A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong
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a pious action. During Nehemiah’s twelve years in Jerusalem, the city gradually superseded Mizpah as the capital of the province: he built a residence for the peha in Jerusalem. Gradually the city became the center of the life of the Golah in Judah. But there was a power struggle going on within Jerusalem itself: some of the priests had close links with the Am Ha-Aretz, including Sanballat, who seems to have been the most dangerous of Nehemiah’s opponents. He also had to curb the greed of some of the wealthier citizens, who were seizing the sons and daughters, vineyards and fields of the poor, when they proved unable to pay off their loans with interest. With considerable popular support, Nehemiah forced the nobles and officials to take a solemn oath to stop charging interest.52 It was an attempt to make Jerusalem a refuge for the poor once again, but it naturally antagonized the upper classes, who tended to turn more and more to their allies in the neighboring territory. There seems to have been considerable tension in the country. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gershen could see perfectly well that fortifying the city was a bid for political control and preeminence.
In his second term of office, which began in about 432, Nehemiah also made new legislation to prevent members of the Golah from marrying the local people. He expelled the chief priest Eliashib, who was married to Sanballat’s daughter; Eliashib took up residence in Samaria, where he was probably joined by other malcontents from the priestly caste. The question of mixed marriage became an increasingly contentious issue in Jerusalem. Nehemiah’s legislation was not designed to ensure the purity of the race in the twentieth-century sense but was an attempt to express the new sacred geography developed in exile by such prophets as Ezekiel in social terms: the Golah must live apart from the Goyim, as befitted God’s holy people. In Babylon, the exiles had been concerned to preserve a distinct Judaean identity, centered on the presence of Yahweh in Israel. The same centripetal pull was also evident in social life. The Torah obliged the people of Israel to marry beyond the basic family unit, but it was considered better to marry people who were as closely related as was legally possible. People inside the family were regarded as acceptable marriage partners, while those outside were undesirable. These series of concentric circles stopped at the border of Israel: the Goyim, who were off the holiness map, were literally beyond the pale.53 A marriage “outside” was equivalent to leaving the sacred enclave and going out into the godless wilderness, where the scapegoat was dispatched on Yom Kippur. It was an attempt to make Israel a “holy” and separate people and defined the Judaean identity by marking out the people who were “outside” and “not-like-us.” But in Judah, the Golah were being asked to reject people who had once been members of the Israelite family but had now been pushed into the role of strangers and enemies.
During the fifth century, the exiles in Babylon had been engaged in a remarkable religious reform, which resulted in the religion of Judaism. The question of identity was still crucial: the exiles had stopped giving their children Babylonian names, preferring such names as Shabbetai, which reflected their new religious symbols. The Torah now played a central role in their religious lives and had taken the place of the Temple. By observing the mitzvoth, the Judaeans of Babylon could make themselves a sacred community which enshrined the divine Presence and established God’s order on earth. But that meant that the ordinary Jews had to be instructed in the intricacies of the Torah by experts. One of these was Ezra, who “had devoted himself to the study of the Law of Yahweh, to practicing it and to teaching Israel its laws and customs.”54 He may also have been the minister for Jewish affairs at the Persian court. In 398 he was sent by Artaxerxes II to Judah with a fourfold task. He was to accompany a party of Jews who wished to return to their homeland; he would take gifts from the Jewish community in Babylon to the Temple; once he had arrived in Judah, he was “to conduct an inquiry into the situation in Judah and Jerusalem on the basis of the law of [their] god”; and finally, he had to instruct the Jews in the Levant in this law.55 The laws of other subject peoples were under review at this time. Artaxerxes was supporting the cult of the Jewish Temple, which was central to the life of the province of Judah. He had to be sure that it was compatible with the interests and security of the empire. As a legal expert in Babylon, Ezra may have worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between the Torah and the Persian legal system, and Artaxerxes needed to be certain that this law was also operating in Judah. Ezra would promulgate the Torah in Jerusalem and make it the official law of the land.56
The biblical writer sees Ezra’s mission as a turning point in the history of his people. Ezra’s journey to Judah is described as a new exodus and Ezra himself, the lawgiver, as a new Moses. He arrived in Jerusalem in triumph, but was appalled by what he found: priests and Levites were still colluding with the Am Ha-Aretz and continued to take foreign wives. The people of Jerusalem were chastened to see the emissary of the king tear his hair and sit down in the street in the posture of mourning for a whole day. Then he summoned all the members of the Golah to a meeting in Jerusalem: anybody who did not attend would be cast out of the community and have his property confiscated. On New Year’s Day (September/October), Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and, standing on a wooden dais and surrounded by the leading citizens, he read the Law to the assembled crowd, explaining it as he went along.57 We have no idea what he actually read to them: was it the whole of the Pentateuch, the Book of Deuteronomy, or the Holiness Code? Whatever its content, Ezra’s Law was clearly a shock to the people, who had obviously never heard it before. They were so tearful that Ezra had to remind them that this was a festival day, and he read aloud the passage from the Torah which commanded the Israelites to live in special booths during the month of Sukkoth, in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the wilderness. He sent the people into the hills to pick branches of myrtle, olive, pine, and palm, and soon Jerusalem was transformed by the leafy shelters that appeared all over the city. The new festival had replaced the old Jebusite rites of Sukkoth; now a new interpretation linked it firmly to the Exodus traditions. There was a carnival atmosphere in the city during the next seven days, and every evening the people assembled to listen to Ezra’s exposition of the Law.
The next assembly was a more somber occasion.58 It was held in the square in front of the Temple, and the people stood trembling as the torrential winter rains deluged the city. Ezra commanded them to send away their foreign wives, and special committees were set up to examine individual cases. Women and children were sent away from the Golah to join the Am Ha-Aretz. Membership of Israel was now confined to the descendants of those who had been exiled to Babylon and to those who were prepared to submit to the Torah, which had now become the official law code of Jerusalem. The lament of the people who had now become outcasts may have been preserved for us in the book of Isaiah:
For Abraham does not own us
and Israel does not acknowledge us;
yet you, Yahweh, yourself are our father.…
We have long been like people who do not rule,
people who do not bear your name.59
A ruthless tendency to exclude other people would henceforth become a characteristic of the history of Jerusalem, even though this ran strongly counter to some of Israel’s most important traditions. As one might expect, there were many people who opposed this new tendency. They did not want to sever all relations with the people of Samerina and the surrounding countries. They feared that Jerusalem would become parochial and introverted and that the city would suffer economically. But others responded to the new legislation with enthusiasm. We know very little about Jerusalem in the generations succeeding Ezra, but within the next eight generations the Law had become as central as the Temple to the spirituality of the people of Judah. When these two sacred values were imperiled, there was a crisis in Jerusalem which nearly resulted in the city’s losing its new Jewish identity.