Jerusalem: The Biography (153 page)

Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.

Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.

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The Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to rule Canaan at this time but it is not clear whether they actually did. They may have used these pottery symbols to curse the defiant rulers of their enemies or to express their aspirations. The theories about these fragments have changed several times, showing how archaeology is as much interpretative as scientific. It was long believed that the Egyptians smashed these vases or figures to curse or execrate the places named on them – hence they are known as the Execration texts.

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These are some of the 380 letters, written in Babylonian on baked clay tablets, by local chieftains to the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352–1336), who instituted the worship of the sun, instead of the traditional pantheon of numerous Egyptian gods: he changed his name to Akhenaten. The royal archive of his foreign ministry, the House of Correspondence of Pharaoh, was discovered in 1887 at his new capital Akhetaten, now El-Amarna, south of Cairo. One theory suggests that the Habiru were the early Hebrews/Israelites, yet the word actually appears all over the Middle East at this time to describe these marauders – the word simply means ‘vagrant’ in Babylonian. It is possible that the Hebrews descended from a small group of Habiru.

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The Creation appears twice in Genesis 1.1–2.3 and 2.4–25. There are two genealogies of Adam, two flood stories, two captures of Jerusalem, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. There are many anachronisms – for example, the presence of Philistines and Arameans in Genesis when they had not yet arrived in Canaan. Camels as beasts of burden appear too early. Scholars believe the early Biblical books were written by separate groups of writers, one who emphasized El, the Canaanite god, and another who stressed Yahweh, the Israelite one God. yet invaluable source, often the only one available to us – and it is also, effectively, the first and paramount biography of Jerusalem.

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When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, only the high priest, once a year, could utter the tetragram YHWH, and Jews, even today, are forbidden to say it, preferring to use Adonai (Lord), or just HaShem (the unspeakable Name)

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The Israelite invasion of Canaan is a battlefield of complex, usually unprovable theories. But it seems that the storming of Jericho, whose walls were crumbled by Joshua’s trumpets, is mythical: Jericho was more ancient than Jerusalem. (In 2010, the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 10,000th anniversary – though the date is random.) However, Jericho was temporarily uninhabited and there is no evidence of collapsed walls. The Conquest Hypothesis is hard to take literally since the fighting (as recounted in the Book of Joshua) usually takes place in such a small area. Indeed Bethel near Jerusalem is one of the few conquered towns in the Book of Judges that
was
actually destroyed in the thirteenth century. The Israelites may have been far more peaceful and tolerant than they claimed.

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Just as the word ‘Philistine’ has, thanks to the Bible, entered the language to describe a lack of culture (despite their cultural sophistication), so the people of Gath, known at ‘Gits’, also entered the vernacular. But the Philistines gave their name to the land which became the Roman Palestina, hence Palestine.

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The sling was not then a child’s toy but a powerful weapon: slingers are shown in inscriptions in Beni Hasan in Egypt standing beside the archers in battle. Royal inscriptions in Egypt and Assyria show contingents of slingers were regular units of the imperial armies of the ancient world. It is believed skilled slingers could project specially smoothed stones the size of tennis balls at 100–150mph.

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Was ‘David’ a nom de guerre or regal name? The Bible tells the Goliath story twice, and in the second version it names the Israelite boy-hero as Elhanan: was this David’s real name?

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This is the world’s most excavated archaeological site. The present dig around the Spring by Professor Ronny Reich is the twelfth on this site and has revealed the Canaanite fortifications described in chapter one. In 1867, the English archaeologist Charles Warren discovered a shaft leading from Ophel down to the spring. It was long believed that Warren’s Shaft was man-made and that Jerusalemites lowered buckets to get water. But the most recent dig has changed all that: it seems Warren’s Shaft was natural. In fact, the water flowed to a man-made rock-cut pool, guarded by an enormous tower and walls.

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The scale of David’s city is now much debated between the minimalists who claim that it was just a chieftain’s small citadel and the maximalists who embrace the imperial capital of traditional Bible stories. Until the Tel Dan inscription was uncovered, the extreme minimalists even hinted that David himself never existed, pointing to the lack of any archaeological evidence except the Bible. In 2005 Dr Eilat Mazor announced that she had discovered King David’s palace. This was widely doubted, but her excavations do seem to have uncovered a substantial tenth-century public building, which, along with the Canaanite fortifications and stepped structures, would have formed David’s citadel.

