A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

Yet if the Israelites really were Canaanites, why does the Bible insist so forcefully that they were outsiders? Belief in their foreign origin was absolutely central to the Israelite identity. Indeed, the story of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is dominated by the story of Israel’s search for a homeland. It is inconceivable that the entire story of the Exodus is a fabrication. Perhaps some hapiru did flee the pharaoh’s corvée (forced labor) and later join the Canaanite settlers in the hill country. Even the Bible hints that not all of the people of Israel had taken part in the Exodus.8 Ultimately the religion and mythology of these newcomers from Egypt became the dominant ideology of Israel. The stories of a divine liberation from slavery and the special protection of the god Yahweh may have appealed to Canaanites who had themselves escaped from oppressive and corrupt regimes and had become aware that they were taking part in an exciting new experiment in their highland settlements.

Israelites did not begin to write their own history until after they had become the major power in the country. Scholars have traditionally found four sources embedded in the text of the Pentateuch. The earliest two writers are known as “J” and “E” because of their preferred use of “Yahweh” and “Elohim” respectively as titles for the God of Israel. They may have written in the tenth century, though some would put them as late as the eighth century BCE. The Deuteronomist (“D”) and Priestly (“P”) writers were both active during the sixth century, during and after the exile of the Israelites to Babylon. In recent years this source criticism has failed to satisfy some scholars and more radical theories have been suggested, as, for example, that the whole of the Pentateuch was composed in the late sixth century by a single author. At present, however, the four-source theory is still the customary way of approaching these early biblical texts. The historical books that deal with the later history of Israel and Judah—Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings—were written during the Exile by historians of the Deuteronomist school (“D”), whose ideals we shall discuss in Chapter 4. They were often working with earlier sources and chronicles but used them to further their own theological interpretation. The Chronicler, who was probably writing in the mid-fourth century BCE, is even more cavalier with his sources. None of our authors, therefore, was writing objective history that would satisfy our standards today. What they show is how the people of their own period saw the past.

This is especially true of the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the three patriarchs of Israel. These could have been written nearly a thousand years after the events they purport to describe. They are legends, and not historical in our sense. The biblical writers knew nothing about life in nineteenth- and eighteenth-century Canaan—there is no mention of the strong Egyptian presence in the country, for example—but the tales of the patriarchs are important because they show how the Israelites were beginning to shape a distinct identity for themselves at the time when J and E were writing. By this time, Israelites believed that they had all descended from a common ancestor, Jacob, who had been given the new name of Israel (“May God show his strength!,” or, alternatively, “One who struggles for God”) as a sign of his special relationship with the Deity. Jacob/Israel had twelve sons, each of whom was the ancestor of one of the tribes. Next the Israelites looked back to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham, who had been chosen by God to be the founder of the new nation. So strong was their conviction that they were not of Canaanite stock originally that they wanted to trace their ancestry back to Mesopotamia. In about 1850 BCE, they believed that God had appeared to Abraham in Haran and told him: “Leave your country, your family and your father’s house for the land I will show you.”9 That country was Canaan. Abraham did as he was told and left Mesopotamia, but he lived in Canaan as a migrant. He owned no land there until he bought a burial plot for his wife in the Cave of Machpelah at Hebron.

Crucial to the patriarchal narratives is the search for a homeland. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob remained highly conscious of their alien status in Canaan.10 As soon as he describes Abraham’s arrival, J makes a point of reminding the reader: “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.”11 This is an important point. In the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all found other people in possession. They have all had to cope with the fact that the city and the land have been sacred to other people before them and the integrity of their tenure will depend in large part upon the way they treat their predecessors.

