Jerusalem: The Biography

The princeling was hidden in the Temple complex while Jezebel’s half-Phoenician, half-Israelite daughter attracted cosmopolitan trade and Baalist worship to her small mountain capital. An exquisite ivory dove perched atop a pomegranate, less than an inch high, was found in Jerusalem, it was probably used to decorate a piece of furniture in a grand Jerusalem house. Phoenician clay seals – known as bullae, the headed notepaper of the day – have been found around the rock pool below the City of David with images of their ships and holy totems such as a winged sun over a throne, along with 10,000 fishbones, probably imported from the Mediterranean by these ocean-going traders. But Athaliah was soon as hated as Jezebel. Her idolatrous priests set up Baal and other gods in the Temple. After six years, the Temple’s priest called Jerusalem’s grandees to a secret meeting and revealed the existence of the little prince, Jehoash – to whom they immediately swore loyalty. The priest armed the guards with the spears and shields of King David, still stored in the Temple, and then publicly anointed the child, crying ‘God save the king’ and blowing trumpets.

The Queen heard ‘the noise of the guard and the people’ and rushed through the acropolis from the palace into the neighbouring Temple, now packed with people. ‘Treason! Treason!’ she cried, but the guards seized her, dragged her off the holy mountain and killed her outside the gates. The priests of Baal were lynched, their idols smashed.

King Jehoash ruled for forty years until about 801 when he was defeated in battle by the Syrian king, who marched on Jerusalem and forced him to pay out ‘all the gold in the treasures’ of the Temple. He was murdered. Thirty years later, a king of Israel raided Jerusalem and plundered the Temple. From now on the growing wealth of the Temple made it a tempting prize.¹⁵

Yet Jerusalem’s remote prosperity was no match for Assyria, energized under a new king: that carnivorous empire was again on the march. The kings of Israel and of Aram-Damascus tried to put together a coalition to resist the Assyrians. When King Ahaz of Judah refused, the Israelites and Syrians besieged Jerusalem. They could not break through the newly fortified walls, but King Ahaz despatched the Temple treasury and an appeal for help to Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria. In 732, the Assyrians annexed Syria and ravaged Israel. In Jerusalem, King Ahaz agonized over whether to submit to Assyria or fight.

ISAIAH: JERUSALEM AS BEAUTY AND HARLOT

The king was advised by Isaiah, prince, priest and political consigliere, to wait: Yahweh would protect Jerusalem. The king, said Isaiah, would have a son named Emmanuel – meaning ‘God with us’ – ‘For unto us a child is born’ who would be ‘the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’, bringing ‘peace without end’.

There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah – one of them wrote over 200 years later – but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted upand his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.’

Isaiah loved the ‘holy mountain’, which he saw as a beautiful woman, ‘the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem’, sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and ‘Jerusalem is ruined’, there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone ‘upon every dwelling-place’, preaching loving-kindness: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.’ Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’