A HISTORY OF JERUSALEM

One City Three Faiths

Karen Armstrong

Dedication

For my mother, Eileen Armstrong

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

New Foreword

Introduction

1: ZION

2: ISRAEL

3: CITY OF DAVID

4: CITY OF JUDAH

5: EXILE AND RETURN

6: ANTIOCH IN JUDAEA

7: DESTRUCTION

8: AELIA CAPITOLINA

9: THE NEW JERUSALEM

10: CHRISTIAN HOLY CITY

11: BAYT AL-MAQDIS

12: AL-QUDS

13: CRUSADE

14: JIHAD

15: OTTOMAN CITY

16: REVIVAL

17: ISRAEL

18: ZION?

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

New Foreword

This book was first published in 1996. At that time, the situation in Jerusalem looked extremely grave and it was difficult to see how the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians could be resolved. But at least people were talking about peace. Despite the tragic death of President Yitzhak Rabin, the Oslo Accords were still in place, and, though there were obvious difficulties and religious extremists on both sides continued to oppose a peaceful settlement, progress was made. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians benefited from the cessation of hostilities, politically, socially and economically. As I write this, in the fall of 2004, this seems a halcyon period. The situation in the Middle East has deteriorated and now threatens the security of the entire planet. Our world has irrevocably changed and yet it is also true that in Jerusalem not very much has changed at all.

In the summer of 2000, Ariel Sharon marched onto the Haram al-Sharif with a crowd of supporters, a symbolic gesture designed to be provocative. Sharon was regarded as the architect of the settlement movement in Gaza and the West Bank. Now he was tacitly threatening to occupy the Temple Mount. Immediately violence broke out in Jerusalem and the Second Intifadah began. It was the beginning of the end of the peace process. Today the Oslo Accords are in ruins, Palestinian militants have launched a devastating series of suicide bombing attacks, and the death toll on both sides of the conflict has been horrific.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization headed by the Muslim extremist Usama bin Laden, attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This has inevitably affected the situation in Israel and Palestine. Relations between the Islamic world and the West have reached an all-time low, and Jerusalem can be regarded as the bleeding heart of the problem. All sides continue to identify with it at a profound level.

For Jews, the possession of the Holy City continues to have healing power; they see Jewish Jerusalem rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Auschwitz. In constant danger from suicide attacks, an increasing number of Israelis can no longer imagine sharing the city with the Palestinians. Muslims also feel beleaguered as a result of the “war against terror” launched by the United States after September 11. Many see the loss of Muslim Jerusalem as a symbol of their impotence in the modern world.

In the United States, the Christian Right has also hardened its position. They have long believed that the final battle of Armageddon will be fought outside the city, and that Jews must be present in the Holy Land in order to fulfil the ancient prophecies (even though all unbaptised Jews will be massacred by the Antichrist). During the Cold War, Christian fundamentalists regarded the Soviet Union as the Antichrist; since September 11, they have come to believe that Islam will fulfil this role. Their apocalyptic views have an undoubted influence on American policy in the Middle East.

And yet, as this book shows, Jerusalem has for centuries been a symbol, surrounded in people’s minds with an aura of associations that have made it sacred. They found their God in the Holy City and it thus became inseparable from their deepest selves. People have always experienced God not simply as a transcendent reality “out there” but also in the ground of their being. When Jerusalem was threatened, they felt personally attacked; when its sanctity was violated, they experienced this as a rape. Today everybody feels threatened; everybody is in danger; everybody is on high alert in the expectation of a terrorist attack. As a result, Jerusalem has become more sacred to their identity than ever before.

This book traces the explosive history of Jerusalem, and the atrocities that have been committed in its name. But it also shows that for centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims were able to live amicably together there. Peaceful coexistence in the Holy City is not an impossible dream. If Jerusalem has become the symbolic heart of the conflict that now threatens the whole world, a solution is a matter of the highest importance. It will require imagination and commitment to find a solution to the problem of Jerusalem; everybody will have to make sacrifices; everybody will have to compromise in the interests of peace. But people were able to share the Holy City once, and they can therefore do it again.

Introduction

In Jerusalem, more than in any other place I have visited, history is a dimension of the present. Perhaps this is so in any disputed territory, but it struck me forcibly the first time I went to work in Jerusalem in 1983. First, I was surprised by the strength of my own reaction to the city. It was strange to be walking around a place that had been an imaginative reality in my life ever since I was a small child and had been told tales of King David or Jesus. As a young nun, I was taught to begin my morning meditation by picturing the biblical scene I was about to contemplate, and so conjured up my own image of the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, or the Via Dolorosa. Now that I was going about my daily business among these very sites, I discovered that the real city was a far more tumultuous and confusing place. I had, for example, to take in the fact that Jerusalem was clearly very important to Jews and Muslims too. When I saw caftaned Jews or tough Israeli soldiers kissing the stones of the Western Wall or watched the crowds of Muslim families surging through the streets in their best clothes for Friday prayers at the Haram al-Sharif, I became aware for the first time of the challenge of religious pluralism. People could see the same symbol in entirely different ways. There was no doubting the attachment of any of these people to their holy city, yet they had been quite absent from my Jerusalem. Still, the city remained mine as well: my old images of biblical scenes were a constant counterpoint to my firsthand experience of twentieth-century Jerusalem. Associated with some of the most momentous events of my life, Jerusalem was somehow built into my own identity.

Yet as a British citizen, I had no political claim to the city, unlike my new colleagues and friends in Jerusalem. Here again, as Israelis and Palestinians presented their arguments to me, I was struck by the vivid immediacy of past events. All could cite, in sometimes minute detail, the events leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 or the Six-Day War in 1967. Frequently I noted how these depictions of the past centered on the question of who had done what first. Who had been the first to resort to violence, the Zionists or the Arabs? Who had first noticed the potential of Palestine and developed the country? Who had lived in Jerusalem first, the Jews or the Palestinians? When they discussed the troubled present, both Israelis and Palestinians turned instinctively to the past, their polemic coursing easily from the Bronze Age through the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Again, when Israelis and Palestinians proudly showed me around their city, the very monuments were drawn into the conflict.

On my first morning in Jerusalem, I was instructed by my Israeli colleagues how to spot the stones used by King Herod, with their distinctively beveled edges. They seemed ubiquitous and a perpetual reminder of a Jewish commitment to Jerusalem that could be dated back (in this case) to the first century BCE—long before Islam appeared on the scene. Constantly, as we passed construction crews in the Old City, I was told how Jerusalem had been utterly neglected by the Ottomans when they had ruled the city. It had come to life again only in the nineteenth century, thanks, largely, to Jewish investment—look at the windmill built by Sir Moses Montefiore and the hospitals funded by the Rothschild family. It was due to Israel that the city was thriving as never before.

My Palestinian friends showed me a very different Jerusalem. They pointed out the splendors of the haram al-Sharif and the exquisite madāris, Muslim schools, built around its borders by the Mamluks as evidence of the Muslim commitment to Jerusalem. They took me to the shrine of Nebī Musa near Jericho, built to defend Jerusalem against the Christians, and the extraordinary Umayyad palaces nearby. When we drove through Bethlehem once, my Palestinian host stopped the car beside Rachel’s roadside tomb to point out passionately that the Palestinians had cared for this Jewish shrine for centuries—a pious devotion for which they had been ill rewarded.

One word kept recurring throughout. Even the most secular Israelis and Palestinians pointed out that Jerusalem was “holy” to their people. The Palestinians even called the city al-Quds, “the Holy,” though the Israelis scornfully waved this aside, pointing out that Jerusalem had been a holy city for Jews first, and that it had never been as important to the Muslims as Mecca and Medina. But what did the word “holy” mean in this context? How could a mere city, full of fallible human beings and teeming with the most unholy activities, be sacred? Why did those Jews who professed a militant atheism care about the holy city and feel so possessive about the Western Wall? Why should an unbelieving Arab be moved to tears the first time he stood in the Mosque of al-Aqsā? I could see why the city was holy to Christians, since Jerusalem had been the scene of Jesus’s death and resurrection: it had witnessed the birth of the faith. But the formative events of both Judaism and Islam had happened far away from Jerusalem, in the Sinai Peninsula or the Arabian Hijaz. Why, for example, was Mount Zion in Jerusalem a holy place for Jews instead of Mount Sinai, where God had given the Law to Moses and made his covenant with Israel? Clearly, I had been wrong to assume that the holiness of a city depended upon its associations with the events of salvation history, the mythical account of God’s intervention in the affairs of humanity. It was to find out what a holy city was that I decided to write this book.

What I have discovered is that even though the word “holy” is bandied around freely in connection with Jerusalem, as though its meaning were self-evident, it is in fact quite complex. Each one of the three monotheistic religions has developed traditions about the city that are remarkably similar. Furthermore, the devotion to a holy place or a holy city is a near-universal phenomenon. Historians of religion believe that it is one of the earliest manifestations of faith in all cultures. People have developed what has been called a sacred geography that has nothing to do with a scientific map of the world but which charts their interior life. Earthly cities, groves, and mountains have become symbols of this spirituality, which is so omnipresent that it seems to answer a profound human need, whatever our beliefs about “God” or the supernatural. Jerusalem has—for different reasons—become central to the sacred geography of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This makes it very difficult for them to see the city objectively, because it has become bound up with their conception of themselves and the ultimate reality—sometimes called “God” or the sacred—that gives our mundane life meaning and value.

There are three interconnected concepts that will recur in the following pages. First is the whole notion of God or the sacred. In the Western world, we have tended to view God in a rather anthropomorphic and personalized manner, and as a result, the whole notion of the divine frequently appears incoherent and incredible. Since the word “God” has become discredited to many people because of the naïve and often unacceptable things that have been asserted and done in “his” name, it may be easier to use the term “sacred” instead. When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with the natural world, but that it also goes beyond. However we choose to define it—it has been called God, Brahman, or Nirvana—this transcendence has been a fact of human life. We have all experienced something similar, whatever our theological opinions, when we listen to a great piece of music or hear a beautiful poem and feel touched within and lifted, momentarily, beyond ourselves. We tend to seek out this experience, and if we do not find it in one setting—in a church or synagogue, for example—we will look elsewhere. The sacred has been experienced in many ways: it has inspired fear, awe, exuberance, peace, dread, and compelling moral activity. It represents a fuller, enhanced existence that will complete us. It is not merely felt as a force “out there” but can also be sensed in the depths of our own being. But like any aesthetic experience, the sense of the sacred needs to be cultivated. In our modern secular society, this has not always been a priority, and so, like any unused capacity, it has tended to wither away. In more traditional societies, the ability to apprehend the sacred has been regarded as of crucial importance. Indeed, without this sense of the divine, people often felt that life was not worth living.

