date it was probably impossible to imagine life without them. But instead they proposed that Israel should have only one sanctuary, which could be closely supervised to prevent foreign accretions from creeping into the cult. Originally, they may have had Shechem or Bethel in mind, but after 722 the Jerusalem Temple was the only major Yahwistic shrine in a position to become the central sanctuary, so, reluctantly, the reformers had to settle for this. Even so, when they described Moses looking forward to this central shrine in the Promised Land, they were careful to avoid the mention of “Zion” or “Jerusalem”: instead, they make Moses refer vaguely to “the place where Yahweh your god has chosen to set his name.”37
There was no possibility of the Deuteronomists’ ideal coming into effect under Manasseh, but unexpectedly their chance came during the reign of his grandson Josiah (640–609). The time was right. Throughout the Near East, people were obscurely aware that the old order was passing away. The experience of living in the new giant empires of Assyria and of its rising competitor Babylon had given the population a wider global perspective than ever before. Technological advance had also given them a greater control of their environment. People could not see the world in the same way as their ancestors, and inevitably their religious ideas changed too. In other parts of the world, it had also been found necessary to reform the old paganism. During the Axial Age, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and, finally, Greek rationalism took the place of the old faith, and there was a similar movement toward change in Judah. But as antiquity died, people from Egypt to Mesopotamia were possessed by a fin de siècle nostalgia for an idealized past. This was congenial to the Deuteronomists’ vision of the “golden age”