Читать книгу A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths - Karen Armstrong - Страница 12

THE DESTRUCTION of Jerusalem and its Temple was in some profound sense the end of the world. Yahweh had deserted his city and Jerusalem had become a desert wasteland, like the formless chaos that had preceded creation. The destruction was an act of de-creation, like the Flood that had overwhelmed the world at the time of Noah. As Jeremiah had predicted, the desolate landscape, from which even the birds had fled, seemed to presage the overturning of cosmic order: the sun and the moon gave no light, the mountains quaked, and no people could be seen on earth at all.¹ Poets recalled with horror the memory of the Babylonian troops rushing through the Temple courts and the sickening sound of their axes hacking away at the cedar panels.² They longed for vengeance and dreamed of smashing the heads of Babylonian babies against a rock.³ The people of Judah had become a laughingstock: no wonder the gentile nations asked derisively, “Where is their god?”⁴ Without a temple, there was no possibility of making contact with the sacred in the ancient world. Yahweh had disappeared, Jerusalem was a heap of rubble, and the people of God were scattered in alien territory.

When a city had been destroyed in the Near East, it was customary for the survivors to sit among the ruins to sing dirges, similar to those sung at the funeral of a beloved relative. The Judahites and Israelites who had been left behind seem to have mourned their city twice a year: on the ninth day of the month of Av, the anniversary of the destruction, and at Sukkoth, the anniversary of the Temple’s dedication. On one occasion, we know of eighty pilgrims coming from the northern towns of Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria to the ruined city, with shaven heads and torn garments.⁵ The Book of Lamentations may have preserved some of these dirges, chanted by the elders who sat upon the ground in the usual posture of mourning, clad in sackcloth and with ashes sprinkled on their foreheads. The poems give us a poignant picture of the desolation of the site. Instead of a populous city, its streets thronged with worshippers, there remained only empty squares, crumbling walls, and ruined gates haunted by jackals. But the lamentations also painfully evoke the psychological effects of catastrophe, which can make the survivors abhorrent to themselves. Those who had died in 586 were the lucky ones: now people reared in luxury clawed at rubbish heaps for food, tender-hearted women had killed and boiled their own babies, and beautiful young men wandered through the ruined streets with blackened faces and skeletal bodies.⁶ Above all, there was a crippling sense of shame. Jerusalem, the holy city, had become unclean. People who used to admire her now eyed her with contempt, “while she herself groans and turns her face away,” her garments covered in menstrual blood.⁷ Even in their evocation of despair, however, the lamentations had gone beyond the point of blaming the Babylonians. The authors knew that Yahweh had destroyed the city because of the sins of the people of Israel.

Jerusalem was no longer habitable, and the country south of the city had been too badly damaged for settlement. In the extreme south of the former Kingdom of Judah, the land was overrun by Edomites, who laid the foundations of the future Kingdom of Idumea. Most of the Judahites who had stayed behind in 586 either migrated to Samerina or settled to the north of Jerusalem at Mizpah, Gibeon, or Bethel. The Babylonians had installed Gedaliah, a grandson of King Josiah’s secretary, as governor of the region, and from his residence at Mizpah he tried to establish some measure of normality. The Babylonians also attempted to build up the country by giving the lands of the deportees to those who had stayed, people who had previously been among the poorest and most exploited sector of Judah. Yet this bid for the loyalty of the former Kingdom of Judah failed. In 582, officers of the old Judaean army who had fled to the Transjordan returned, and their leader, Ishmael, a member of the House of David, murdered Gedaliah and many of his entourage. The coup failed, because Ishmael failed to win the grassroots support of the people, and he escaped to Ammon. Many of the more politically active people also emigrated to Egypt to escape the wrath of Babylon. We hear nothing more about the fortunes of Jerusalem and Judah for another fifty years.

Despite the pain of their uprooting, the deportees had an easier time. They were not persecuted in Babylon, and King Jehoiachin lived at the court and retained his royal title.⁸ The exiles were settled in some of the most attractive and important districts in and around Babylon, near the “great canal” of the Chebar, which brought the waters of the Euphrates to the city. They probably translated the Babylonian place-names into Hebrew: some, for example, lived in a neighborhood called Tel Aviv, Springtime Hill. The exiles followed Jeremiah’s advice and became well integrated into Babylonian society. They were allowed to meet freely, buy land, and establish businesses. Many quickly became prosperous and respected merchants; some gained office at court. They may have been joined by descendants of the Israelites who had been deported to Babylonia in 722, since a number of the deportees mentioned in the Bible were members of the ten northern tribes.⁹

Babylon was both a shock and a challenge: the magnificent city was more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than any of the towns they had seen back home. With its fifty-five temples, Babylon had a religious world far more complex than the old paganism of Canaan. Yet some of its myths would seem strangely familiar. Yahweh had been defeated by Marduk, and now that they were living in his territory it would have seemed natural to many of the deportees to adopt the local faith. Others probably worshipped Babylonian deities as well as Yahweh and gave their children such names as Shameshledin (“May [the god] Shamesh judge!”) or Beliadach (“Bel protects!”).¹⁰

But others clung to their old traditions.

