Jerusalem: The Biography (8 page)

After 430 years, the Book of Exodus portrays the Israelites, repressed as slaves building the pharaoh’s cities, miraculously escaping Egypt with God’s help (still celebrated by Jews in the festival of Passover), led by a Hebrew prince named Moses. As they wandered through Sinai, God granted Moses the Ten Commandments. If the Israelites lived and worshipped according to these rules, God promised them the land of Canaan. When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking ‘What is thy name?’, he received the majestically forbidding reply, ‘I AM THAT I AM,’ a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.
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Many Semites did settle in Egypt; Ramses II the Great was probably the pharaoh who forced the Hebrews to work on his store-cities; Moses’ name was Egyptian, which suggests at least that he originated there; and there is no reason to doubt that the first charismatic leader of the monotheistic religions – Moses or someone like him – did receive this divine revelation for that is how religions begin. The tradition of a Semitic people who escaped repression is plausible but it defies dating.

Moses glimpsed the Promised Land from Mount Nebo but died before he could enter it. It was his successor Joshua who led the Israelites into Canaan. The Bible portrays their journey as both a bloody rampage and a gradual settlement. There is no archaeological evidence of a conquest but pastoral settlers did found many unwalled villages in the Judaean highlands.
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A small group of Israelites, who escaped Egypt, were probably among them. They were united by their worship of their God – Yahweh – whom they revered in a moveable temple, a tabernacle that held the sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant. They perhaps crafted their identity by telling the stories of their founding Patriarchs. Many of these traditions, from Adam and the Garden of Eden to Abraham, would later be revered not just by Jews but by Christians and Muslims too – and would be located in Jerusalem.

The Israelites were now very close to the city for the first time.

THE RISE OF DAVID

YOUNG DAVID

Joshua set up his headquarters north of Jerusalem, at Shechem, where he built a shrine to Yahweh. Jerusalem was the home of the Jebusites, ruled by King Adonizedek, a name that suggests a priest-king. Adonizedek resisted Joshua but was defeated. Yet ‘the sons of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites’, who ‘lived in Jerusalem side by side with the sons of Judah as they do today’. Around 1200
BC,
Merneptah, the son of Ramses the Great and perhaps the pharaoh who was forced to release Moses’ Israelites, faced attacks from the Sea Peoples – throwing the old empires of the Near East into flux. The pharaoh raided Canaan to restore order. When he returned home, he inscribed his triumph on the walls of his Theban temple, declaring that he had defeated the Sea Peoples, recaptured Ashkelon – and massacred a people who now appear in history for the first time: ‘Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.’

Israel was not yet a kingdom; rather, the Book of Judges recounts, it was a confederation of tribes ruled by elders who were now challenged by a new enemy: the Philistines, part of the Sea Peoples, who originated in the Aegean. They conquered the coast of Canaan, building five rich cities where they wove clothes, crafted red and black pottery, and worshipped their many gods. The Israelites, hill shepherds from little villages, were no match for these sophisticated Philistines whose infantry wore Greek-style breastplates, greaves (leg armour) and helmets, and deployed close-combat weapons that challenged the cumbersome chariotry of the Egyptians.

The Israelites elected charismatic warlords – the Judges – to fight Philistines and Canaanites. At one point, a much neglected verse of the Book of Judges claims the Israelites took and burned Jerusalem; if so, they did not manage to keep the stronghold.

At the Battle of Ebenezer in about 1050
BC,
the Philistines crushed the Israelites, destroyed their shrine at Shiloh, captured the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred symbol of Yahweh, and advanced into the hill country around Jerusalem. Faced with annihilation and wishing to be ‘like other nations’, the Israelites decided to elect a king, chosen by God.
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They turned to their ageing prophet, Samuel. Prophets were not predictors of the future but analysts of the present –
propheteia
in Greek means the interpreting of the will of the gods. The Israelites needed a military commander: Samuel chose a young warrior, Saul, whom he anointed with holy oil. Ruling from a hilltop citadel at Gibeon (Tell al-Ful), just three miles north of Jerusalem, this ‘captain over my people Israel’ justified his selection by defeating the Moabites, Edomites and Philistines. But Saul was not suited to the throne: ‘an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.’

Samuel, faced with a mentally unstable king, secretly looked elsewhere. He sensed the blessing of genius among the eight sons of Jesse of Bethlehem: David, the youngest, ‘was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the Lord said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he.’ David was also ‘cunning in playing, a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters’. He grew up to be the most remarkable yet rounded character in the Old Testament. The creator of sacred Jerusalem was a poet, conqueror, murderer, adulterer, the essence of the holy king and the flawed adventurer.

Samuel brought young David to court where King Saul appointed him as one of his armour-bearers. When the king was haunted by madness, David showed his first god-given gift: he played the harp ‘so Saul was refreshed’. David’s musical talents are an important part of his charisma: some of the Psalms ascribed to him may even be his.

The Philistines advanced to the valley of Elah. Saul and his army faced them. The Philistines produced a brobdingnagian champion, Goliath from Gath,
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whose full armour contrasted with the flimsy gear of the Israelites. Saul feared a pitched battle so he must have been relieved, if sceptical, when David demanded a shot at beating Goliath. David chose ‘five smooth stones out of the brook’ and, wielding his sling, he ‘slang it and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead’.
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He beheaded the fallen champion and the Israelites pursued the Philistines all the way to their city of Ekron. Whatever its truth, the story signifies that as a boy David made his name as a warrior.
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Saul promoted David but the women in the streets sang ‘Saul hath slain his thousands; David, his ten thousands.’ Saul’s son Jonathan befriended David and his daughter Michal loved him. Saul allowed them to marry but was tormented by jealousy: he twice tried to kill his son-in-law with a javelin. Princess Michal saved David’s life by letting him down from a palace window, and he was later granted asylum by the priests of Nob. The king pursued him, killing all the priests except one, but David escaped again, living on the run as the leader of 600 brigands. Twice he crept up on the sleeping king but spared his life, leading Saul to weep: ‘Thou art more righteous than I.’