This is partly because human beings have always experienced the world as such a painful place. We are the victims of natural disasters, of mortality, extinction, and human injustice and cruelty. The religious quest has usually begun with the perception that something has gone wrong, that, as the Buddha put it, “Existence is awry.” Besides the common shocks that flesh is heir to, we all suffer personal distress that makes apparently unimportant setbacks overwhelmingly upsetting. There is a sense of abandonment that makes such experiences as bereavement, divorce, broken friendship, or even losing a beloved object seem, sometimes, part of an underlying and universal ill. Often this interior dis-ease is characterized by a sense of separation. There appears to be something missing from our lives; our existence seems fragmented and incomplete. We have an inchoate feeling that life was not meant to be thus and that we have lost something essential to our well-being—even though we would be hard put to explain this rationally. This sense of loss has surfaced in many ways. It is apparent in the Platonic image of the twin soul from which we have been separated at birth and in the universal myth of the lost paradise. In previous centuries, men and women turned to religion to assuage this pain, finding healing in the experience of the sacred. Today in the West, people sometimes have recourse to psychoanalysis, which has articulated this sense of a primal separation in a more scientific idiom. Thus it is associated with memories of the womb and the traumatic shock of birth. However we choose to see it, this notion of separation and a yearning for some kind of reconciliation lies at the heart of the devotion to a holy place.

The second concept we must discuss is the question of myth. When people have tried to speak about the sacred or about the pain of human existence, they have not been able to express their experience in logical, discursive terms but have had recourse to mythology. Even Freud and Jung, who were the first to chart the so-called scientific quest for the soul, turned to the myths of the classical world or of religion when they tried to describe these interior events, and they made up some new myths of their own. Today the word “myth” has been rather debased in our culture; it is generally used to mean something that is not true. Events are dismissed because they are “only” myths. This is certainly true in the debate about Jerusalem. Palestinians claim that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the Jewish kingdom founded by King David and that no trace of Solomon’s Temple has been found. The Kingdom of Israel is not mentioned in any contemporary text but only in the Bible. It is quite likely, therefore, that it is merely a “myth.” Israelis have also discounted the story of the Prophet MuḤammad’s ascent to heaven from the haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem—a myth that lies at the heart of the Muslim devotion to al-Quds—as demonstrably absurd. But this, I have come to believe, is to miss the point. Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way. Mythology has been well defined as an ancient form of psychology, because it describes the inner reaches of the self which are so mysterious and yet so fascinating to us. Thus the myths of “sacred geography” express truths about the interior life. They touch on the obscure sources of human pain and desire and can thus unleash very powerful emotions. Stories about Jerusalem should not be dismissed because they are “only” myths: they are important precisely because they are myths.

The Jerusalem question is explosive because the city has acquired mythical status. Not surprisingly, people on both sides of the present conflict and in the international community frequently call for a rationalized debate about rights and sovereignty, divorced from all this emotive fiction. It would be nice if this were possible. But it is never safe to say that we have risen above our need for mythology. People have often tried to eradicate myth from religion in the past. Prophets and reformers in ancient Israel, for example, were extremely concerned to separate their faith from the mythology of the indigenous Canaanites. They did not succeed, however. The old stories and legends surfaced again powerfully in the mysticism of Kabbalah, a process that has been described as the triumph of myth over the more rational forms of religion. In the history of Jerusalem we shall see that people turned instinctively toward myth when their lives became particularly troubled and they could find no consolation in a more cerebral ideology. Sometimes outer events seemed so perfectly to express a people’s inner reality that they immediately assumed mythical status and inspired a burst of mythologized enthusiasm. Two such events have been the discovery of the Tomb of Christ in the fourth century and the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967. In both cases, the people concerned thought they had left this primitive way of thinking far behind, but the course of events proved too strong for them. The catastrophes which have befallen the Jewish and the Palestinian people in our own century have been of such magnitude that it has not been surprising that myth has once again come to the fore. For good or ill, therefore, a consideration of the mythology of Jerusalem is essential, if only to illuminate the desires and behavior of people who are affected by this type of spirituality.

The last term that we must consider before embarking on the history of Jerusalem is symbolism. In our scientifically oriented society, we no longer think naturally in terms of images and symbols. We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. This has changed the religious experience for many people in the West, a process that, as we shall see, began in the sixteenth century. We tend to say that something is only a symbol, essentially separate from the more mysterious reality that it represents. This was not so in the premodern world, however. A symbol was seen as partaking in the reality to which it pointed; a religious symbol thus had the power of introducing worshippers to the sacred realm. Throughout history, the sacred has never been experienced directly—except, perhaps, by a very few extraordinary human beings. It has always been felt in something other than itself. Thus the divine has been experienced in a human being—male or female—who becomes an avatar or incarnation of the sacred; it has also been found in a holy text, a law code, or a doctrine. One of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine has been a place. People have sensed the sacred in mountains, groves, cities, and temples. When they have walked into these places, they have felt that they have entered a different dimension, separate from but compatible with the physical world they normally inhabit. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem has been such a symbol of the divine.

This is not something that happens automatically. Once a place has been experienced as sacred in some way and has proved capable of giving people access to the divine, worshippers have devoted a great deal of creative energy to helping others to cultivate this sense of transcendence. We shall see that the architecture of temples, churches, and mosques has been symbolically important, often mapping out the inner journey that a pilgrim must take to reach God. Liturgy and ritual have also heightened this sense of sacred space. In the Protestant West, people have often inherited a mistrust of religious ceremonial, seeing it as so much mumbo-jumbo. But it is probably more accurate to see liturgy as a form of theater, which can provide a powerful experience of the transcendent even in a wholly secular context. In the West, drama had its origins in religion: in the sacred festivals of ancient Greece and the Easter celebrations in the churches and cathedrals of medieval Europe. Myths have also been devised to express the inner meaning of Jerusalem and its various shrines.

One of these myths is what the late Romanian-American scholar Mircea Eliade has called the myth of eternal return, which he found in almost all cultures. According to this mode of thought, all objects that we encounter here on earth have their counterpart in the divine sphere. One can see this myth as an attempt to express the sense that our life here below is somehow incomplete and separated from a fuller and more satisfactory existence elsewhere. All human activities and skills also have a divine prototype: by copying the actions of the gods, people can share in their divine life. This imitatio dei is still observed today. People continue to rest on the Sabbath or eat bread and drink wine in church—actions which are meaningless in themselves—because they believe that in some sense God once did the same. The rituals at a holy place are another symbolic way of imitating the gods and entering their fuller and more potent mode of existence. The same myth is also crucial to the cult of the holy city, which can be seen as the replica of the home of the gods in heaven; a temple is regarded as the reproduction of a particular deity’s celestial palace. By copying its heavenly archetype as minutely as possible, a temple could also house the god here on earth.

In the cold light of rational modernity, such myths appear ridiculous. But these ideas were not worked out first and then applied to a particular “holy” location. They were an attempt to explain an experience. In religion, experience always comes before the theological explanation. People first felt that they had apprehended the sacred in a grove or on a mountain peak. They were sometimes helped to do so by the aesthetic devices of architecture, music, and liturgy, which lifted them beyond themselves. They then sought to explain this experience in the poetic language of mythology or in the symbols of sacred geography. Jerusalem turned out to be one of those locations that “worked” for Jews, Christians, and Muslims because it did seem to introduce them to the divine.

One further remark is necessary. The practices of religion are closely akin to those of art. Both art and religion try to make some ultimate sense of a flawed and tragic world. But religion is different from art because it must have an ethical dimension. Religion can perhaps be described as a moral aesthetic. It is not enough to experience the divine or the transcendent; the experience must then be incarnated in our behavior towards others. All the great religions insist that the test of true spirituality is practical compassion. The Buddha once said that after experiencing enlightenment, a man must leave the mountaintop and return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This also applies to the spirituality of a holy place. Crucial to the cult of Jerusalem from the very first was the importance of practical charity and social justice. The city cannot be holy unless it is also just and compassionate to the weak and vulnerable. But sadly, this moral imperative has often been overlooked. Some of the worst atrocities have occurred when people have put the purity of Jerusalem and the desire to gain access to its great sanctity before the quest for justice and charity.

All these underlying currents have played their part in Jerusalem’s long and turbulent history. This book will not attempt to lay down the law about the future of Jerusalem. That would be a presumption. It is merely an attempt to find out what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have meant when they have said that the city is “holy” to them and to point out some of the implications of Jerusalem’s sanctity in each tradition. This seems just as important as deciding who was in the city first and who, therefore, should own it, especially since the origins of Jerusalem are shrouded in such obscurity.

1 ZION

WE KNOW NOTHING about the people who first settled in the hills and valleys that would eventually become the city of Jerusalem. In tombs on the Ophel hill, to the south of the present walls of the Old City, pottery vessels have been found which have been dated to 3200 BCE. This was the time when towns had begun to appear in other parts of Canaan, the modern Israel; in Megiddo, Jericho, Ai, Lachish, and Beth Shan, for example, archaeologists have unearthed temples, houses, workshops, streets, and water conduits. But there is as yet no conclusive evidence that urban life had begun in Jerusalem at that period. Ironically, the city which would be revered as the center of the world by millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims was off the beaten track of ancient Canaan. Situated in the highlands, which were difficult to settle, it was outside the hub of the country. Development in the Early Bronze Age was mainly confined to the coastal plain, the fertile Jezreel Valley, and the Negev, where the Egyptians had established trade depots. Canaan was a potentially rich country: its inhabitants exported wine, oil, honey, bitumen, and grain. It also had strategic importance, linking Asia and Africa and providing a bridge between the civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Phoenicia, and Mesopotamia. But even though the springs around the Ophel hill had always attracted hunters, farmers, and temporary settlers—flints and shards have been found there dating from the Paleolithic Age—Jerusalem, as far as we know, played no part in this early florescence.

