Jerusalem: The Biography

Hezekiah poisoned any wells outside Jerusalem. His troops, manning his new walls, wore turbans fastened with headbands and long earflaps, short kilts, leg armour and boots. As the siege set in, there must have been panic in the city. Sennacherib sent his generals to parley – resistance was hopeless. The prophet Micah foresaw the destruction of Zion. However, old Isaiah counselled patience: Yahweh would provide.

Hezekiah prayed in the Temple. Sennacherib bragged that he had surrounded Jerusalem ‘like a bird in a cage’. But Isaiah was right: God intervened.

MANASSEH: CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE VALLEY OF HELL

‘The angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians … and when they arose in the morning, they were all dead corpses.’ The Assyrians suddenly packed up their camp, probably to suppress a rebellion in the east. ‘So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.’ Yahweh told Sennacherib that ‘The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.’ This was the Jerusalem version, but Sennacherib’s annals describe Hezekiah’s crushing tribute, including 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver: he seems to have paid them to leave. Sennacherib reduced Judah to a rump not much larger than the district of Jerusalem and boasted that he had deported 200,150 people.¹⁸

When Hezekiah died soon after the siege, his son Manasseh became a loyal Syrian vassal. He brutally crushed any opposition in Jerusalem, married an Arabian princess, overturned his father’s reforms and installed ritual male prostitutes and the idols Baal and Asherah in the Temple. Most dreadful of all, he encouraged the sacrifice of children at the roaster – the tophet – in the Valley of Hinnom,^* south of the city. Indeed ‘he made his own son pass through the fire …’ Children were said to be taken there as priests beat drums to hide the shrieks of the victims from their parents.

Thanks to Manasseh, the Valley of Hinnom became not just the place of death, but Gehenna, ‘hell’ in Jewish and later Christian and Islamic mythology. If the Temple Mount was Jerusalem’s own heaven, Gehenna was her own Hades.

Then in 626, Nabopolassar, a Chaldean general, seized control of Babylon and started to destroy the Assyrian empire, recording his exploits in the Babylonian Chronicles. In 612, Nineveh fell to an alliance of Babylonians and Medes. In 609, the succession of Manasseh’s eight-year-old grandson, Josiah, seemed to herald a golden age ruled by a Messiah.¹⁹

THE WHORE OF BABYLON

586–539 BC

JOSIAH: THE REVOLUTIONARY SAVIOUR

It was a miracle: the evil empire of Assyria had fallen apart and the kingdom of Judah was free. King Josiah may have extended his kingdom northwards into the former lands of Israel, southwards towards the Red Sea and eastwards towards the Mediterranean, and then, in the eighteenth year of his reign, Hilkiah the chief priest found a forgotten scroll stored in the chambers of the Temple.

Josiah recognized the power of this document, an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy (‘Second Law’ in Greek), probably one of the scrolls brought southwards from Israel after its fall and hidden in the Temple during Manasseh’s persecutions. Having assembled the Judaeans in the Temple, Josiah stood by that totemic symbol, the royal pillar, and announced his covenant with the one God to keep the Law. The king set his scholars to retell the ancient history of the Judaeans, linking the mythical Patriarchs, the sacred kings David and Solomon and the story of Jerusalem into a single past, to illuminate the present. This was another step towards the creation of the Bible. Indeed these laws were backdated and attributed to Moses, but the biblical portrait of the Temple of Solomon surely reflected the real but later Jerusalem of Josiah, the new David. Henceforth the holy mountain became nothing less than ha-Makom in Hebrew: the Place.

The king had the idols burned in the Kidron Valley, and expelled the male prostitutes from the Temple; he smashed the child-roasters of the Valley of Hell and killed the idolatrous priests, grinding their bones into their altars.^* Josiah’s revolution sounds violent, frenzied and puritanical. He then held a Passover festival to celebrate. ‘And like unto him was there no king before him.’ Yet he was playing a dangerous game. When Necho, the Egyptian pharaoh, marched up the coast, Josiah, fearing he was about to swap Assyrian for Egyptian dominion, rushed to stop him. In 609 BC, the pharaoh crushed the Judaeans and killed Josiah at Megiddo. Josiah had failed, but his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus. The dream of independence, however, ended at Megiddo, which became the very definition of catastrophe: Armageddon.²⁰