The Deuteronomists must have felt vindicated by the tragedy of 586: they had been right all along. The old Canaanite mythology that had encouraged Judahites to believe that Zion was impregnable had indeed been a delusion. Instead, they urged their fellow countrymen to concentrate on the Law of Moses and the covenant that Yahweh had made with the people of Israel before they had ever heard of Jerusalem. The Law would prevent the exiles from losing their identity in the melting pot of Babylon. During these years, the exiles codified regulations and practices that marked them out from their pagan neighbors. They circumcised their male children, refrained from work on the Sabbath, and adopted special food laws that distinguished them as the people of the covenant. They were to be a “holy” people, as distinct and separate as their God.

Others found comfort in the old mythology, however, and felt that the ancient symbols and stories of Zion spoke more eloquently to their condition. The history of religion shows that in times of crisis and upheaval, people turn more readily to myth than to the more rational forms of faith. As a form of psychology, myth can penetrate deeper than cerebral discourse and touch the obscure cause of distress in the farthest reaches of our being. In our own day, we have seen that exile involves far more than a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Having lost their unique place in the world, exiles can feel cast adrift and lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of “home” has gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, people can feel that they are in some sense withering and becoming insubstantial. Thus the French anthropologist R. P. Trilles records that after they had to leave their ancestral land, the Gabon Pygmies felt that the whole cosmos had been disturbed. Their creator was angry with them, the world had become a dark place—“night and again night”—and their exile had also uprooted the spirits of their ancestors, who now wandered lost in distant, inaccessible realms, eternally displaced.

Are they below, the spirits? Are they there?

Do they see the offerings set out?

Tomorrow is naked and empty.

For the Maker is no longer with us there,

He is no longer the host seated with us at our fire.¹¹

The loss of homeland meant that the link with heaven, which alone made life supportable, had been broken. In the sixth century, the Judahite exiles expressed this by saying that their world had come to an end.

Those who wished to remain loyal to Yahwism and the traditions of their ancestors had a serious problem. When the exiles asked: “How can we sing one of Yahweh’s songs in an alien land?”¹² they were not simply giving voice to their homesickness but facing a theological dilemma. Today religious people believe that they can make contact with their God wherever they are in the world: in a field, supermarket, or church. But in the ancient world, prayer in our sense was far from common. In exile the Judaeans developed the practice of lifting up their hands, turning in the direction of Jerusalem, and speaking words of praise or entreaty to Yahweh precisely as a substitute for sacrifice, which was the normal way to approach the deity.¹³ But this type of prayer was a novel idea and would not have occurred to the first deportees as a matter of course. The exile would teach the Judaeans the more interior spirituality of the Axial Age. When they first arrived in Babylonia in 597 the exiles would probably have felt that they had been taken away from Yahweh’s presence. His home was in Zion, and they could not build a temple to him in Babylon, as we would build a church, synagogue, or mosque, because according to the Deuteronomist ideal there was only one legitimate shrine for Israel and that was in Jerusalem. Like the Gabon Pygmies, the exiles must have wondered whether their Maker was actually with them in this strange city. Hitherto Israelites had gathered for communal worship only in places associated with a revelation of Yahweh or some other type of hierophany. But there was no known instance of a Yahwistic theophany in Babylonia.

Then, out of the blue, Yahweh made an appearance in Tel Aviv. Among the first batch of deportees to arrive in Babylon in 597 was the priest Ezekiel. For the first five years, he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he was—literally—knocked out by a shattering vision of Yahweh which left him stunned for an entire week. A cloud of light had seemed to approach him from the north in the midst of which he saw a huge chariot drawn by four of the cherubim, strange beasts not unlike the karibu carved on the palace gates of Babylon. When he tried to describe this apparition, Ezekiel was at pains to show that it lay beyond normal words and concepts. What he had seen was “something … shaped like a throne and high upon this throne was a being that looked like a man.” In the dense confusion of storm, fire, and tumultuous noise, Ezekiel knew that he had glimpsed “something that looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”¹⁴ Like Isaiah, Ezekiel had glimpsed the extraordinary Reality that lay behind the symbols of the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant—Yahweh’s earthly throne—was still in the Temple in Jerusalem, but his “glory” had arrived in Babylon. It was indeed a “revelation,” an unveiling: the great curtain separating the Hekhal from the Devir in Solomon’s Temple had represented the farthest limit of human perception. Now that veil had been pulled to one side, though Ezekiel was careful to distinguish between Yahweh himself and his “glory,” a manifestation of his Presence which made the ineffable reality of the sacred apprehensible to human beings. The vision was a startling reformulation of an older theology. In the very earliest days, Israel had experienced God as mobile. He had come to his people from the Sinai to Canaan on the wings of the cherubim. Now the cherubim had conveyed him to his people in exile. He was not confined to either the Temple or the Promised Land, like so many of the pagan gods who were associated indissolubly with a particular territory.