The perception that other people were established in Canaan before the Chosen People can, perhaps, be seen in God’s persistent choice of the second son instead of the first. Thus Abraham had two sons. The first was Ishmael, who was born to his concubine Hagar. Yet when Isaac was miraculously born to Abraham’s aged and barren wife, Sarah, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his oldest son. Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation, but Abraham’s name must be carried on through Isaac. Consequently the patriarch dispatched Hagar and Ishmael to the desert east of Canaan, where they would certainly have perished had God not protected them. They were of little further interest to the biblical writers, but, as we shall see in Chapter 11, a people who claimed to be the descendants of Ishmael would arrive in Jerusalem centuries later. In the next generation too, God preferred the second son. Isaac’s wife, Rebecca, felt her twin babies fighting in the womb, and God told her that two nations were at war in her body. When the twins were born, the second arrived grasping the heel of his brother, Esau. Consequently he was called Ya’aquob: the Heel-Holder or Supplanter.12 When the twins grew up, Jacob managed to trick the aged Isaac into giving him the blessing that should by rights have gone to the older son. Henceforth Esau was also dismissed to the eastern lands. Yet neither J nor E discounts the claims of the rejected older siblings. There is real pathos in the story of Hagar and Ishmael, and the reader is made to sympathize with Esau’s distress. When J and E were writing, the Israelites did not perceive their ownership of the Promised Land as a cause for crude chauvinism: the process of establishing themselves as a nation in their own land was painful to others and morally perplexing.

There is none of the militant zeal of Joshua, who was commanded by God to wipe out all the altars and religious symbols of the indigenous people of Canaan. This was a later Israelite ideal. Both J and E show the patriarchs behaving for the most part with respect toward the Canaanites and honoring their religious traditions. According to them, the patriarchs did not seek to impose their own God on the country, nor did they trample on the altars of the native people. Abraham seems to have worshipped El, the high god of the country. It was only later that El was fused imaginatively with Yahweh, the God of Moses. As God himself told Moses from the burning bush: “To Abraham and Isaac and Jacob I appeared as El Shaddai; I did not make myself known to them by my name Yahweh.”13 In the meantime, the land of Canaan had to reveal its own sanctity to the patriarchs, who waited for El to show himself to them in the usual sites.

Thus Jacob stumbled unawares upon the sanctity of Beth-El. He lay down to sleep at what seemed to be an unremarkable spot, using a stone as a pillow. But the site was in fact a maqom (a “place”), a word with cultic connotations. That night Jacob dreamed of a ladder standing in the ground beside him reaching up to heaven. It was a classic vision, reminding us of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. At the top of the ladder was the God of Abraham, who now assured Jacob of his protection and favor. When he woke, Jacob was overcome with the dread that often characterizes an encounter with the sacred: “Truly God is in this place and I never knew it!” he said in awe. What had seemed to be an ordinary location had proved to be a spiritual center that provided human beings with access to the divine world. “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God [beth-el]; this is the gate of heaven!”14 Before leaving, Jacob upended the stone on which he had been lying and consecrated it with a libation of oil to mark the place out as radically separate from its surroundings.

Later generations of Israelites would strongly condemn the Canaanite matzevot, or standing-stones, which were used as symbols of the divine. But J and E found nothing odd about Jacob’s pious action here. When they were writing, Israelites were not monotheists in our sense. Yahweh, the God of Moses, was their God, and some believed that Israelites should worship him alone. But they believed that other gods existed, and, as we know from the writings of the prophets and historians, many Israelites continued to worship other deities. It seemed absurd to neglect gods who had long ensured the fertility of Canaan, and could be encountered in its sacred “places” (bamoth). We know that other deities were worshipped by the Israelites in Jerusalem right up until the city was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. We shall see that Israelites honored the fertility goddess Asherah, the consort of El, in their Temple in Jerusalem as well as a host of Syrian astral deities; they also took part in the fertility rites of Baal. It was not until the exile to Babylon (597–39) that the people of Israel finally decided that Yahweh was the only God and that no other deities existed. They would then become very hostile indeed to all “pagan” worship. But when J and E, the earliest biblical writers, imagined the religion of their forefathers, they found nothing offensive in the notion that Jacob had seen his God in a pagan cult place and had marked this theophany with a matzevah.

