Jerusalem: The Biography (9 page)

ABSALOM: RISE AND FALL OF A PRINCE

After Amnon lured Absalom’s sister Tamar to his house and raped her, Absalom had Amnon murdered outside Jerusalem. As David mourned, Absalom fled the capital and returned only after three years. The king and his favourite were reconciled: Absalom bowed to the ground before the throne and David kissed him. But Prince Absalom could not rein in his ambition. He paraded through Jerusalem in his chariot and horses with fifty men running before him. He undermined his father’s government – ‘Absalom stole the heart of Israel’ – and set up his own rebel court at Hebron.

The people flocked to the rising sun, Absalom. But now David regained some of his old spirit: he seized the Ark of the Covenant, the emblem of God’s favour, and then abandoned Jerusalem. While Absalom established himself in Jerusalem, the old king rallied his forces. ‘Deal gently for my sake with the young man,’ David told his general, Joab. When David’s forces massacred the rebels in the forest of Ephraim, Absalom fled on a mule. His gorgeous hair was his undoing: ‘and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.’ When the dangling Absalom was spotted, Joab killed him and buried the body in a pit instead of beneath the pillar the rebel prince had built for himself.
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‘Is the young man Absalom safe?’ the king asked pathetically. When David heard that the prince was dead, he lamented: ‘Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’
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As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an altar there. There may already have been a shrine in Jerusalem whose rulers are described as priest-kings. One of the original inhabitants of the city, Araunah the Jebusite, owned land on Moriah which suggests that the city had expanded from the Ophel onto the neighbouring mountain. ‘So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ David planned a temple there and ordered cedarwood from Abibaal, the Phoenician King of Tyre. It was the crowning moment in his career, the bringing together of God and his people, the union of Israel and Judah, and the anointment of Jerusalem herself as the holy capital. But it was not to be. God told David: ‘Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war and hast shed blood.’

Now that David was ‘old and stricken’, his courtiers and sons intrigued for the succession. Another son Adonijah made a bid for the throne, while a lissom concubine, Abishag, was brought in to distract David. But the plotters underestimated Bathsheba.
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SOLOMON: THE TEMPLE

Bathsheba claimed the throne for her son Solomon. David called in Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, who escorted Solomon on the king’s own mule down to the sacred Gihon Spring. There he was anointed king. The trumpet was blown and the people celebrated. Adonijah, hearing the celebrations, sought refuge in the sanctuary of the altar, and Solomon guaranteed his life.
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After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites and cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was the authors of the Bible, writing four centuries afterwards to instruct their own times, who made the imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king. He was buried in the City of David.
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His son was very different. Solomon would finish that sacred mission – but he started his reign, in about 970
BC,
with a bloody settling of scores.

Bathsheba, the queen mother, asked Solomon to allow his elder half-brother, Adonijah, to marry King David’s last concubine, Abishag. ‘Ask for him the kingdom too?’ replied Solomon sarcastically, ordering the murder of Adonijah and a purge of his father’s old guard. This story is the last from the court historian of David but it is also really the first and only glimpse of Solomon as a man, for he becomes the inscrutably wise and splendid stereotype of a fabulous emperor. Everything Solomon had was bigger and better than any ordinary king: his wisdom generated 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs, his harem contained 700 wives and 300 concubines, and his army boasted 12,000 cavalry and 1,400 chariots. Those expensive showpieces of military technology were housed in his fortified towns, Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, while his fleet was anchored at Ezion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba.
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Solomon traded with Egypt and Cilicia in spices and gold, chariots and horses. He shared trading expeditions to Sudan and Somalia with his Phoenician ally King Hiram of Tyre. He hosted the Queen of Sheba (probably Saba, today’s Yemen), who came to Jerusalem ‘with a very great train with camels that bore spices and very much gold and precious stones’. The gold came from Ophir, probably India; the bronze from his own mines. His wealth embellished Jerusalem: ‘The king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the vale, for abundance.’ The most telling mark of his international prestige was his marriage to a pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaohs almost never married their daughters to foreign princes – especially not parvenu Judaeans only recently graduated from hill shepherd chieftains. Yet once-haughty Egypt was in such shameful chaos that Pharaoh Siamun raided Gezer not far from Jerusalem and, perhaps finding himself exposed far from home, offered the spoils to Solomon along with his daughter, an unthinkable honour at any other time. But the Temple of Jerusalem, planned by his father, was his masterpiece.

The ‘house of God’ was to stand right next to Solomon’s royal palace in an imperial-sacred acropolis, described in the Bible, that boasted halls and palaces of astonishing grandeur covered in gold and cedarwood, including the House of the Forest of Lebanon and the Hall of Pillars where the king adjudicated.

This was not just an Israelite achievement. The Phoenicians, who lived in independent city states along the Lebanese coast, were the most sophisticated artisans and seafaring traders of the Mediterranean, famed for their Tyrian purple from which they derived their name (
phoinix
, meaning purple) and for creating the alphabet. King Hiram of Tyre provided not only the cypress and cedarwood but also the craftsmen who carved the silver and gold ornamentation. Everything was ‘pure gold’.

The Temple was not just a shrine, it was the home of God himself, a complex made up of three parts, standing about 33 by 115 feet, in a walled enclosure. First there was a gateway with two bronze pillars, Yachin and Boaz, 33 feet high, decorated with pomegranates and lilies, that led into a huge pillared courtyard open to the skies and surrounded on three sides with two-storey chambers that may have contained the royal archives or treasury. The portico opened into a sacred hall: ten golden lamps stood along walls. A golden table for shewbread was placed in front of an incense altar for sacrifices, a water pool and wheeled lavers with bowls on top for purification, and a bronze pool known as the Sea. Steps led up towards the Holy of Holies,
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a small chamber guarded by two winged cherubim, 17 feet high, made of olive wood covered with gold foil.

