A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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gateway led into an outer court surrounded by various offices, storehouses, and apartments for the priests, which were built into the walls. Another wall separated this courtyard from an inner court where the altar of sacrifice stood, made of white, unhewn stone. This time, however, there was no royal palace on the Zion acropolis, since Judah no longer had a king. Another crucial difference was that the Devir was now empty, as the Ark of the Covenant had vanished without trace. The vacancy symbolized the transcendence of Yahweh, who could not be represented by any human imagery, but others may have felt that it reflected his seeming absence from this new Temple. The extravagant hopes of the Second Isaiah were not fulfilled. If Yahweh’s “glory” did come and take up residence in the Devir, nobody would have known it. There was no dramatic revelation to the Goyim, and the gentile nations did not troop to Jerusalem in chains. There was a new sense of God’s immense distance from the world, and in these first years of the Second Temple the very idea that the transcendent Deity could dwell in a house seemed increasingly ridiculous:
Thus says Yahweh:
With heaven my throne
and earth my footstool
what house could you build me?
what place could you make for my rest?42
All people could do was to hope against hope that Yahweh would condescend to come down to meet them.
Instead of being drawn to splendid temples as in the past, Yahweh was more attracted these days by a “humbled and contrite spirit.”43 The cult of the First Temple had been noisy, joyful, and tumultuous. Worship in the Second Temple tended to be quiet and sober. In exile, the Golah had become aware that its own sins had been responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, and the cult reflected the “broken and crushed heart” of the Golah. This was especially apparent in the new festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the chief priest symbolically laid the sins of the people onto a goat, which was then driven out into the desert. But this enabled Israel to approach the sacred once more. Yom Kippur was the one day in the year when the chief priest entered the Devir as the people’s representative. The element of expiation was also evident in the sacrifices that were offered daily in the Temple court. The people would bring bulls, sheep, goats, or pigeons as “guilt” or “sin” offerings, according to their means. They would lay their hands on the animal’s head as a symbol of its surrender to Yahweh. After the beast had been killed, parts of it were given to the person who offered it, and he or she would share it with family and friends. The communion feast on earth mirrored the restored harmony with the divine.
Even though Yahweh never returned to Zion in the way that Second Isaiah had predicted, people continued to dream of the day when he would create “a new heaven and a new earth” in Jerusalem. The old hopes did not die, and Jerusalem became a symbol of that final salvation: integration, harmony, intimacy with God, and a return to paradise. The New Jerusalem would be like no other city: everybody would live a long and happy life there; everybody would be settled in his own place. There would be no weeping in the city, and the pain of the past would be forgotten. The gentiles would be astonished by the city of peace, which would establish life as it had been meant to be.44 But other people were more disillusioned. There were social problems in the city, some prophets pointed out, and the inhabitants still flirted with the old paganism.45 There were worries about the new exclusive attitude of the Golah: should not the City of God be open to everybody, as Zechariah had suggested? Perhaps Jerusalem should open its doors to foreigners, outcasts, and eunuchs—people regarded as “unclean” by the priests. Yahweh had proclaimed, “My house will be a house of prayer for all the peoples”: one day he would bring these outsiders into the city and let them sacrifice to him on Mount Zion.46
Yet in the fifth century, there seemed little chance of Jerusalem’s becoming a cult center for either Judaeans or gentiles. The city was still largely in ruinous condition and underpopulated. Jerusalem might even have suffered fresh damage in 458 during the disturbances that broke out all over the Persian empire when King Xerxes ascended the throne. In about 445 the news of the city’s plight reached Susa, the Persian capital, and shocked the community of Judaeans there. One of the leading members of this community was Nehemiah, who held the post of cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I. He was so distressed to hear of the humiliation of the Golah in Jerusalem, whose walls were still in ruins, that he wept for several days in penitence for the sins that his people and family had committed, which had caused this calamitous state of affairs. Then he begged the king to allow him to go to Judah and rebuild the city of his ancestors. The king granted his request and appointed Nehemiah the peha of Judah, giving him letters of recommendation to the other governors in the region and promising him access to timber and other building materials from the royal park.47 Artaxerxes probably hoped that Nehemiah would be able to bring stability to Judah: a reliable Persian bastion so near to Egypt would enhance the security of his empire.
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah consist of a number of unrelated documents, which an editor has attempted to string together. He thought that Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries and makes Ezra arrive in Jerusalem before Nehemiah. But there are good reasons for dating Ezra’s mission much later, in 398, during the reign of King Artaxerxes II.48 So Nehemiah probably set out from Susa in about 445. He would have regarded his post as a religious challenge, since the building of fortifications had long been a sacred duty in the Near East. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he stayed in the city incognito for three days and then went out secretly one night to ride around the walls. He paints a grim picture of the old fortifications “with their gaps and burned-out gates.” At one point he could not even find a path for his horse.49 The next day he made himself known to the elders, urging them to put an end to this shame and indignity. The whole city responded in a massive cooperative effort, priests and laity working side by side, and managed to erect new walls for the city in a record fifty-two days. It was a dangerous task. By this time relations with the Am Ha-Aretz had seriously deteriorated, and Nehemiah constantly had to contend with the machinations of some of the local dynasts: Sanballat, governor of Samerina; Tobiah, one of his officials; and Gershen, governor of Edom. The situation was so tense that the builders constantly feared attack: “each did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other. And as each builder worked, he wore his sword at his side.”50 There was no attempt to fortify the old Mishneh suburb on the Western Hill. Nehemiah’s city simply comprised the old ’Ir David on the Ophel. From the biblical text we can see the way it was organized. The markets were ranged along the western wall of the city; the priests and temple servants lived next to the Temple on the site of the old Ophel fortress. Artisans and craftsmen inhabited the southeastern quarters, while the military were concentrated in the northern district, where the city was most vulnerable. Nehemiah also built a citadel, probably northeast of the Temple on the site later occupied by the Hasmonean and Herodian fortresses. On 25 Elul (early September) 445 the new walls were dedicated: Levites and choristers from the surrounding villages were divided into two huge choirs and processed in contrary directions around the new walls, singing psalms, before filing together into the Temple courts; the music and shouts of rejoicing could be heard from miles away.
Nehemiah had brought new hope to Jerusalem, but it was still not much of a city. No new families were growing up there, and the people were reluctant to move in. Constantly fearing attack from the Am Ha-Aretz, the citizens had to organize themselves into a watch to guard the new gates. Nehemiah managed to bring the population up to about ten thousand by organizing a lottery whereby every tenth man had to move into the city.51 The settlers who “volunteered”