Sometimes, therefore, the religious experiences of the patriarchs—especially those described by J—would seem rather dubious to later generations of Israelites. Thus Jews came to believe that it was blasphemous to represent their God in human form, but J shows him appearing to Abraham as a man. Abraham is sitting outside his tent at Mamre, near Hebron, when three strangers approach. With typical Near Eastern courtesy, the patriarch insists that they all sit down while he prepares a meal for them. Then the four men eat together, and in the course of the conversation it transpires quite naturally that these three visitors are really the God of Abraham and two of his angels.15 Jews cherished this story, however, which also became very important to Christians, who regarded it as an early manifestation of God as Trinity. One of the reasons why this Mamre epiphany is so important is that it expresses a truth which is central to monotheism. The sacred does not manifest itself only in holy places. We can also encounter the divine in other human beings. It is essential, therefore, that we treat the men and women with whom we come in contact—even complete strangers—with absolute honor and respect, because they too enshrine the divine mystery. This is what Abraham discovered when he ran out joyfully to meet these three travelers and insisted on giving them all the refreshment and comfort he could. This act of compassion and courtesy led to a divine encounter.

Social justice and concern for the poor and vulnerable were crucial to the concept of sanctity in the Near East, as we have seen. It was essential to the ideal of a holy city of peace. Very early in the Israelite tradition we find an even deeper understanding of the essential sacredness of humanity. Perhaps we can see this in the stark and terrible tale of God’s temptation of Abraham. He commanded the patriarch to take Isaac—“your son, your only son, whom you love”—and offer him as a human sacrifice in “the land of Moriah.”16 Since Abraham had just lost his older son, Ishmael, this would seem to mean the end of God’s promise to make Abraham the father of a great nation. It made a mockery of his life of faith and commitment. Nevertheless, Abraham prepared to obey and took Isaac to the mountaintop which God had prescribed. But just as he was about to plunge the knife into Isaac’s breast, an angel of the Lord commanded him to desist. Instead, Abraham must sacrifice a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. There is no mention of Jerusalem in the text, but later, at least by the fourth century BCE, “the land of Moriah” would come to be associated with Mount Zion.17 The Jewish Temple was thought to have been built on the place where Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice; the Muslim Dome of the Rock also commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. There was a symbolic reason for this identification, because on this occasion Yahweh had let it be known that his cult must not include human sacrifice—a prohibition that was by no means universal in the ancient world—but only the sacrifice of animals. Today we find even the notion of animal sacrifice repellent, but we should realize that this practice, which was absolutely central to the religion of antiquity, did not indicate any disrespect for the animals. Sacrifice tried to engage with the painful fact that human life depended on the killing of other creatures—an insight that also lay at the heart of the combat myths about Marduk and Baal. Carnivorous humanity preyed upon plants and animals in order to survive: there were guilt, gratitude, and reverence for the beasts who were sacrificed in this way—a complex of emotions that may have inspired the prehistoric paintings in the caves of Lascaux. Today we carefully shield ourselves from the realization that the neatly packaged joints of meat we buy in the butcher shop come from other beings who have laid down their lives for our sake, but this was not the case in the ancient world. Yet it is also significant that in later years, the Jerusalem cult was thought to have been established at the moment when it was revealed that the sacredness of humanity is such that it is never permissible to sacrifice another human life—no matter how exalted the motivation.

After his ordeal, Abraham called the place where he had bound Isaac “Yahweh sees,” and E glossed this by quoting a local maxim: “On Yahweh’s mountain [it] is seen.”18 On the sacred mountain, midway between earth and heaven, human beings could both see and be seen by their gods. It was a place of vision, where people learned to look in a different way. They could open the eyes of their imagination to see beyond their mundane surroundings to the eternal mystery that lay at the heart of existence. We shall see that Mount Zion in Jerusalem became a place of vision for the people of Israel, though it was not their only holy place in the earlier phase of their history.