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The pyramid known as Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley was first mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela in
AD
1170 and it does not date from 1000
BC.
It is actually a first-century
BC
tomb. In the Middle Ages, the Jews, banned from the city and even from the Western Wall, prayed close to the Pillar. Even into the early twentieth century, passing Jews used to spit or throw stones at it to signify their disgust for Absalom’s disloyalty.

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Several hundred years later, John Hyrcanus, the Maccabean king, was said to have plundered David’s tomb to pay off a foreign conqueror. Two thousand years after that, during the Crusader Kingdom, workmen repairing the Cenacle on Mount Zion, where Jesus took his last supper, discovered a room that they thought was David’s tomb. This became a site revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But the real site of David’s tomb remains a mystery.

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Where was the Holy of Holies? This is now a politically explosive question and an intractable challenge for any Israeli–Palestinian peace deal sharing Jerusalem. There are many theories, depending on the size of the Temple Mount which was later extended by Herod the Great. Most scholars believe it stood atop the rock within the Islamic Dome of the Rock. Some argue that this mysterious yellow, twisted cavern was originally a burial cave of around 2000
BC,
and there seem to be folk memories of this: when exiles returned from Babylon around 540
BC,
they were said to have found Araunah the Jebusite’s skull. The Mishnah, the compilation of oral Jewish traditions of the second century ad, calls it the Tomb of the Abyss, hollowed for ‘fear of any grave in the depths’. The Muslims called it the Well of Souls. Jews and Muslims believe this was where Adam was created and Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. It is likely that in
AD
691, the caliph Abd al-Malik chose the site for the Dome at least partly to create an Islamic successor to the Temple. Jews regard the Rock as the foundation stone of the Temple.

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The Bible cites the fortresses of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor as Solomon’s store-cities. But in the debates of the twenty-first century, revisionists, led by Professor Israel Finkelstein, argue that they are actually Syrian-style palaces built a hundred years later, leaving Solomon without any buildings. Other archaeologists challenge the revisionist dating. The black-onred pottery found at these sites belongs in the late tenth century
BC,
roughly the time of Solomon’s reign and Pharaoh Sheshonq’s invasion, nine years after the king’s death, while exciting new analysis of the buildings suggests they were indeed huge, tenth-century stables, and therefore plausibly evidence of Solomon’s cavalry power and Mediterranean horse-trading operations. The debate continues.

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The Kings of Israel and Judah marched together against Mesha, the rebellious Moabite king who, in a stele, declared that he sacrificed his own son and successfully repelled the invaders. Almost 3,000 years later, in 1868, some Bedouin showed a German missionary a black basalt stone which unleashed an archaeological race between Prussia, France and England, whose agents intrigued to win this prestigious imperial prize. One tribe of Bedouin tried to destroy the stone, but finally the French won. It was worth the struggle. Sometimes contradicting, sometimes confirming the Bible, Mesha admits that Israel had conquered Moab but states that he rebelled against King Ahab and then defeated Israel and Judah – which (according to the latest translation) he calls ‘House of David’, again confirming David’s existence. He then boasts that he took from a captured Israelite town ‘the vessels of Yahweh,’ the first mention of the Israelite God outside the Bible.

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The Bible portrays King Jehu of Israel as the restorer of Yahweh and smasher of the idols of Baal. But the Bible is more interested in his relations with God than in the power politics now revealed by archaeology: Jehu probably had help from Damascus because its king Hazael left the stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel boasting that he had defeated previous kings of the House of Israel and the House of the David, the archaeological proof that King David existed. But Jehu also had to become a vassal of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. On the Black Obelisk, found at Nimrud, now in the British Museum, Jehu makes his low obeisance to Shalmaneser who sits, with his braided beard, diadem, embroidered robes and sword, before the winged symbol of Assyrian power, sheltered by a parasol held by a courtier. ‘I received’, says Shalmaneser, ‘silver, gold, a gold bowl, a gold vase, gold buckets, tin, a staff, hunting spears.’ This kneeling Jehu is the first historical image of an Israelite.