Finally David defected to the Philistine King of Gath who granted him his own city domain, Ziklag. The Philistines again invaded Judah and defeated Saul on Mount Gilboa. His son Jonathan was killed and the king himself fell on his sword.

THE KINGDOM AND THE TEMPLE

DAVID: THE ROYAL CITY

A young man appeared at David’s camp claiming to have killed Saul: ‘I have slain the Lord’s anointed.’ David killed the messenger and then lamented Saul and Jonathan in timeless poetry:

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Ye daughters of Israel, weepover Saul who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel … Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions … How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!
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At this dark hour, the southern tribes of Judah anointed David as king with Hebron as his capital, while Saul’s surviving son, Ishbosheth, succeeded Saul to rule the northern tribes of Israel. After a seven-year war, Ishbosheth was murdered and the northern tribes too anointed David as king. The monarchy was united yet the split between Israel and Judah was a schism healed only by David’s charisma.

Jerusalem, known as Jebus after its Jebusite inhabitants, stood just south of Saul’s stronghold, Gibeon. David and his army advanced on the citadel of Zion, facing the formidable fortifications which have been recently uncovered around the Gihon Spring.
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Zion was said to be impregnable and how David captured it is a mystery. The Bible portrays the Jebusites lining the walls with the blind and the lame, a warning to any attacker of what would befall him. But the king somehow penetrated the city – through what the Hebrew Bible calls a
zinnor
. This may be a water-tunnel, one of the network now being excavated on the Ophel hill, or it may be the name of some magical spell. Either way, ‘David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David.’

This capture may just have been a palace coup. David did not slaughter the Jebusites; instead he co-opted them into his cosmopolitan court and army. He renamed Zion the City of David, repaired the walls and summoned the Ark of the Covenant (recaptured in battle) to Jerusalem. Its awesome sanctity killed one of those moving it, so David placed it with a trusted Git until it was safe to bear. ‘David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.’ Donning the sacerdotal loincloth, ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might.’ In return, God promised David, ‘thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever’. After the centuries of struggle, David was declaring that Yahweh had found a permanent home in a holy city.
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Michal, Saul’s daughter, mocked her husband’s half-naked submission to God as a display of vulgar vanity.
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While the earlier books of the Bible are a mixture of ancient texts and backdated stories written much later, the rounded, unheroic portrait of David, buried within the second Book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings, reads so vividly that it may have been based on the memoir of a courtier.

David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah. He brought the golden shields of his conquered enemies to Jerusalem, where he built himself a palace, importing cedarwood from his Phoenician allies in Tyre. David is said to have conquered a kingdom that stretched from Lebanon to the borders of Egypt, and eastwards into today’s Jordan and Syria, even placing a garrison in Damascus. Our only source for David is the Bible: between 1200 and 850
BC,
the empires of Egypt and Iraq were in eclipse and left meagre royal records, but they also left a power vacuum. David certainly existed: an inscription found in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel dating from the ninth century
BC
shows that the kings of Judah were known as the House of David, proving that David was the kingdom’s founder.

Yet David’s Jerusalem was tiny. At this time, the city of Babylon, in today’s Iraq, covered 2,500 acres; even the nearby town of Hazor covered 200. Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just enough to house about 1,200 people around the citadel. But the recent discoveries of fortifications above the Gihon Spring prove that David’s Zion was much more substantial than previously thought, even if it was very far from an imperial capital.
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David’s kingdom, conquered with his Cretan, Philistine and Hittite mercenaries, is plausible too, however exaggerated by the Bible, and was only a tribal federation held together by his personality. The Maccabees would, much later, show how dynamic warlords could quickly conquer a Jewish empire during an imperial power vacuum.

One evening, David was relaxing on the roof of his palace: ‘he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is this not Bathsheba?’ The woman was married to one of his non-Israelite mercenary captains, Uriah the Hittite. David summoned her and ‘she came in unto him and he lay with her’, making her pregnant. The king ordered his commander Joab to send him her husband back from the wars in present-day Jordan. When Uriah arrived, David ordered him to go home to ‘wash thy feet’ though he really intended that Uriah should sleep with Bathsheba to cover up her pregnancy. But Uriah refused so David ordered him to take this letter back to Joab: ‘Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle … that he may be smitten.’ Uriah was killed.

Bathsheba became David’s favourite wife, but the prophet Nathan told the king the story of a rich man who had everything but still stole a poor man’s only lamb. David was appalled by the injustice: ‘the man that hath done this thing shall surely die!’ ‘
Thou
art that man,’ replied Nathan. The king realized that he had committed a terrible crime. He and Bathsheba lost their first child born of this sin – but their second son, Solomon, survived.
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Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show: his sons struggled for the succession. His eldest, Amnon, may have expected to succeed David but the king’s favourite was Amnon’s half-brother, the spoiled and ambitious Absalom, with his lustrous head of hair and a physique without blemish: ‘in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty’.