In the ancient world, civilization was always a precarious achievement. By about 2300 BCE there were virtually no cities left in Canaan. Because of either climatic change, foreign invasion, or internecine warfare, urban life disappeared. It was also a time of upheaval and instability throughout the Near East. Egypt saw the destruction of what is known as the Old Kingdom (c. 2613–2160 BCE). The Akkadian dynasty of Mesopotamia was overthrown by the Amorites, a Western Semitic people who established a capital at Babylon. Urban sites were abandoned throughout Asia Minor, and Ugarit and Byblos, on the Phoenician coast, were destroyed. For reasons that we do not understand, Syria remained unscathed and nearby towns in northern Canaan, such as Megiddo and Beth Shan, managed to survive longer than their southern neighbors. Yet in all these regions the struggle to create an ordered environment where people could lead a more secure and fulfilled life continued. New cities and new dynasties appeared and old settlements were restored. By the beginning of the second millennium the old towns of Canaan were inhabited once more.

We know very little about life in Canaan at this period. No central government developed in the country. Each town was autonomous, having its own ruler and dominating the surrounding countryside, rather as in Mesopotamia, where civilization had begun. Canaan remained an intensely regional country. There was no large-scale trade or industry, and there were such sharp differences of terrain and climate that the various districts tended to remain distinct and cut off from one another. Few people lived in the highlands, the Judaean steppes, or the Jordan Valley, where the river was not navigable and led nowhere. Communications were difficult, and people did not travel much from one part of the country to another. The main road linking Egypt and Damascus went up the coast from Gaza to Jaffa and then cut inland to avoid the swamps around Mount Carmel toward Megiddo, the Jezreel Valley, and the Sea of Galilee. Naturally these regions remained the most densely populated, and it was this area which interested the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty when they began to extend their influence northward toward Syria during the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE. Canaan, which the Egyptians called “Retinu,” did not actually become a province of Egypt, but the pharaohs dominated the country politically and economically. Sesostris III, for example, did not hesitate to march up the coastal road to subdue local rulers who were becoming too powerful and independent. Even so, the pharaohs showed relatively little interest in other parts of Canaan, and despite the general Egyptian overlordship, towns such as Megiddo, Hazor, and Acco developed into fortified city-states. By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had also begun to penetrate the hill country and built cities there. Shechem became the most powerful of these fortified highland towns: in area it may have been as large as thirty-seven acres, and it controlled a considerable part of the countryside. Cities, such as Hebron and Jerusalem, also developed in the southern hills.

This is the point when Jerusalem can be said to have entered history. In 1961 the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered a wall, nearly six and a half feet thick, running along the eastern slope of the Ophel hill with a large gate near the Gihon Spring. She concluded that this town wall continued around the southern end of the hill and along the western slope. In the north it disappeared under a later city wall. Kenyon also found pottery between the wall and the rock scarp which dated to about 1800 BCE. The city was most vulnerable in the north, and later the citadel of Zion was built there; it is possible that there was also a fortress in the north of the city during the eighteenth century BCE. The walls were built quite low down the eastern slope of the Ophel, possibly to include access to an underground tunnel to the Gihon Spring.¹ The British engineer Charles Warren had discovered this tunnel in 1867: it started at an opening in the rock within the city, descended obliquely, and then plunged vertically to meet the water which had been conveyed from the Gihon by means of another horizontal tunnel. Jugs and pitchers could be lowered down the shaft during a siege. Similar devices have been discovered at Megiddo, Gezer, and Gibeon. Kenyon believed that the shaft was in use during the Bronze Age, but her theory has been disputed: some doubt that the inhabitants would have had the technological skill to build such a system at this stage. But recent geological findings indicate that “Warren’s Shaft,” as it is known, is not entirely man-made; it is a natural sinkhole along a joint in the limestone, which the ancient Jerusalemites could well have modified and enlarged.²

Settlers were probably attracted to the Ophel because of its proximity to the Gihon. The site also had strategic advantages, lying at the point where the foothills of the highlands give way to the Judaean desert. The Ophel could not support a large population—the city covered an area of little more than nine acres—but three steep valleys gave the settlers formidable protection: the Kidron Valley to the east, the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) to the south, and the Central Valley, now largely silted up, which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus called the Tyropoeon Valley, to the west.³ Even though the town was not one of the most important cities of Canaan, it seems to have come to the attention of the Egyptians. In 1925, sherds were bought in Luxor which, when reassembled, made up about eighty dishes and vases inscribed with an ancient hieratic script. When this was deciphered, the texts were found to contain the names of countries, towns, and rulers alleged to be the enemies of Egypt. These vases would then be smashed in a rite of sympathetic magic designed to bring about the downfall of the recalcitrant vassals. The vases have been dated to the reign of Pharaoh Sesostris III (1878–1842 BCE); they include the names of nineteen Canaanite cities, one of which is “Rushalimum.” This is the first mention of the city in any historical record. The text also names two of its princes, Yq’rm and Shashan. In another of these so-called Execration Texts, thought to have been inscribed a century later, “Rushalimum” is cursed again, but this time the city appears to have only one ruler. From this slender shred of evidence, some scholars have inferred that during the eighteenth century, Jerusalem, like the rest of Canaan, had evolved from a tribal society with a number of chieftains to an urban settlement governed by a single king.⁴

Here we should pause to consider the name of the city. It seems to have incorporated the name of the Syrian god Shalem, who was identified with the setting sun or the evening star. Canaan may have been dominated politically by Egypt, but in cultural and religious affairs the chief influence was Syria. In Hazor, Megiddo, and Shechem, temples of this period have been unearthed that have clearly been built on a Syrian model. They are constructed according to the same basic plan as the king’s palace, underlining the fact that all rule was seen to derive from the gods. The laity were forbidden to enter the Hekhal, or cult hall, just as they were denied access to the king’s presence. They could glimpse the god’s effigy, which was placed in a niche at the end of the hall, from the courtyard, through the open doors of the Hekhal. No Bronze Age temple has been unearthed in Jerusalem, but the city’s name shows that the inhabitants were also open to Syrian religion. The names of the Jerusalem princes in the Execration Texts indicate that, like the people of Syria, the Jerusalemites were of Western Semitic origin and shared the same worldview.

The name “Rushalimum” can probably be translated as “Shalem has founded.”⁵ In the ancient world of the Near East and the Mediterranean, settlement and town-planning were regarded as divine enterprises. The Ophel hill would have appealed to the first colonists because of its water supply and its strategic advantages, but the name of the city shows that the initiative came from the god. At this date, all cities were regarded as holy places, an alien concept for us in the modern West, where the city is often experienced as a godforsaken realm in which religion has an increasingly marginal role. But long before people began to map their world scientifically, they had evolved a sacred geography to define their place in the universe emotionally and spiritually. Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the study of sacred space, pointed out that reverence for a holy place preceded all other speculation about the nature of the world.⁶ It is to be found in all cultures and was a primordial religious conviction. The belief that some places were sacred, and hence fit for human habitation, was not based on an intellectual investigation or on any metaphysical speculation into the nature of the cosmos. Instead, when men and women contemplated the world about them, they were drawn irresistibly to some localities which they experienced as radically different from all others. This was an experience that was basic to their view of the world, and it went far deeper than the cerebral level of the mind. Even today our scientific rationalism has not been able to replace the old sacred geography entirely. As we shall see, ancient conceptions of holy topography still affect the history of Jerusalem and have been espoused by people who would not normally consider themselves religious. Men and women have formulated this perception of sacred space in different ways over the centuries, but in their discussion of the special status of a city such as Jerusalem certain themes tend to recur, indicating that they speak to some fundamental human need.⁷ Even those who have no interest in any of the traditionally holy cities and have no belief in the supernatural often have special places to which they like to repair. Such sites are “sacred” to us because they are inextricably bound up with our conception of ourselves; they may be associated with a profound experience that transformed our lives, with memories of early childhood, or with a person who was important to us. When we visit such places, we can perhaps recall the experience of enhanced life that we once had there, an experience which momentarily convinced us that despite the distressing and arbitrary nature of much of our mundane existence, it had some ultimate meaning and value, even if we would find it hard to explain this insight in rational terms.

In the ancient world, just as in traditional societies in our own day, people tried to explain their sacred geography by saying that the world had been created by the gods. It was not, therefore, neutral territory: the landscape had something to say to humanity. When they regarded the cosmos, men and women discerned a level of existence which transcended the frailties and limitations that impeded their own lives. This represented a fuller and more powerful dimension, a reality that was at one and the same time other than they and yet deeply familiar. To express their sense of affinity with the sacred realm, they often personified it, imaging it forth in gods and goddesses with personalities similar to their own. Because they sensed this divine element in the natural world, these deities were also associated with the sun, the wind, or the life-giving rain. People told stories about these deities which were not intended to describe events that had actually happened but were a tentative attempt to express the mystery that they experienced in the world. Above all, men and women wanted to live as closely as possible to this transcendent reality. To say that they sought the meaning of life could be misleading, since the phrase suggests a clear formula that sums up the human condition. In fact, the goal of the religious quest has always been an experience, not a message. We want to feel truly alive and to fulfill the potential of our humanity, living in such a way that we are in tune with the deeper currents of existence. This search for superabundant life—symbolized by the potent, immortal gods—has informed all great religions: people wanted to get beyond the mortality and triviality of mundane experience to find a reality that would complement their human nature. In the ancient world, men and women felt that without the possibility of living in contact with this divine element, life was insupportable.⁸

Hence, as Eliade has shown, they would settle only in places where the sacred had once manifested itself, breaking down the barrier that divided the gods from humanity. Perhaps the god Shalem had revealed himself on the Ophel hill and thus made the place peculiarly his own. People could journey there, knowing that it was possible to make contact with the god in the city that he had marked out for himself. But the sacred did not only erupt into the mundane world in apparitions and epiphanies. Anything that stood out from its surroundings and ran counter to the natural order could be a hierophany, a revelation of the divine. A rock or a valley that was particularly beautiful or majestic might indicate the presence of the sacred because it could not easily be fitted into its surroundings. Its very appearance spoke of something else.⁹ The unknown, the alien, or even the perfect seemed to the men and women of archaic societies to point to something other than themselves. Mountains which towered above the earth were particularly potent symbols of transcendence; by climbing to the summit, worshippers could feel that they had ascended to a different plane, midway between heaven and earth. In Mesopotamia, the great temple-towers known as ziggurats were designed to resemble hills; the seven levels of these huge stone ladders represented the seven heavens. Pilgrims thus imagined themselves climbing through the cosmos and at the top they could meet their gods.¹⁰ In Syria, a more mountainous region, there was no need to create artificial hills: real mountains were experienced as sacred places. One which would be very important in the history of Jerusalem would be Mount Zaphon, the present Jebel al-Aqra, twenty miles north of Ugarit at the mouth of the Orontes.¹¹ In Canaan too, Mounts Hermon, Carmel, and Tabor were all revered as holy places. As we know from the Hebrew psalms, Mount Zion to the north of the Ophel hill in Jerusalem was also a sacred site. It is impossible for us to see the mountain’s natural contour, since it has been concealed by the vast platform built by King Herod in the first century BCE to house the Jewish Temple. But in its natural state, Mount Zion may have stood out dramatically from the surrounding hills in such a way that it seemed to embody the sacred “other” and marked the place out as “holy.”