Jerusalem played no part in the formative events in which the new nation of Israel found its soul. We have seen that even at the time when the books of Joshua and Judges were written, some Israelites saw the city as an essentially foreign place, a predominantly Jebusite city. The Patriarchs were associated with Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, and Beersheva but do not seem to have noticed Jerusalem during their travels. But on one occasion Abraham did meet Melchizedek, King and Priest of “Salem,” after his return from a military expedition. The king presented him with bread and wine and blessed him in the name of El Elyon, the god of Salem.19 Jewish tradition has identified “Salem” with Jerusalem, though this is by no means certain,20 and the meeting was thought to have taken place at the spring of En Rogel (known today as Bir Ayyub: Job’s Well) at the conjunction of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys.21 En Rogel was certainly a cultic site in ancient Jerusalem and seems to have been associated with the coronation of the kings of the city. Local legend made Melchizedek the founder of Jerusalem, and its kings were seen as his descendants.22 Later, as we see in the Hebrew psalms, the Davidic kings of Judah were told at their coronation: “You are a priest of the order of Melchizedek, and for ever,”23 so they had inherited this ancient title, along with many other of the Jebusite traditions about Mount Zion. The story of Melchizedek’s meeting with Abraham may have been told first at the time of King David’s conquest of the city to give legitimacy to his title: it shows his ancestor honoring and being honored by the founder of Jerusalem.24 But the story also shows Abraham responding with courtesy to the present incumbents of the city, offering Melchizedek a tithe of his booty as a mark of homage, and accepting the blessing of a foreign god. Again, the story shows respect for the previous inhabitants of Jerusalem and a reverence for their traditions.

Melchizedek’s god was called El Elyon, “God Most High,” a title later given to Yahweh once he had become the high god of Jerusalem. El Elyon was also one of the titles of Baal of Mount Zaphon.25 In the ancient world, deities were often fused with one another. This was not regarded as a betrayal or an unworthy compromise. The gods were not seen as solid individuals with discrete and inalienable personalities but as symbols of the sacred. When people arrived in a new place, they would often merge their own god with the local deity. The incoming god would take on some of the characteristics and functions of his or her predecessor. We have seen that in the imagination of Israel, Yahweh, the god of Moses, became one with El Shaddai, the god of Abraham. Once the Israelites arrived in Jerusalem, Yahweh was also linked to Baal El Elyon, who was almost certainly worshipped on Mount Zion.

Jerusalem does not figure at all in the stories of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which became absolutely central to their faith. The biblical account of these events has mythologized them, bringing out their spiritual, timeless meaning. It does not attempt to reproduce them in a way that would satisfy the modern historian. It is essentially a story of liberation and homecoming that has nourished Jews in many of the darkest moments of their long and tragic history; the message of the Exodus also inspires Christians who are struggling with injustice and oppression. Even though Jerusalem plays no part in the story, the Exodus traditions would become significant in the spirituality of the Israelites on Mount Zion. The incidents can also be seen as versions of the Near Eastern creation and combat myths, except that instead of taking place in primordial time they are seen to happen in the mundane world and what comes into being is not a cosmos but a people.26 The combat myths of Baal and Marduk ended with the construction of a city and a temple: the Exodus myth concludes with the building of a homeland. During these years, Israel passed from a state of chaos and nonbeing to a divinely established reality. Instead of splitting the carcass of a sea-monster to create the world, as Marduk did, Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds to let his people escape from Pharaoh and his pursuing army. Instead of slaying the demonic hordes, like Marduk, Yahweh drowned the Egyptians. As always the new creation depended upon the destruction of others—a motif that would frequently recur in the future history of Jerusalem. Finally the people of Israel had passed through the divided waters to safety and freedom. In all cultures, immersion signified a return to the primal waters, the original element, an abrogation of the past and a new birth.27 Water thus had the power to restore—if only temporarily—the pristine purity of the beginning. Their passage through the Sea of Reeds made Israel Yahweh’s new creation.

Next the Israelites traveled to the holy mountain of Sinai. There, in the time-honored way, Moses climbed to meet his god on the summit, and Yahweh descended in the midst of a violent storm and volcanic eruption. The people kept their distance, as instructed: the sacred could be dangerous for the uninitiated and, at least in the Israelite tradition, could be approached only by a carefully instructed elite. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh made Israel his own people, and as a seal of this covenant, he gave Moses the Torah, or Law, which included the Ten Commandments, though, as we shall see, the Torah would not become central to the religious life of Israel until after the exile to Babylon.