Yet Solomon’s own magnificence came first. He took seven years to finish the Temple, and thirteen to build his own palace, which was larger. There had to be silence in God’s house, so ‘there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house’: his Phoenician craftsmen dressed the stones, carved the cedar and cypress, and crafted the silver, bronze and gold decorations in Tyre before shipping them to Jerusalem. King Solomon fortified Mount Moriah by expanding the old walls: henceforth the name ‘Zion’ described both the original citadel and the new Temple Mount.

When all was finished, Solomon assembled the people to watch the priests bear the acacia wood chest of the Ark of the Covenant from its tent on the citadel of Zion, the City of David, to the Temple on Mount Moriah. Solomon sacrificed at the altar and then the priests took the Ark into the Holy of Holies and placed it beneath the wings of the two immense gold cherubim. There was nothing in the Holy of Holies except the cherubim, and the Ark, and nothing within the Ark – just 4 by 2

As the priest came out, the ‘cloud’ of the Divine Presence, ‘the glory of the Lord, filled the house of the Lord.’ Solomon consecrated the Temple before his people, declaring to God: ‘I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide for ever,’ God replied to Solomon, ‘I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father.’ This became the first of the festivals that developed into the great pilgrimages of the Jewish calendar: ‘three times a year did Solomon offer burnt offerings upon the altar’. At that moment, the concept of sanctity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world found its eternal home. Jews and the other Peoples of the Book believe that the Divine Presence has never left the Temple Mount. Jerusalem would become the superlative place for divine-human communication on earth.

SOLOMON: THE DECLINE

All the ideal Jerusalems, new and old, celestial and temporal, were based on the Bible’s description of Solomon’s city. But there is no other source to confirm it, and nothing has been found of his Temple.

This is less surprising than it sounds. It is impossible to excavate the Temple Mount for political and religious reasons, but even if such excavations were allowed we would probably find no traces of Solomon’s Temple because it was obliterated at least twice, cut down to bedrock at least once and remodelled countless times. Yet the Temple is plausible in size and design even if the biblical writers exaggerated its splendour. Solomon’s Temple was a classic shrine of its time. The Phoenician temples, on which Solomon’s was partly based, were thriving corporations run by hundreds of officials, temple prostitutes whose fees contributed to corporate income, and even in-house barbers for those who dedicated their hair to their gods. The layout of Syrian temples, discovered all over the region, along with their sacred paraphernalia such as their lavers, were very similar to the biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Sanctuary.

Its bounty of gold and ivory is completely credible. A century later, the kings of Israel reigned from sumptuous palaces in nearby Samaria where their ivory has been found by archaeologists. The Bible says Solomon dedicated 500 gold shields to the Temple in an era when other sources prove that gold was plentiful – imported from Ophir, the Egyptians also mined it in Nubia. Just after Solomon’s death, the pharaoh Sheshonq was paid off with the Temple’s treasury of gold when he threatened Jerusalem. King Solomon’s mines were long thought to be mythical, but copper mines have been found in Jordan that were working during his reign. The size of his army, too, was feasible given that we know a king of Israel would field 2,000 chariots just over a century later.
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Solomon’s magnificence may be exaggerated, but his decline rings only too true: the king of wisdom became an unpopular tyrant who funded his monumental extravagances through high taxes and the ‘chastisement of whips’. To the disgust of the monotheistic biblical authors, writing two centuries later, Solomon prayed to Yahweh and other local gods, and furthermore he ‘loved many strange women’.

Solomon faced rebellions from Edom in the south and Damascus in the north, while his general, Jeroboam, started to plan a revolt among the northern tribes. Solomon ordered Jeroboam’s assassination but the general fled to Egypt where he was backed by Sheshonq, the Libyan pharaoh of a resurgent empire. The Israelite kingdom was tottering.

THE KINGS OF JUDAH

930–626
BC

REHOBOAM VERSUS JEROBOAM: THE SPLIT

When Solomon died in 930
BC
after a reign of forty years, his son Rehoboam summoned the tribes to Shechem. The northerners chose the general, Jeroboam, to tell the young king that they would no longer tolerate Solomon’s taxes, ‘I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips,’ replied the brash Rehoboam, ‘I will chastise you with scorpions.’ The ten northern tribes rebelled, anointing Jeroboam as king of a new breakaway kingdom of Israel.

Rehoboam remained king of Judah; he was David’s grandson and he possessed the Temple of Jerusalem, the home of Yahweh. But the more experienced Jeroboam, who made his capital at Shechem, faced up to this: ‘If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto Rehoboam King of Judah and they shall kill me.’ So he built two mini-temples at Bethel and Dan, traditional Canaanite shrines. Jeroboam’s reign was long and successful, but he could never match Rehoboam’s Jerusalem.

The two Israelite kingdoms were sometimes at war with each other, sometimes close allies. For around four centuries after 900
BC,
the Davidic dynasty ruled Judah, the small rump around the royal Temple city of Jerusalem, while the much richer Israel became a local military power in the north, usually dominated by charioteer generals who seized the throne in bloody coups. One of these usurpers killed so many of the ruling family that ‘he left him not one that pisseth against a wall’. The authors of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, writing two centuries later, were not concerned with personal detail or strict chronology but judged the rulers by their loyalty to the one God of Israel. Fortunately, however, the Dark Age was over: the inscriptions of the empires of Egypt and Iraq now illuminate – and often confirm – the furiously righteous pontifications of the Bible.