Once a spot had been experienced as sacred, it was radically separate from its profane environs. Because the divine had been revealed there, the place became the center of the earth. This was not understood in any literal, geometric manner. It would not matter to the inhabitants of Jerusalem that nearby Hebron was also regarded as a sacred “center.” Nor when psalmists or rabbis later claimed that Mount Zion was the highest place in the world were they at all disturbed by the fact that the Western Hill, on the other side of the Tyropoeon Valley, was obviously higher than Zion. They were not describing the physical geography of the city but its place on their spiritual map. Like any other sacred hill where the divine had revealed itself, Zion was felt to be exalted because people felt closer to heaven there. It was “the center” of their world for the same reason: it was one of the places where it was possible to make contact with the divine that alone gave reality and point to their lives.

In archaic societies, people would settle only in places where such contact was possible. Eliade noted that the Australian Achilpa tribe became entirely disoriented when the sacred pole which they carried around with them on their travels was broken. It represented their link with the sacred: once it had been broken, the Achilpa simply lay down to die.¹² We are meaning-seeking creatures, and once we have lost our orientation, we do not know how to live or to place ourselves in the world. That was why cities in the ancient world were built around shrines and temples which housed the divine Presence. The sacred was the most solid reality and gave substance to our more fragmented existence. The sacred could be experienced as frightening and “other.” The German historian Rudolph Otto explained in his classic book The Idea of the Holy that it could sometimes inspire dread and horror. Yet it was also fascinans, exerting an irresistible attraction because it was recognized as profoundly familiar and something that was essential to humanity. Only by associating themselves with this more potent reality could human beings ensure that their societies would survive. Civilization was fragile: cities could disappear almost overnight, as they did in Palestine during the Early Bronze Age. They could not hope to endure if they did not share to some degree the more potent and effective life of the gods.

Sometimes this search for the sacred and the cult of a holy place was associated with the nostalgia for paradise. Almost every culture has a myth of a golden age at the dawn of time, when communication with the gods was easy and intimate. The divine was felt not as a distant, eruptive force but as a fact of daily life. Humanity enjoyed enhanced powers: there was no death, no sickness, no disharmony. People longed to return to this state of primal bliss and harmony, feeling that this is what life should have been like had it not been for some original lapse.¹³ Today we may no longer believe in an earthly paradise or a Garden of Eden, but the yearning for something different from the flawed present persists. There is an innate conviction that life was not meant to be like this: we hanker for what might have been, mourn the transitory nature of earthly existence, and feel outraged by death. We are haunted by a sense of more perfect relationships and imagine a world of harmony and wholeness, where we would feel completely in tune with our surroundings, instead of having to battle against them. This longing for an inaccessible paradise that remains irretrievably lost surfaces today in popular songs, in fiction, and in the utopian fantasies of philosophers, politicians, and advertisers. Psychoanalysts associate this nostalgia with the pain of separation we experienced at birth, when we were ejected violently and forever from our mother’s body. Today many people seek this paradisal harmony in art, drugs, or sex; in the ancient world, men and women sought it by living in a place where, they believed, the lost wholeness could be recovered.

We have no direct information about the religious life in Jerusalem during the eighteenth century BCE, however. In fact, after the Execration Texts there is no further mention of Jerusalem for some time. It was a time of prosperity in Canaan. During the seventeenth century, the pharaohs were too preoccupied with domestic affairs to bother about “Retinu,” and the country prospered. There were no more aggressive Egyptian campaigns; local culture could flourish. Some towns of Canaan became full city-states: architecture, furniture, pottery, and jewelry have been unearthed at such sites as Megiddo, Hazor, and Shechem. But no pottery from the seventeenth to the fifteenth century has been found in Jerusalem. For all we know, the city may even have ceased to exist during these years.

It is not until the fourteenth century BCE that we can be certain that the site was inhabited again. By that time, Egypt had managed to reassert its presence in Canaan. The pharaohs were now in conflict with the new Hittite empire in Anatolia and the Hurrian Kingdom of Mittani in Upper Mesopotamia. They needed to ensure that Canaan, an important transit country, was firmly under their control. In 1486, Pharaoh Thutmose III had put down a rebellion of Canaanite and Syrian princes at Megiddo and reduced “Retinu” to a mere dominion of Egypt. The country was divided into four administrative districts, and the princes of the city-states of Canaan became vassals of the pharaoh. They were bound to him by a personal oath and forced to pay heavy tribute. In return they seem to have expected more help and support than the pharaoh was actually prepared to give. Yet the princes still enjoyed a fair measure of independence: Egypt did not have the means to control the country completely. The princes could raise armies, fight against one another, and annex new territory for themselves. But other great powers were beginning to be interested in Canaan. Hurrians from the Kingdom of Mitanni had started to establish themselves in the country by the beginning of the fifteenth century. They are the people who are called “Hivites” or “Horites” in the Bible. Unlike the local people, they were of Aryan stock, and though they did not come as conquerors, they exerted such strong influence that the Egyptians started to call Canaan “Huru” or “Hurrian Land.” The Hurrians often gained positions of power in the city-states; they lived alongside the native population and taught them their Akkadian language, which became the official diplomatic tongue, and cuneiform writing.

Hurrian influence was strong in Jerusalem,¹⁴ which emerges in the fourteenth century as one of the city-states of Canaan—albeit one of lesser importance than Hazor or Megiddo. Its territory now extended as far as the lands of Shechem and Gezer. Its ruler was Abdi-Hepa, whose name is Hurrian. Our knowledge of Jerusalem at this point is derived from the cuneiform tablets discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt in 1887 CE, which seem to have been part of the royal archives of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1386–49 BCE) and his son Akhenaten (1350–34 BCE). They consist of about 350 letters from the princes of Canaan to the pharaoh, their overlord, and show that the country was in turmoil. The city-states were at war with one another: Prince Lab’ayu of Shechem, for example, was pursuing a ruthlessly expansionist policy and had extended his territory as far north as the Sea of Galilee and westward as far as Gaza. The princes also complained of internal enemies and begged the pharaoh for help. It also appears that Egypt, then at war with the Hittites, gave them little support. The unrest in Canaan probably did not displease the pharaoh, since it meant that the city-states were unable to take a united stand against Egyptian hegemony.

Six of the Amarna letters are from Abdi-Hepa of Jerusalem, who does not appear to have been one of the more successful rulers of Canaan. He protests his loyalty to the pharaoh in extravagant terms, plangently appealing for help against his enemies—help that was not forthcoming. Abdi-Hepa could make no headway against Shechem and in the end lost all his allies. There were also uprisings in the city of Jerusalem itself. Yet Abdi-Hepa did not want Egyptian troops to be sent to Jerusalem. He had already suffered enough at the hands of the poorly trained and inadequately supplied Egyptian soldiers, who, he complained, had actually broken into his palace and tried to kill him. Instead he asked the pharaoh to send reinforcements to Gezer, Lachish, or Ashkelon. Unless help came from Egypt, the land of Jerusalem would surely fall to his enemies.¹⁵

Abdi-Hepa almost certainly never received his troops: indeed, at this time the hill country was fast becoming a demilitarized zone.¹⁶ The fortified town of Shiloh, for example, was abandoned and 80 percent of the smaller highland settlements had disappeared by the early thirteenth century. Some scholars believe that it was during this period of unrest that the people whom the Bible calls the Jebusites established themselves in Jerusalem. Others claim, on the basis of the literary evidence, that the Jebusites, who were closely related to the Hittites, did not arrive in the country until after the fall of the Hittite empire, which was situated in what is now northern Turkey, in about 1200 BCE.¹⁷ It is impossible to be certain about this one way or the other. Certainly, the archaeological investigations do not, as yet, indicate a change in the population of Jerusalem at the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE). It has also been suggested that the Jebusites were simply an aristocratic family who lived in the citadel, separately from the people in the town itself.¹⁸ It could, therefore, have been the Jebusites who repaired the old fortifications on the Ophel and built a new district on the eastern slope between the wall and the summit of the hill. Kathleen Kenyon unearthed a series of stone-filled terraces which, she believed, made this steep terrain habitable and replaced the old straggling houses and plunging streets. The work took a long time; Kenyon claimed that the project was begun in the mid-fourteenth century but was not completed until the early thirteenth century. Some of the walls were thirty-three feet high, and construction was often interrupted by such natural disasters as earthquakes and soil erosion.¹⁹ As well as providing accommodation, this new structure was probably also part of the city’s defenses. Kenyon thought that it could have been the “Millo” mentioned by the biblical writers:²⁰ since some of the later kings of Judah made a point of repairing the Millo, it probably had a military function. It may well have been part of the city’s fortress on the crest of the Ophel. It has been suggested that the name “Zion” did not refer to the whole city of Jerusalem but originally denoted the fortress which protected the town on its northern and more vulnerable side.

During the Amarna period, Jerusalem seems to have remained loyal to Shalem, its founder-god. Abdi-Hepa speaks in his letters to the pharaoh of “the capital of the land of Jerusalem, of which the name is Beit-Shulmani [House of Shalem].”²¹ But scholars believe that the Hurrians brought a new god to the city: the storm god Baal, who was worshipped by the people of Ugarit on the Syrian coast.²² We know about Baal’s cult there from the cuneiform tablets which were discovered at Ras Shamra (the modern city on the site of ancient Ugarit) in 1928. We should pause briefly to consider it, because it would have a great impact on the spirituality of Jerusalem.