Finally, before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land, the Israelites had to undergo the ordeal of a forty-year sojourn in the desert. This was no romantic interlude. The Bible makes it clear that the people constantly complained and rebelled against Yahweh during these years: they longed for what seemed, in retrospect, the easier life they had enjoyed in Egypt. In the Near East the desert was associated with death and primeval chaos. We have seen that Mot, the Syrian god of the desert, was also the voracious god of the Abyss, the dark void of death and mortality. Desert was thus a sacred area that had, as it were, gone awry and become demonic.28 It remained a place of utter desolation in the Israelite imagination: there was no nostalgia for the wilderness years of the Exodus, as some biblical critics have imagined. Instead, the prophets and biblical writers recalled that God had made Israel his people “in the howling wilderness of the desert”;29 the desert was “a land unsown” where “no one lives”; it was “void of human dwelling,” the land of “no-kingdom-there,”30 It constantly threatened to encroach on the settled land and reduce it to the primal no-thingness. When they imagined the destruction of a city, Israelites saw it reverting to desert and becoming once again “the plumb-line of emptiness,” the haunt of pelicans, hedgehogs, and satyrs, where there was “no man at all.”31 For forty years—a phrase that is used simply to denote a very long time indeed—the Israelites had to struggle through this demonic realm, entering a state of symbolic extinction before their God brought them home.

God had not entirely deserted his people in the wilderness, however. Like other nomadic peoples, the Israelites possessed a portable symbol of their link with the divine realm which kept them in being. Where the Australian Aborigines carried a sacred pole, the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant, a shrine that would be of great importance to them in Jerusalem. Most of the descriptions of the Ark in the Bible come from the later sources, so it is difficult to guess what it was originally like. It seems to have been a chest which contained the tablets of the Law and was surmounted by two golden cherubim: their outstretched wings formed the back of a throne for Yahweh.32 We know that an empty throne was often used as a symbol for the divine: it invited the god to sit among his worshippers. Henceforth the Throne would come to stand as a symbol of the divine Presence in the Jewish tradition. The Ark was thus an outward sign of Yahweh’s presence. It was carried by members of the tribe of Levi, who were the appointed priestly caste of Israel: Aaron, Moses’s brother, was the chief priest. Originally the Ark seems to have been a military palladium, since its sacred power—which could be lethal—provided protection against Israel’s enemies. J tells us that when the Israelites began their day’s march, the cloud representing Yahweh’s presence would descend over the Ark and Moses would cry: “Arise, Yahweh, may your enemies be scattered!” At night, when they pitched tent, he would cry: “Come back, Yahweh, to the thronging hosts of Israel!”33 The Ark enclosed the Israelites in a capsule of safety, as it were; it rendered the Abyss of the desert habitable because it kept them in touch with the sacred reality.

We know very little about the early life of Israel in Canaan. P believes that once they had settled in the hill country, the Israelites set up a tent for the Ark in Shiloh: P imagined Yahweh giving very precise instructions about this tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai. If the Ark was indeed originally enshrined in a tent, Yahweh was very like El, who also lived in a tent-shrine, was the source of law, and, when he appeared as El Sabaoth (“El of Armies”), was enthroned on cherubim. In the Book of Samuel, however, the Ark seems to have been housed in the Hekhal (or cult hall) of a more conventional temple in Shiloh.34 But Israelites seem to have worshipped at a number of other temples, in Dan, Bethel, Mizpah, Oprah, and Gibeon, as well as at outdoor bamoth. Some Israelites would have worshipped other gods, alongside Yahweh, who was felt to be a foreign deity who had not yet properly settled in Canaan. He was still associated with the southern regions of Sinai, Paran, and Seir. They imagined him leaving this territory, when his people were in trouble, and riding on the clouds to come to the help of his people: this is how he appears in some of the earliest passages of the Bible.35 The Israelites may even have developed a liturgy which reenacted the theophany of Mount Sinai, with braying trumpets reproducing the thunder and incense recreating the thick cloud that had descended on the mountaintop. These elements would also later appear in the Jerusalem cult. The ceremony thus imitated the decisive appearance of Yahweh on Sinai, and this symbolic reenactment would have created a sense of Yahweh’s presence among his people yet again.36 Unlike most of the Near Eastern gods, therefore, Yahweh was at first regarded as a mobile deity who was not associated with one fixed shrine. Yet the Israelites also commemorated their liberation from Egypt. Over the years the old spring festival was used to recall the Israelites’ last meal in Egypt, when the Angel of Death passed them by but slew all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. Eventually, this family feast would be called Passover (Pesaḥ).