A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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world and kept it in being. Mount Zion had become radically different from the surrounding territory, therefore: in Hebrew the word for “holy” (kaddosh) means “other,” “set apart.” The very plan of the building, with its three-tiered gradations of sanctity culminating in the Devir (the Holy of Holies), symbolized the transcendence of the sacred. Entry to the Devir was prohibited to all except the priests; it remained silent, void, and inaccessible. Yet since it enshrined the Ark and the Presence, it tacitly bore witness to the fact that the sacred could enter the world of men and women: it was at once immanent and transcendent.
Built on the summit of the sacred mountain of Zion, the Temple also represented the Garden of Yahweh, as described by J in the second and third chapters of Genesis.27 The great candlesticks resembled branched trees, covered with almonds and flowers; the palm trees and flowers on the doors and walls of the Hekhal also recalled the garden where the cherubim had walked at the beginning of time; there was even a serpent. J may have been writing during the reign of King Solomon, but even if he lived at a later date, he had clearly been influenced by the spirituality of the Temple. When Marduk created the world, he built a temple, but, J tells us, after Yahweh completed the creation, he planted a garden, where he walked in the cool of the evening and conversed familiarly with the first human beings at the dawn of history.
In the Eden story, we can see what the divine meant for the Israelite worshippers in Solomon’s Temple. As in all the myths of the lost paradise, Eden was a place where there had been easy access to the heavenly world. Indeed, Eden was itself an experience of the sacred. It was, J says, the source of the world’s fertility; in its midst was a river that divided into four streams once it had left the garden and fructified the rest of the earth: one of these streams was called the Gihon. In the Temple there were two large candlesticks; in Eden there were two trees, which, with their power to regenerate themselves each year, were common symbols of the divine. Eden was an experience of that primal wholeness which human beings all over the world sought in their holy places. God and humanity were not divided but could live in the same place; the man and woman did not know that they were different from each other; there was no distinction between good and evil. Adam and Eve, therefore, existed on a plane that transcends all opposites and all divisions: it is a unity that is beyond our experience and is quite inconceivable to us in our fragmented existence, except in rare moments of ecstasy or insight. It was a mythical description of that harmony which people in all cultures have felt to have been meant for humanity. Adam and Eve lost it when they “fell” and were ejected from the divine presence and barred from Eden. Yet when the worshippers entered Solomon’s Temple, its imagery and furnishings helped them to make an imaginary return to the Garden of Yahweh and to recover—if only momentarily—a sense of the paradise they had lost. It healed in them that sense of separation which, we have seen, lies at the root of the religious quest. The liturgy and architecture all aided this spiritual journey to that unity which is inseparable from the reality that we call “God” or the “sacred.”
These ideas are also implicit in J’s story of the Tower of Babel, which describes the creation of a perverse holy place. Instead of waiting for the sacred site to be revealed to them, human beings themselves take the initiative. “Come … let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven.” This attempt to scale the heavens is an act of pride and self-aggrandizement: the men concerned want to “build a name for themselves.” The result is not unity but discord and fragmentation. To punish these people for their presumption, God “scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth” and muddled their language so that they could no longer understand one another. Henceforth the place was called Babel, “because God had confused (bll) the language of the whole earth there.”28 J’s story reveals a profound hostility towards Babylon and its imposing ziggurats. Instead of being a “gate of the gods” (bab-ilani), it was the source of the alienation, disharmony, and disunity that characterizes mundane existence at its worst. Quite different was the worshippers’ experience in Zion, the city of peace (shalom) and reconciliation. There the people of Israel could congregate on the holy mountain that God himself had established as his heritage, not on an artificially constructed sacred mountain rooted in human ambition and the lust for power.
The Temple built by Solomon on Mount Zion gave pilgrims and worshippers an experience of God. In the following chapter, we will see that many of them hoped to have a vision of Yahweh there. Instead of being cast adrift in the world, like the builders of Babel, many of them felt that they had come home when they entered Yahweh’s Temple. As a symbol of the sacred, the Temple was also the source of the world’s fertility and order.29 But, as in the other countries of the Near East, its great sanctity was inseparable from the pursuit of what we would today call “social justice.” This is an important point. Now that they had a monarchy of their own, the people of Israel and Judah naturally adopted the local ideal of sacral kingship. The king was Yahweh’s mashiach, his “anointed one.” On the day of his coronation on Zion, God’s “holy mountain,” God adopted him as his son.30 His palace was next to the Temple, and his throne of judgment was beside Yahweh’s throne in the Devir. His task was to impose the rule of God and to ensure that God’s own justice prevailed in the land. The psalms tell us that the king had to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need, and crush their oppressors.”31 If this justice prevailed, there would be peace, harmony, and fertility in the kingdom.32 Yahweh would provide them with the security which was so earnestly and continually sought for in the ancient world: because Zion was now Yahweh’s heritage, it was, therefore, “God-protected for ever.”33 But there could be no security and no shalom if there was no justice in Zion.
The ideal is expressed in three words which recur constantly in the Jerusalem psalms: mishpat, tzedek, and shalom.34 The word mishpat is a legal term meaning “judgment” or “verdict,” but it also denotes the harmonious rule of Yahweh on Mount Zion. When the Ark of the Covenant was carried into the Devir, Yahweh was enthroned on his holy mountain and he was henceforth the real King of Jerusalem, the earthly king being merely his human representative. The human king’s task was to impose tzedek. In Canaan, tzedek (justice, righteousness) was an attribute of the sun god, who brought hidden crimes to light, righted the wrongs done to the innocent, and watched over the world as a judge. Once Yahweh had been enthroned on Zion, tzedek became his attribute too: he would see that justice was done in his kingdom, that the poor and vulnerable were protected, and that the strong did not oppress the weak. Only then would Zion become a city of shalom, a word that is usually translated as “peace,” but has as its root meaning “wholeness,” “completeness”—that sense of wholeness and completeness which people sought in their holy places. Hence shalom includes all manner of well-being: fertility, harmony, and success in war. The experience of shalom negated the anomie and alienation that is the cause of so much human distress on earth. It was, as we have seen, also a sense of the peace which is God. But Jerusalem could not be a holy city of shalom if there was no tzedek or “righteousness” in the land. All too often, the people of Israel would forget this. They would concentrate on the holiness and integrity of Jerusalem; they would fight for its purity. But, as the prophets reminded them, if they neglected the pursuit of justice, this would inevitably entail the loss of shalom.
By building his Temple and enthroning Yahweh on Zion, Solomon was in Canaanite terms formally taking possession of the land in the name of the Davidic dynasty. Yahweh was now the ruler of Jerusalem, and because Israel was his people, the land became theirs. Baal’s palace on Mount Zaphon had made the surrounding territory his inalienable heritage; now Zion belonged to Yahweh, as his eternal inheritance. The Temple and Yahweh’s enthronement, therefore, were the basis for Solomon’s claim to Jerusalem as the eternal heritage of the House of David. The construction of the Temple was an act of conquest, a means