Baal was not the chief god of the Syrian pantheon. His father was El, who would also make an appearance in the Hebrew Bible. El lived in a tent-shrine on a mountain, near the confluence of two great rivers which were the source of the world’s fertility. Each year the gods used to assemble there to take part in the Divine Council to establish the laws of the universe. El, therefore, was the fount of law, order, and fecundity, without which no human civilization could survive. But over the years, like other high gods, El became a rather remote figure, and many people were attracted by his more dynamic son Baal, who rode upon the clouds of heaven and hurled lightning from the skies to bring the life-giving rain to the parched earth.

But Baal had to fight to the death to secure the earth’s fruitfulness. In the Near East, life was often experienced as a desperate struggle against the forces of chaos, darkness, and mortality. Civilization, order, and creativity could be achieved only against great odds. People told stories about the mighty battles fought by the gods at the dawn of time which brought light out of darkness and order out of chaos and kept the lawless elements of the cosmos within due and manageable bounds. Thus in Babylon, the liturgy commemorated the battle of the young warrior god Marduk, who slew the sea-monster Tiamat, split her carcass in two, and created the world. There were similar stories about Baal. In one myth, he fought the seven-headed sea-monster Lotan, who is called “Leviathan” in the Hebrew Bible. In almost all cultures, the dragon or the monster has symbolized the unformed and the undifferentiated. By slaying Lotan, Baal had halted the slide back to the formless waste of chaos from which all life—human and divine—had sprung. The myth depicts a fear of extinction and annihilation that, especially in these early days of civilization, was a perpetual possibility.

The same terror can be felt in the stories of Baal’s other battles, against the sea and the desert—two natural forces that threatened these early cities of the Near East. The sea represented everything that the civilized world was not and everything it feared. It had no boundaries, no shape. It was vast, open, and unformed. At the same time, the barren steppes constantly threatened to encroach on the fertile land, which alone was suitable for human habitation. The myths of Ugarit told the story of Baal’s desperate fight with Yam-Nahar, the god of the seas and rivers, and Mot, the god of death, sterility, and drought. Mot in particular was death imagined as a voracious force, insatiably craving human flesh and blood. Baal overcame both these foes only with great difficulty: the battle with Mot was especially frightening, since, it seems, Baal was taken prisoner in the underworld—Mot’s domain—the “abyss” of fearful nothingness. During Baal’s imprisonment the earth was scorched by drought and reduced to desert. Finally Baal prevailed. Yet his victory was never complete. Yam and Mot both survived: the frightening power of Chaos was a perennial possibility and Death the most ineluctable of certainties. Gods and men had to join forces and fight an endless battle against them.

To celebrate his victory, Baal asked El’s permission to build a palace for himself. This was quite common in ancient myth. After Marduk had created the world, gods and humans worked together to build the city of Babylon at the center of the earth. At Bab-ilani (“The Gate of the Gods”) the deities could assemble each year to take part in the Divine Council: it was their home in the mundane world of men and women, who knew that they could gain access to them there. At the center of the city, they also built Marduk’s great temple of Esagila, his palace in the city. There he lived and imposed the divine order, through his vicegerent the king. Architecture was thus seen as a divinely inspired exercise. The great stone cities, temples, and ziggurats seemed such colossal achievements that the human beings who had created them appeared to have transcended themselves. They were a permanent reminder of the human-divine victory against formlessness and disorder.

Similarly, Baal could not rule over the gods without a palace. Once he was properly housed in his celestial mansion of gold and lapis lazuli above Mount Zaphon, Baal had truly become “Lord,” as his name suggests. Henceforth, Baal alone would rule gods and men alike. As he proclaimed:

[For] I alone am he that shall be king over the gods,

[that] indeed fattens gods and men,

that satisfies the multitudes of the earth.²³

In his temple, Baal and his consort, Anat, celebrated their great victories which had restored order to the world:

Did I not destroy Yam the darling of El …

Was not the dragon captured and vanquished?

I did destroy the wiggling serpent,

the tyrant with seven heads.²⁴

The people of Ugarit, who lived just twenty miles from Baal’s dwelling on Zaphon, felt that because they lived in Baal’s territory they shared in his victory. In the hymns of Ugarit, Baal calls Zaphon “the holy place, the mountain of my heritage … the chosen spot … the hill of victory.” Zaphon was the center of their world. It was a “holy mountain,” a “beautiful height,” and the “joy of the whole earth.”²⁵ Because Baal lived there, he had made Zaphon an earthly paradise of peace, fertility, and harmony. There he would “remove war from the earth. Pour out peace in the depths of the earth.” “Love would increase in the depths of the fields.”²⁶ To make sure that they would also enjoy this divine fertility and peace, the people of Ugarit built a temple which was a replica of Baal’s palace on Mount Zaphon. They copied it down to the last detail that had been revealed to them, so that, according to the principle of imitatio dei, Baal would dwell with them too. Thus heaven would come to earth in their city and they would create an enclave of life as it was meant to be in the midst of a dangerous world.

Baal’s presence among them in his temple made human life possible in Ugarit. When the people entered the temple, they felt that they had entered another dimension of existence and were once again in communion with the natural and divine rhythms of life that were normally hidden from them. They could hear

The speech of wood and the whisper of stones,

the converse of heaven with the earth

Of the deeps with the stars.

… lightning which the heavens do not know,

Speech which men do not know

And the multitude of the earth do not understand.²⁷

In the ancient world, the temple was often experienced as a place of vision, where people learned to see further and in a different way. They were stretching themselves imaginatively to see into the life of things. The liturgy and the architecture of the temple were part of that creative effort to imagine a fuller and more intense mode of existence. But it was also a program for action. In their ritual, the people of Ugarit reenacted the battles of Baal and his enthronement on Mount Zaphon in a sacred drama. This autumnal festival marked the start of the New Year: Baal’s victories were repeated and imitated so that the lifegiving rain would fall once again and the city be preserved in safety against the lawless forces of destruction. This enthronement ceremony also made Ugarit part of Baal’s “eternal heritage,”²⁸ a haven—or so they hoped—of peace and plenty.

A central figure in the liturgy was the person of the king, who sat enthroned, his head glistening with the oil of victory as Baal’s representative. Like other kings in the Near East, he was regarded as the viceroy of the god and had clearly defined duties. At this point, the people of the Near East did not have extravagant hopes of religion. “Salvation” for them did not mean immortality: that was a prerogative of the gods alone. Their aim was more modest: to help the gods to sustain a decent, ordered life on earth, holding hostile forces at bay. War was an essential part of the king’s duties: the enemies of a city were often identified with the forces of chaos, because they could be just as destructive. Yet war was waged for the sake of peace. At his coronation, a Near Eastern king would often swear to build temples for the gods of his city and keep them in good repair. Thus the city’s lifeline to the divine world would be preserved intact. But he also had a duty to build canals for the city and to ensure that it was properly fortified at all times. No city was worthy of the name if it could not provide its citizens with security from their enemies. At the beginning and end of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the people of Uruk were exhorted to admire the strength and craftsmanship of the city walls:

Inspect the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork

If its brickwork be not of burnt bricks

and if the seven [wise men] did not lay its foundations.²⁹

King Gilgamesh had tried to transcend the human condition; he had left his city and gone to seek eternal life. His quest failed, but, the poet tells us, at least he had been able to ensure that his city was safe from attack, and had anchored himself in Uruk, the one place on earth that he was meant to be.

But a Near Eastern king also had another task. He had to impose the law, which was widely regarded as a divine creation which had been revealed to the king by the gods. In a famous stele, the great eighteenth-century Babylonian king Hammurabi is shown standing in front of the enthroned god Shemesh and receiving the laws from him. In his law code, he asserts that he was appointed by the gods

to cause justice to prevail in the land,

to destroy the wicked and the evil,

that the strong might not oppress the weak.³⁰

Besides maintaining the physical fabric of the city, the king was bound to preserve its social order. It was no good building fortifications against external foes if exploitation, poverty, and discontent were likely to cause instability within the city. The king therefore presented himself as the shepherd of his people, as Hammurabi explained in the epilogue of his code:

I made the people rest in friendly habitations;

I did not let them have anyone to terrorize them …

So I became the beneficent shepherd whose scepter is righteous;

My benign shadow is spread over the city.

In my bosom I carried the people of Sumer and Akkad;

They prospered under my protection;

I have governed them in peace;

I have sheltered them in my strength.³¹

In Ugarit too the king was supposed to take good care of widows and orphans:³² by making sure that justice and fair dealing prevailed in the city, he would also ensure that famine and drought would be held at bay and the land would remain fertile. Both were essential to the divine order. A city could not be a peaceful, fecund enclave unless the welfare of the people was a top priority.³³ Throughout the Near East, this ideal of social justice was crucial to the notion of sacred kingship and the holy city. People were very much aware that only a privileged elite was able to enjoy the benefits of civilization. The fragile order could easily be overturned by an angry peasantry. Hence the battle for social justice was crucial to the ideal of the city of peace.

Just how crucial can be seen in the history of Ugarit, where some 7,000 city dwellers, who were mostly dependents of the palace, were supported by a mere 25,000 peasants in the surrounding countryside. This elaborate civilization was built on the backs of the poor—a perception that might be reflected in the stories of Baal’s battles, which show creativity and order as dependent upon the subjugation of another. Eventually the system proved unworkable, and in the thirteenth century the economy collapsed, the villages were deserted, and the city-states of the region could not defend themselves against the invasions of the “sea peoples” from the Aegean islands and Anatolia. The quest for greater social equity was not just a pious fantasy. It was essential to the healthy running of the holy city and would remain so. We shall see in the history of Jerusalem that oppressive regimes would sometimes sow the seeds of their own downfall.

