A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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has left the world of nature and penetrated the realm of human culture. Death is the greatest impurity of all, since it is the most dramatic reminder of the fragility of culture and our inability to control and order the world.24 By living in an ordered cosmos, Israelites would build the kind of world imagined by Ezekiel, centered on the God in their midst. While the Temple had stood in Jerusalem, it had given them access to the sacred. Now the mitzvoth would restore the intimacy that Adam and Eve had enjoyed with Yahweh when he had walked with them in the Garden. By means of the mitzvoth, the exiled Judaeans would create a new holy place which kept the confusion and anomaly of chaos at bay. But P was not simply concerned with ritual purity: crucial to his Holiness Code were the mitzvoth relating to the treatment of other human beings. Alongside the laws about worship and agriculture in the Holy Land are such stern commandments as these:
You must not steal nor deal deceitfully or fraudulently with your neighbor.…
You must not be guilty of unjust verdicts. You must neither be partial to the little man nor overawed by the great.…
You must not slander your own people, and you must not jeopardize your neighbor’s life.
You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart.…
You must not exact vengeance, nor must you bear a grudge against the children of your people. You must love your neighbor as yourself.25
If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him … You must count him as one of your countrymen and love him as yourself-—for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.26
Social justice had always been the concomitant to the devotion to a holy place and to temple ritual: in the Canaanite myths, the Zion cult and the oracles of the prophets. P goes further: there must be not only justice but love, and this compassion must also extend to people who do not belong to the House of Israel. The Goyim might be off Ezekiel’s map of holiness, but they must be included in the ambit of Israel’s love and social concern.
As the memory of the Temple became idealized in exile, the priests acquired a new prestige. Both P and Ezekiel stressed the role of the priesthood in the community. Originally there had been no priestly caste in Israel; David and Solomon had both performed priestly functions. But gradually the Temple service and the interpretation of the Law had been assigned to the tribe of Levi, who were supposed to have carried the Ark in the wilderness. Ezekiel narrowed this down still further. Because the Levites had condoned the idolatry in the Temple, they were demoted to a subsidiary role. Henceforth they would perform only menial tasks in the new Temple, such as preparing the animals for sacrifice, singing in choir, and keeping watch at the Temple gates. Only those priests who were direct descendants of Zadok would be allowed to enter the Temple buildings and perform the liturgy.27 This injunction would be the cause of much future strife in Jerusalem, and it is ironic that the authentic traditions of Israel were to be enshrined in the House of Zadok the Jebusite. The more exclusive nature of the priesthood reflected the growing transcendence of God, whose sanctity was more dangerous than ever to the uninitiated and unwary. Both P and Ezekiel gave detailed instructions regarding the behavior of the priests in the sanctuary of Yahweh. When they entered the Hekhal, for example, they must change their clothes, since they were passing to a realm of sanctity that demanded a higher standard of purity. The high priest alone was permitted to enter the Devir, and that only once a year.28 The new regulations enhanced the Israelites’ sense of the holiness of Yahweh, who was a reality that was entirely separate from all other beings and could not be approached in the same way.
It is a striking fact that these elaborate descriptions of the sanctuary, its liturgy, and the priesthood were evolved at a time when there was no hope of their being implemented. The Temple was in ruins, but the most creative exiles imagined it as a fully functioning institution and drew up an intricate body of legislation to regulate it. In Chapter 8 we shall see that the rabbis did the same. Thus the most detailed Jewish texts regarding sacred space and the sanctity of Jerusalem describe a situation that no longer existed at the time of writing. “Jerusalem” had become an internalized value for the exiled Judaeans: it was an image of a salvation that could be achieved far from the physical city in the desolate territory of Judah. At about the same time in India, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, discovered that it was possible to enter into the ultimate reality by the practice of meditation and compassion: it was no longer essential to walk into a temple or other sacred area to attain this transcendent dimension. In the spirituality of the Axial Age it was sometimes possible to bypass the symbols and experience the sacred in the depths of the self. We have no idea how their contemporaries understood the writings of Ezekiel and P. Doubtless they hoped that one day the Temple would be rebuilt and Jerusalem restored to them. Yet it remains true that when they finally had the chance to return to Jerusalem, most of the exiles elected to stay in Babylon. They did not feel that their physical presence in Jerusalem was necessary, since they had learned to apprehend the values of Zion in a new way. The religion that we know as Judaism originated not in Judaea but in the diaspora and would be conveyed to the Holy Land in the future by such emissaries from Babylon as Nehemiah, Ezra, and Hillel.
Ezekiel and P had both been able to look beyond the earthly symbols of their faith to the eternal reality to which they pointed. Neither mentioned Jerusalem directly in their vision of the future, and P concluded his narrative on the threshold of the Promised Land. Their vision was essentially utopian, and perhaps they did not expect it to be fulfilled in their own lifetime. Their attitude to Jerusalem may have been similar to its use in the Passover seder today, where the words “Next year in Jerusalem!” always refer to the future messianic age and not to the earthly city. When Ezekiel imagined the return to Zion, he looked forward to a spiritual transformation: Yahweh would give his people “a new heart” and “a new spirit.” In the same way, Jeremiah had foretold that one day the Law would no longer be inscribed on stone tablets but deep in the hearts of the people.29 If they did look forward to a redemption, the architects of the new Judaism did not believe that it would be accomplished by a political program alone. They understood that salvation meant more than a new Temple and a new city: these could only be symbols of a more profound liberation.
Yet suddenly it seemed that political redemption was at hand. It might indeed be possible for the Judaean exiles to return to the land of their fathers and rebuild Jerusalem. People in Babylon who were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the rule of King Nabonidus, the successor of Nebuchadnezzar, were watching the career of Cyrus II, the young King of Persia, with much interest. Since 550, when he had conquered the Kingdom of Medea, he had been steadily building a vast empire for himself, and by 541 Babylon was entirely surrounded by Cyrus’s territory. The priests of Marduk were especially heartened by Cyrus’s propaganda, since they felt that Nabonidus had neglected their cult. Cyrus, on the other hand, promised that he would restore the temples of the empire and honor the gods. He would rebuild the ruined cities and restore a universal peace in his domains. This message also appealed to the anonymous Judaean prophet who is usually known as Second Isaiah. He hailed Cyrus as the Messiah: he had been anointed by Yahweh for the special task of rebuilding Jerusalem and its Temple. Second Isaiah turned instinctively to the old myths and liturgy of Zion. Through his instrument Cyrus, Yahweh would initiate a new creation and a new exodus. He would overcome the current enemies of Israel as he had once overcome Leviathan and Rahab, and the Judaean exiles would return to Zion through the desert, which had lost its demonic power.30
This return would have implications for the whole of humanity: the returning exiles would be the pioneers of a new world order. Once they had returned to Jerusalem, they would at once rebuild the Temple and the “glory” of Yahweh would return to its holy mountain. Once again, he would be enthroned in his own city “in the sight of all the nations.”31 The Jerusalem liturgy had long proclaimed that Yahweh was not only