We have no direct evidence about the religious life of Jerusalem during the Bronze Age. Archaeologists have found no trace of a Jebusite temple, and no texts similar to those at Ugarit have been unearthed to give us detailed information about the cult of Mount Zion. Yet there are uncanny similarities between the Ugaritic texts and some of the Hebrew psalms that were used in the Israelite cult on Mount Zion. Phrases from the hymns of Ugarit appear in the psalms that celebrate the enthronement of the God of Israel on Mount Zion. They praise his victory over “Leviathan” and the dragon on the day of creation. Mount Zion is also called the city of peace, the holy mountain, and the eternal heritage of its god. Occasionally “Zion” is even called “Zaphon” in the Hebrew Bible. We know that the Hurrians also told stories about Baal and his temple on Zaphon, and scholars have therefore concluded that they brought the cult of Baal with them to Jerusalem and this would one day introduce the Ugaritic notion of a holy city of peace to the Israelite cult on Mount Zion.³⁴

The people of Near Eastern antiquity yearned for security, and it seems that Jerusalem was able to provide its people with the safety for which they longed. The city was able to survive the unrest of the thirteenth century, when so many settlements of the Canaanite hill country were abandoned. The Bible indicates that the Jebusite citadel of Zion was considered impregnable. In the twelfth century, there were new threats and new enemies. Once again, Egypt began to lose control of Canaan; the Hittite empire was destroyed and Mesopotamia ravaged by plague and famine. Yet again the achievements of civilization were shown to be frail and flawed. There were large-scale migrations, as people sought a new haven. As the great powers declined, new states emerged to take their place. One of these was Philistia on the southern coast of Canaan. The Philistines may have been among the “sea peoples” who invaded Egypt, were repelled, and were made the vassals of the pharaoh. Ramses III may have settled the Philistines in Canaan to rule the country in his stead. In their new territory, they adapted to the local religion and organized themselves into five city-states at Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath, and Gaza. As Egypt grew weaker, Philistia became virtually independent and may even have become the de facto ruler of Canaan. But during the eleventh century, the inhabitants of Canaan had to encounter a new power in the land. A kingdom was forming in the hill country which was bigger and entirely different in kind from any previous Canaanite entity. Eventually Jebusite Zion found itself entirely surrounded by an aggressive new power: the Kingdom of Israel, which would change its destiny forever.

2 ISRAEL

WHO WERE the Israelites? The Bible tells us that they came originally from Mesopotamia. For a time they settled in Canaan, but in about 1750 BCE the twelve tribes of Israel migrated to Egypt during a famine. At first they prospered in Egypt, but their situation declined and they were reduced to slavery. Eventually—in about 1250 BCE—they escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses and lived a nomadic life in the Sinai Peninsula. Yet they did not regard this as a permanent solution, because they were convinced that their god, Yahweh, had promised them the fertile land of Canaan. Moses died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land, but under his successor, Joshua, the tribes stormed into Canaan and took the country by the sword in the name of their God, an event that is usually dated to about 1200 BCE. The Bible speaks of terrible massacres. Joshua is said to have subdued “the highlands, the Negev, the lowlands, the hillsides, and all the kings in them. He left not a man alive.”¹ Each of the twelve tribes was allotted a portion of Canaan, but between the territory of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin one city held out: “The sons of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem,” the biblical writer admits. “The Jebusites lived in Jerusalem side by side with the sons of Judah, as they still do today.”² Eventually, Jerusalem would become central to the religion of Israel, but the first time the city is mentioned unequivocally in the Bible it appears as enemy territory.

Yet in recent years, scholars have become skeptical about the biblical account. Archaeologists have found signs of destruction in some Canaanite sites, but nothing that can be linked definitively with Israel. There is no sign of any foreign invasion in the highlands, which would become the Israelite heartland.³ Even the biblical writers concede that Joshua’s conquest was not total. We are told that he could not defeat the Canaanite city-states nor make any headway against the Philistines.⁴ A careful examination of the first twelve chapters of the Book of Joshua shows that most of the action was confined to a very small area of the territory of Benjamin.⁵ Indeed, the Bible leaves us with the distinct impression that the conquest of Joshua was something of a nonevent. There are still scholars—particularly in Israel and the United States—who adhere to the view that the Israelites did conquer the country in this way, but others are coming to the conclusion that instead of erupting violently into Canaan from the outside, Israel emerged peacefully and gradually from within Canaanite society.

There is no doubt that Israel had arrived in Canaan by the end of the thirteenth century. In a stele commemorating the successful campaign of Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BCE, we find this entry among the other conquests: “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” But this is the only non-biblical reference to Israel at this time. It used to be thought that the hapiru or apiru mentioned in various inscriptions and documents of the fourteenth century were forerunners of Joshua’s “Hebrew” tribes. But it appears that the hapiru were not an ethnic group but, rather, a class within Canaanite society. They were people who had become social outcasts, banished from the city-states for economic or political reasons. Sometimes they became brigands, sometimes they hired themselves out as mercenaries.⁶ Certainly they were perceived as a disruptive force in Canaan: Abdi Hepa himself was very worried indeed about the hapiru. The Israelites were first called “Hebrews” while they were themselves an outgroup in Egypt, but they were not the only hapiru in the region.

Instead, scholars today tend to associate the birth of Israel with a new wave of settlement in the central highlands of Canaan. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of about one hundred unfortified new villages in the hill country north of Jerusalem, which have been dated to about 1200 BCE. Hitherto this barren terrain had been unsuitable for farming, but there had recently been technological advances that made settlement feasible. The new settlers eked out a precarious existence by breeding sheep, goats, and oxen. There is no evidence that the settlers were foreigners: the material culture of these villages is substantially the same as that of the coastal plain. Archaeologists have therefore concluded that the settlers were almost certainly native Canaanites.⁷ It was a time of great unrest, especially in the city-states. Some people may well have preferred to take to the hills. Their lives were hard there, but at least they were free of the wars and economic exploitation that now characterized life in the decaying cities on the coast. Some of the settlers may have been hapiru, others nomads, compelled during these turbulent times to change their lifestyle. Could this migration from the disintegrating Canaanite towns have been the nucleus of Israel? Certainly this is the area where the Kingdom of Israel would appear during the eleventh century BCE. If this theory is correct, the “Israelites” would have been natives of Canaan who settled in the hills and gradually formed a distinct identity. Inevitably they clashed from time to time with the other cities, and tales of these skirmishes form the basis of the narratives of Joshua and Judges.

Yet if the Israelites really were Canaanites, why does the Bible insist so forcefully that they were outsiders? Belief in their foreign origin was absolutely central to the Israelite identity. Indeed, the story of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is dominated by the story of Israel’s search for a homeland. It is inconceivable that the entire story of the Exodus is a fabrication. Perhaps some hapiru did flee the pharaoh’s corvée (forced labor) and later join the Canaanite settlers in the hill country. Even the Bible hints that not all of the people of Israel had taken part in the Exodus.⁸ Ultimately the religion and mythology of these newcomers from Egypt became the dominant ideology of Israel. The stories of a divine liberation from slavery and the special protection of the god Yahweh may have appealed to Canaanites who had themselves escaped from oppressive and corrupt regimes and had become aware that they were taking part in an exciting new experiment in their highland settlements.

Israelites did not begin to write their own history until after they had become the major power in the country. Scholars have traditionally found four sources embedded in the text of the Pentateuch. The earliest two writers are known as “J” and “E” because of their preferred use of “Yahweh” and “Elohim” respectively as titles for the God of Israel. They may have written in the tenth century, though some would put them as late as the eighth century BCE. The Deuteronomist (“D”) and Priestly (“P”) writers were both active during the sixth century, during and after the exile of the Israelites to Babylon. In recent years this source criticism has failed to satisfy some scholars and more radical theories have been suggested, as, for example, that the whole of the Pentateuch was composed in the late sixth century by a single author. At present, however, the four-source theory is still the customary way of approaching these early biblical texts. The historical books that deal with the later history of Israel and Judah—Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings—were written during the Exile by historians of the Deuteronomist school (“D”), whose ideals we shall discuss in Chapter 4. They were often working with earlier sources and chronicles but used them to further their own theological interpretation. The Chronicler, who was probably writing in the mid-fourth century BCE, is even more cavalier with his sources. None of our authors, therefore, was writing objective history that would satisfy our standards today. What they show is how the people of their own period saw the past.

This is especially true of the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the three patriarchs of Israel. These could have been written nearly a thousand years after the events they purport to describe. They are legends, and not historical in our sense. The biblical writers knew nothing about life in nineteenth- and eighteenth-century Canaan—there is no mention of the strong Egyptian presence in the country, for example—but the tales of the patriarchs are important because they show how the Israelites were beginning to shape a distinct identity for themselves at the time when J and E were writing. By this time, Israelites believed that they had all descended from a common ancestor, Jacob, who had been given the new name of Israel (“May God show his strength!,” or, alternatively, “One who struggles for God”) as a sign of his special relationship with the Deity. Jacob/Israel had twelve sons, each of whom was the ancestor of one of the tribes. Next the Israelites looked back to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham, who had been chosen by God to be the founder of the new nation. So strong was their conviction that they were not of Canaanite stock originally that they wanted to trace their ancestry back to Mesopotamia. In about 1850 BCE, they believed that God had appeared to Abraham in Haran and told him: “Leave your country, your family and your father’s house for the land I will show you.”⁹ That country was Canaan. Abraham did as he was told and left Mesopotamia, but he lived in Canaan as a migrant. He owned no land there until he bought a burial plot for his wife in the Cave of Machpelah at Hebron.

Crucial to the patriarchal narratives is the search for a homeland. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob remained highly conscious of their alien status in Canaan.¹⁰ As soon as he describes Abraham’s arrival, J makes a point of reminding the reader: “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.”¹¹ This is an important point. In the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all found other people in possession. They have all had to cope with the fact that the city and the land have been sacred to other people before them and the integrity of their tenure will depend in large part upon the way they treat their predecessors.

The perception that other people were established in Canaan before the Chosen People can, perhaps, be seen in God’s persistent choice of the second son instead of the first. Thus Abraham had two sons. The first was Ishmael, who was born to his concubine Hagar. Yet when Isaac was miraculously born to Abraham’s aged and barren wife, Sarah, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his oldest son. Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation, but Abraham’s name must be carried on through Isaac. Consequently the patriarch dispatched Hagar and Ishmael to the desert east of Canaan, where they would certainly have perished had God not protected them. They were of little further interest to the biblical writers, but, as we shall see in Chapter 11, a people who claimed to be the descendants of Ishmael would arrive in Jerusalem centuries later. In the next generation too, God preferred the second son. Isaac’s wife, Rebecca, felt her twin babies fighting in the womb, and God told her that two nations were at war in her body. When the twins were born, the second arrived grasping the heel of his brother, Esau. Consequently he was called Ya’aquob: the Heel-Holder or Supplanter.¹² When the twins grew up, Jacob managed to trick the aged Isaac into giving him the blessing that should by rights have gone to the older son. Henceforth Esau was also dismissed to the eastern lands. Yet neither J nor E discounts the claims of the rejected older siblings. There is real pathos in the story of Hagar and Ishmael, and the reader is made to sympathize with Esau’s distress. When J and E were writing, the Israelites did not perceive their ownership of the Promised Land as a cause for crude chauvinism: the process of establishing themselves as a nation in their own land was painful to others and morally perplexing.

There is none of the militant zeal of Joshua, who was commanded by God to wipe out all the altars and religious symbols of the indigenous people of Canaan. This was a later Israelite ideal. Both J and E show the patriarchs behaving for the most part with respect toward the Canaanites and honoring their religious traditions. According to them, the patriarchs did not seek to impose their own God on the country, nor did they trample on the altars of the native people. Abraham seems to have worshipped El, the high god of the country. It was only later that El was fused imaginatively with Yahweh, the God of Moses. As God himself told Moses from the burning bush: “To Abraham and Isaac and Jacob I appeared as El Shaddai; I did not make myself known to them by my name Yahweh.”¹³ In the meantime, the land of Canaan had to reveal its own sanctity to the patriarchs, who waited for El to show himself to them in the usual sites.

Thus Jacob stumbled unawares upon the sanctity of Beth-El. He lay down to sleep at what seemed to be an unremarkable spot, using a stone as a pillow. But the site was in fact a maqom (a “place”), a word with cultic connotations. That night Jacob dreamed of a ladder standing in the ground beside him reaching up to heaven. It was a classic vision, reminding us of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. At the top of the ladder was the God of Abraham, who now assured Jacob of his protection and favor. When he woke, Jacob was overcome with the dread that often characterizes an encounter with the sacred: “Truly God is in this place and I never knew it!” he said in awe. What had seemed to be an ordinary location had proved to be a spiritual center that provided human beings with access to the divine world. “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God [beth-el]; this is the gate of heaven!”¹⁴ Before leaving, Jacob upended the stone on which he had been lying and consecrated it with a libation of oil to mark the place out as radically separate from its surroundings.

Later generations of Israelites would strongly condemn the Canaanite matzevot, or standing-stones, which were used as symbols of the divine. But J and E found nothing odd about Jacob’s pious action here. When they were writing, Israelites were not monotheists in our sense. Yahweh, the God of Moses, was their God, and some believed that Israelites should worship him alone. But they believed that other gods existed, and, as we know from the writings of the prophets and historians, many Israelites continued to worship other deities. It seemed absurd to neglect gods who had long ensured the fertility of Canaan, and could be encountered in its sacred “places” (bamoth). We know that other deities were worshipped by the Israelites in Jerusalem right up until the city was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. We shall see that Israelites honored the fertility goddess Asherah, the consort of El, in their Temple in Jerusalem as well as a host of Syrian astral deities; they also took part in the fertility rites of Baal. It was not until the exile to Babylon (597–39) that the people of Israel finally decided that Yahweh was the only God and that no other deities existed. They would then become very hostile indeed to all “pagan” worship. But when J and E, the earliest biblical writers, imagined the religion of their forefathers, they found nothing offensive in the notion that Jacob had seen his God in a pagan cult place and had marked this theophany with a matzevah.

Sometimes, therefore, the religious experiences of the patriarchs—especially those described by J—would seem rather dubious to later generations of Israelites. Thus Jews came to believe that it was blasphemous to represent their God in human form, but J shows him appearing to Abraham as a man. Abraham is sitting outside his tent at Mamre, near Hebron, when three strangers approach. With typical Near Eastern courtesy, the patriarch insists that they all sit down while he prepares a meal for them. Then the four men eat together, and in the course of the conversation it transpires quite naturally that these three visitors are really the God of Abraham and two of his angels.¹⁵ Jews cherished this story, however, which also became very important to Christians, who regarded it as an early manifestation of God as Trinity. One of the reasons why this Mamre epiphany is so important is that it expresses a truth which is central to monotheism. The sacred does not manifest itself only in holy places. We can also encounter the divine in other human beings. It is essential, therefore, that we treat the men and women with whom we come in contact—even complete strangers—with absolute honor and respect, because they too enshrine the divine mystery. This is what Abraham discovered when he ran out joyfully to meet these three travelers and insisted on giving them all the refreshment and comfort he could. This act of compassion and courtesy led to a divine encounter.

Social justice and concern for the poor and vulnerable were crucial to the concept of sanctity in the Near East, as we have seen. It was essential to the ideal of a holy city of peace. Very early in the Israelite tradition we find an even deeper understanding of the essential sacredness of humanity. Perhaps we can see this in the stark and terrible tale of God’s temptation of Abraham. He commanded the patriarch to take Isaac—“your son, your only son, whom you love”—and offer him as a human sacrifice in “the land of Moriah.”¹⁶ Since Abraham had just lost his older son, Ishmael, this would seem to mean the end of God’s promise to make Abraham the father of a great nation. It made a mockery of his life of faith and commitment. Nevertheless, Abraham prepared to obey and took Isaac to the mountaintop which God had prescribed. But just as he was about to plunge the knife into Isaac’s breast, an angel of the Lord commanded him to desist. Instead, Abraham must sacrifice a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. There is no mention of Jerusalem in the text, but later, at least by the fourth century BCE, “the land of Moriah” would come to be associated with Mount Zion.¹⁷ The Jewish Temple was thought to have been built on the place where Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice; the Muslim Dome of the Rock also commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. There was a symbolic reason for this identification, because on this occasion Yahweh had let it be known that his cult must not include human sacrifice—a prohibition that was by no means universal in the ancient world—but only the sacrifice of animals. Today we find even the notion of animal sacrifice repellent, but we should realize that this practice, which was absolutely central to the religion of antiquity, did not indicate any disrespect for the animals. Sacrifice tried to engage with the painful fact that human life depended on the killing of other creatures—an insight that also lay at the heart of the combat myths about Marduk and Baal. Carnivorous humanity preyed upon plants and animals in order to survive: there were guilt, gratitude, and reverence for the beasts who were sacrificed in this way—a complex of emotions that may have inspired the prehistoric paintings in the caves of Lascaux. Today we carefully shield ourselves from the realization that the neatly packaged joints of meat we buy in the butcher shop come from other beings who have laid down their lives for our sake, but this was not the case in the ancient world. Yet it is also significant that in later years, the Jerusalem cult was thought to have been established at the moment when it was revealed that the sacredness of humanity is such that it is never permissible to sacrifice another human life—no matter how exalted the motivation.

After his ordeal, Abraham called the place where he had bound Isaac “Yahweh sees,” and E glossed this by quoting a local maxim: “On Yahweh’s mountain [it] is seen.”¹⁸ On the sacred mountain, midway between earth and heaven, human beings could both see and be seen by their gods. It was a place of vision, where people learned to look in a different way. They could open the eyes of their imagination to see beyond their mundane surroundings to the eternal mystery that lay at the heart of existence. We shall see that Mount Zion in Jerusalem became a place of vision for the people of Israel, though it was not their only holy place in the earlier phase of their history.

Jerusalem played no part in the formative events in which the new nation of Israel found its soul. We have seen that even at the time when the books of Joshua and Judges were written, some Israelites saw the city as an essentially foreign place, a predominantly Jebusite city. The Patriarchs were associated with Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, and Beersheva but do not seem to have noticed Jerusalem during their travels. But on one occasion Abraham did meet Melchizedek, King and Priest of “Salem,” after his return from a military expedition. The king presented him with bread and wine and blessed him in the name of El Elyon, the god of Salem.¹⁹ Jewish tradition has identified “Salem” with Jerusalem, though this is by no means certain,²⁰ and the meeting was thought to have taken place at the spring of En Rogel (known today as Bir Ayyub: Job’s Well) at the conjunction of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys.²¹ En Rogel was certainly a cultic site in ancient Jerusalem and seems to have been associated with the coronation of the kings of the city. Local legend made Melchizedek the founder of Jerusalem, and its kings were seen as his descendants.²² Later, as we see in the Hebrew psalms, the Davidic kings of Judah were told at their coronation: “You are a priest of the order of Melchizedek, and for ever,”²³ so they had inherited this ancient title, along with many other of the Jebusite traditions about Mount Zion. The story of Melchizedek’s meeting with Abraham may have been told first at the time of King David’s conquest of the city to give legitimacy to his title: it shows his ancestor honoring and being honored by the founder of Jerusalem.²⁴ But the story also shows Abraham responding with courtesy to the present incumbents of the city, offering Melchizedek a tithe of his booty as a mark of homage, and accepting the blessing of a foreign god. Again, the story shows respect for the previous inhabitants of Jerusalem and a reverence for their traditions.

Melchizedek’s god was called El Elyon, “God Most High,” a title later given to Yahweh once he had become the high god of Jerusalem. El Elyon was also one of the titles of Baal of Mount Zaphon.²⁵ In the ancient world, deities were often fused with one another. This was not regarded as a betrayal or an unworthy compromise. The gods were not seen as solid individuals with discrete and inalienable personalities but as symbols of the sacred. When people arrived in a new place, they would often merge their own god with the local deity. The incoming god would take on some of the characteristics and functions of his or her predecessor. We have seen that in the imagination of Israel, Yahweh, the god of Moses, became one with El Shaddai, the god of Abraham. Once the Israelites arrived in Jerusalem, Yahweh was also linked to Baal El Elyon, who was almost certainly worshipped on Mount Zion.

Jerusalem does not figure at all in the stories of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which became absolutely central to their faith. The biblical account of these events has mythologized them, bringing out their spiritual, timeless meaning. It does not attempt to reproduce them in a way that would satisfy the modern historian. It is essentially a story of liberation and homecoming that has nourished Jews in many of the darkest moments of their long and tragic history; the message of the Exodus also inspires Christians who are struggling with injustice and oppression. Even though Jerusalem plays no part in the story, the Exodus traditions would become significant in the spirituality of the Israelites on Mount Zion. The incidents can also be seen as versions of the Near Eastern creation and combat myths, except that instead of taking place in primordial time they are seen to happen in the mundane world and what comes into being is not a cosmos but a people.²⁶ The combat myths of Baal and Marduk ended with the construction of a city and a temple: the Exodus myth concludes with the building of a homeland. During these years, Israel passed from a state of chaos and nonbeing to a divinely established reality. Instead of splitting the carcass of a sea-monster to create the world, as Marduk did, Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds to let his people escape from Pharaoh and his pursuing army. Instead of slaying the demonic hordes, like Marduk, Yahweh drowned the Egyptians. As always the new creation depended upon the destruction of others—a motif that would frequently recur in the future history of Jerusalem. Finally the people of Israel had passed through the divided waters to safety and freedom. In all cultures, immersion signified a return to the primal waters, the original element, an abrogation of the past and a new birth.²⁷ Water thus had the power to restore—if only temporarily—the pristine purity of the beginning. Their passage through the Sea of Reeds made Israel Yahweh’s new creation.

Next the Israelites traveled to the holy mountain of Sinai. There, in the time-honored way, Moses climbed to meet his god on the summit, and Yahweh descended in the midst of a violent storm and volcanic eruption. The people kept their distance, as instructed: the sacred could be dangerous for the uninitiated and, at least in the Israelite tradition, could be approached only by a carefully instructed elite. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh made Israel his own people, and as a seal of this covenant, he gave Moses the Torah, or Law, which included the Ten Commandments, though, as we shall see, the Torah would not become central to the religious life of Israel until after the exile to Babylon.

Finally, before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land, the Israelites had to undergo the ordeal of a forty-year sojourn in the desert. This was no romantic interlude. The Bible makes it clear that the people constantly complained and rebelled against Yahweh during these years: they longed for what seemed, in retrospect, the easier life they had enjoyed in Egypt. In the Near East the desert was associated with death and primeval chaos. We have seen that Mot, the Syrian god of the desert, was also the voracious god of the Abyss, the dark void of death and mortality. Desert was thus a sacred area that had, as it were, gone awry and become demonic.²⁸ It remained a place of utter desolation in the Israelite imagination: there was no nostalgia for the wilderness years of the Exodus, as some biblical critics have imagined. Instead, the prophets and biblical writers recalled that God had made Israel his people “in the howling wilderness of the desert”;²⁹ the desert was “a land unsown” where “no one lives”; it was “void of human dwelling,” the land of “no-kingdom-there,”³⁰ It constantly threatened to encroach on the settled land and reduce it to the primal no-thingness. When they imagined the destruction of a city, Israelites saw it reverting to desert and becoming once again “the plumb-line of emptiness,” the haunt of pelicans, hedgehogs, and satyrs, where there was “no man at all.”³¹ For forty years—a phrase that is used simply to denote a very long time indeed—the Israelites had to struggle through this demonic realm, entering a state of symbolic extinction before their God brought them home.

God had not entirely deserted his people in the wilderness, however. Like other nomadic peoples, the Israelites possessed a portable symbol of their link with the divine realm which kept them in being. Where the Australian Aborigines carried a sacred pole, the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant, a shrine that would be of great importance to them in Jerusalem. Most of the descriptions of the Ark in the Bible come from the later sources, so it is difficult to guess what it was originally like. It seems to have been a chest which contained the tablets of the Law and was surmounted by two golden cherubim: their outstretched wings formed the back of a throne for Yahweh.³² We know that an empty throne was often used as a symbol for the divine: it invited the god to sit among his worshippers. Henceforth the Throne would come to stand as a symbol of the divine Presence in the Jewish tradition. The Ark was thus an outward sign of Yahweh’s presence. It was carried by members of the tribe of Levi, who were the appointed priestly caste of Israel: Aaron, Moses’s brother, was the chief priest. Originally the Ark seems to have been a military palladium, since its sacred power—which could be lethal—provided protection against Israel’s enemies. J tells us that when the Israelites began their day’s march, the cloud representing Yahweh’s presence would descend over the Ark and Moses would cry: “Arise, Yahweh, may your enemies be scattered!” At night, when they pitched tent, he would cry: “Come back, Yahweh, to the thronging hosts of Israel!”³³ The Ark enclosed the Israelites in a capsule of safety, as it were; it rendered the Abyss of the desert habitable because it kept them in touch with the sacred reality.

We know very little about the early life of Israel in Canaan. P believes that once they had settled in the hill country, the Israelites set up a tent for the Ark in Shiloh: P imagined Yahweh giving very precise instructions about this tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai. If the Ark was indeed originally enshrined in a tent, Yahweh was very like El, who also lived in a tent-shrine, was the source of law, and, when he appeared as El Sabaoth (“El of Armies”), was enthroned on cherubim. In the Book of Samuel, however, the Ark seems to have been housed in the Hekhal (or cult hall) of a more conventional temple in Shiloh.³⁴ But Israelites seem to have worshipped at a number of other temples, in Dan, Bethel, Mizpah, Oprah, and Gibeon, as well as at outdoor bamoth. Some Israelites would have worshipped other gods, alongside Yahweh, who was felt to be a foreign deity who had not yet properly settled in Canaan. He was still associated with the southern regions of Sinai, Paran, and Seir. They imagined him leaving this territory, when his people were in trouble, and riding on the clouds to come to the help of his people: this is how he appears in some of the earliest passages of the Bible.³⁵ The Israelites may even have developed a liturgy which reenacted the theophany of Mount Sinai, with braying trumpets reproducing the thunder and incense recreating the thick cloud that had descended on the mountaintop. These elements would also later appear in the Jerusalem cult. The ceremony thus imitated the decisive appearance of Yahweh on Sinai, and this symbolic reenactment would have created a sense of Yahweh’s presence among his people yet again.³⁶ Unlike most of the Near Eastern gods, therefore, Yahweh was at first regarded as a mobile deity who was not associated with one fixed shrine. Yet the Israelites also commemorated their liberation from Egypt. Over the years the old spring festival was used to recall the Israelites’ last meal in Egypt, when the Angel of Death passed them by but slew all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. Eventually, this family feast would be called Passover (Pesaḥ).

By about 1030 BCE, the people of the northern hill country had a strong sense of kinship and solidarity. They thought of themselves as a distinct people with a common ancestry. They had been ruled till then by a series of “judges” or chieftains, but eventually they aspired to establish a monarchy like the other peoples of the region. The biblical authors have mixed feelings about this move. They show Samuel, the last of the judges, as bitterly opposed to the idea: he warns the people of the oppression and cruelty that a king would inflict upon them.³⁷ But in fact the creation of the Kingdom of Israel was a natural and, perhaps, an inevitable development.³⁸ The great powers in Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt were in eclipse at this time, and other, smaller states had appeared to fill the power vacuum: Ammon, Moab, Edom. The Israelites found themselves surrounded by aggressive competitors who were eager to conquer the Canaanite highlands. Ammonites and Moabites infiltrated their territory from the east and the Philistines harried them from the west. On one occasion the Philistines sacked and destroyed the city of Shiloh, carrying off the Ark of the Covenant as a war trophy. They quickly returned it, however, once they experienced the deadly power of this palladium. Now that it was no longer protected by a shrine or a temple, the Israelites also found the sanctity of the Ark frightening, so they lodged it in a private house in Kireath-Jearim, on the border of their land.³⁹ All this political turbulence probably convinced the Israelites that they needed the strong leadership of a king, and, reluctantly, Samuel anointed Saul of the tribe of Benjamin as the first King of Israel.

Saul ruled over a larger territory than any previous king in Canaan. It included the whole of the central highlands, on both sides of the Jordan, north of the city-state of Jerusalem, which was still ruled by the Jebusites. (See map.) In the Bible, Saul is a tragic figure: deserted by his God for daring to take initiative in a cultic matter, prey to paralyzing bouts of depression, and slowly watching his power ebb away. Yet even in this critical narrative, we can see that Saul’s achievements were considerable. Ruling from Gibeon, which contained the most important Yahwist temple in Israel, Saul steadily increased his territory, and the people of the hills joined him voluntarily. For nearly twenty years he was able to hold his kingdom against his enemies, until he and his son Jonathan were killed by the Philistines at the battle of Mount Gilboa in about 1010 BCE. After his death, he was eulogized in some of the most moving poetry in the Bible:

Saul and Jonathan, loved and lovely,

neither in life, nor in death, were divided.

Swifter than eagles were they,

stronger were they than lions.⁴⁰

This lament was sung not by one of Saul’s loyal followers but by a rebel who had fled his court. David had been a highly privileged warrior in Saul’s kingdom: he had been the intimate friend of Jonathan and had been given the hand of Michal, Saul’s daughter. He was the only one who could bring comfort to Saul in his depression, soothing away his despair with song and poetry. Yet, the biblical historians tell us, Saul had become jealous of David’s popularity and prestige, and David had to run for his life. First he had lived with a band of partisans as hapiru in the deserted hills to the south of Jerusalem. Finally he had allied himself with the Philistines, the deadly enemies of Israel. When he heard of Saul’s death, David of the tribe of Judah was living in the Negev town of Ziklag, which had been given to him by his new overlord, Achish, King of Gath.⁴¹ David is one of the most complex characters in the Bible. Poet, musician, warrior, rebel, traitor, adulterer, terrorist, he was certainly no paragon, even though—later—he would be revered as Israel’s ideal king. After Saul’s death, Ishbaal, the surviving son of Saul, ruled his father’s northern Kingdom of Israel, while David established a kingdom for himself in the sparsely inhabited southern hills, with a capital at Hebron. The Philistines may have encouraged this venture, since they would thus, through their vassal, have a toehold in the highlands. But David was playing a double game and had larger ambitions.

In Jerusalem, the Jebusites thus found themselves uncomfortably surrounded by two rival kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel, ruled by Ishbaal, in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah, ruled by David, in the south. But Ishbaal was a weak ruler: his kingdom was probably smaller than Saul’s had been, and he antagonized his most important commander, who defected to David. Eventually, seven and a half years after David had been crowned king in Hebron, Ishbaal was murdered, and the assassins fled to David’s court. David’s hour had come. He carefully dissociated himself from Ishbaal’s death by having his murderers executed. As the husband of Saul’s daughter Michal, he had a tenuous claim to the throne of the Kingdom of Israel. Soon representatives of the tribes of the northern kingdom came to David, made a treaty with him in the Temple of Yahweh in Hebron, and anointed him King of Israel. David was now ruler of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. But in the middle of his territory was the Jebusite city-state of Jerusalem, which he intended to make his capital.

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