Furthermore, Yahweh chose to be with the exiles, not with the Judaeans who were still living in Jerusalem. Ezekiel had his vision in about 592, some six years before the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, but in a later vision he realized that Jerusalem was doomed because even though they were on the brink of disaster the Judaeans back home were still worshipping other gods and ignoring the terms of their covenant with Yahweh. One day Ezekiel was sitting in his house in Tel Aviv with the exiled elders of Judah when “the hand of the Lord Yahweh” fell upon him and he was taken in spirit to Jerusalem. There he was led on a conducted tour of the Temple and was horrified to see people bowing before alien gods within the sacred precincts. These “filthy practices,” he was told, had driven Yahweh from his house, and Ezekiel watched the cherubim spread their wings, the wheels of the great chariot-throne begin to move, carrying the “glory of Yahweh” out of the city of Jerusalem and disappearing over the Mount of Olives to the east of the city. He had decided to come to the community of exiles instead, and now that Yahweh was no longer living in Zion, the destruction of Jerusalem was only a matter of time.¹⁵

But Yahweh also promised the prophet that one day he would return to his city, taking the same route over the Mount of Olives, and reestablish his residence on Mount Zion. There would be a new exodus, as the scattered exiles were brought home, and a new creation in which the land would be transformed from a desolate wasteland to become “like the garden of Eden.” It would be a time of healing and integration: Judah and Israel would be reunited under a Davidic king and, as in Eden, Yahweh would live among his people.¹⁶ It would be the end of separation, alienation, and anomie and a return to that original wholeness for which people longed. Jerusalem was central to this vision. Some fourteen years after the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, either Ezekiel or one of his disciples had a vision of a city “on a very high mountain” whose name was Yahweh Sham: “Yahweh is there.”¹⁷ The city was an earthly paradise, a place of peace and fertility in the old sense. Just as the stream had welled up in the midst of the Garden of Eden and flowed down the sacred mountain to fructify the rest of the world, Ezekiel saw a river bursting up from beneath the city’s Temple, leaving the sacred precincts and bringing life and healing to the surrounding territory. Along the banks of this river there grew trees “withleaves that never wither and fruit that never fails … good to eat and the leaves medicinal.”¹⁸ As they experienced the pain of severance and dislocation, the exiles turned to the ancient myths to imagine a return to the place where they were supposed to be.

Yet Ezekiel was not simply clinging to the past but shaping a new vision for the future. As he contemplated the city of Yahweh Sham, he created a new sacred geography. The Temple in the middle of the city was a replica of Solomon’s Temple, which was now in ruins. Its vestibule (Ulam), cult hall (Hekhal), and inner sanctum (Devir) represented the gradations of holiness: each zone was more sacred than the last.¹⁹ As of old, the sacred could only be approached in stages and not everybody was to be permitted to approach the inner circles of sanctity. This concept would be central to Ezekiel’s vision and would form the basis of his new map of the ideal world. The Temple differed from Solomon’s in two important respects, however. The palace of the king was no longer next door to the Temple, and the Temple buildings were now surrounded by two walled courts.²⁰ The holiness of Yahweh was to be segregated more carefully than before from the profane world. God was becoming a more transcendent reality, more radically separate (kaddosh) from the rest of mundane existence. J, the first biblical writer, had imagined Yahweh sitting and talking with Abraham as a friend, but for Ezekiel, a man of the Axial Age, the sacred was a towering mystery that was overwhelming to humanity. But despite the essential “otherness” of the divine reality, it was still the center of the world of men and women and the source of their life and potency, a reality that was symbolized in Ezekiel’s vision by the paradisal river. Ezekiel now described the Promised Land in a way that bore no relation to its physical geography. Unlike the city of Jerusalem, for example, Yahweh Sham was in the very center of the Land, which was far bigger than the joint kingdoms of Israel and Judah had ever been, stretching as far as Palmyra in the north and to the Brook of Egypt in the west.²¹ Ezekiel was not attempting a literal description of his homeland but was creating an image of a spiritual reality. The divine power radiates from the city of Yahweh Sham to the land and people of Israel in a series of concentric circles, each zone diluting this holiness as it gets farther from the source. The Temple is the nucleus of the world’s reality; the next zone is the city which enfolds it. Surrounding the city and Temple is a special area, occupied by the sacred personnel: the king, priests, and Levites. This district is holier than that occupied by the rest of the twelve tribes of Israel, who inhabit the rest of this sacred territory. Finally, beyond the reach of this holiness, is the rest of the world, occupied by the other nations (Goyim).²² Just as God is radically separate from all other beings, so too Israel, the holy people grouped around him, must share his holy segregation and live apart from the pagan world. It was an image of the kind of life that some of the exiles were trying to establish for themselves in Babylon.

We do not know whether Ezekiel intended this vision as a blueprint for the earthly Jerusalem. It was clearly utopian: at this point, the city, Temple, and much of the land were in ruins and there seemed no hope that they would ever be rebuilt. Ezekiel’s model could have been designed as a mandala, an object of contemplation. When his mysterious visionary guide shows him this new temple, he does not tell him that this is the way the next Temple must be built. The vision has quite another function:

Son of man, describe this Temple to the House of Israel, to shame them out of their filthy practices. Let them draw up the plan, and if they are ashamed of their behavior, show them the design and plan of the Temple, its exits and entrances, its shape, how all of it is arranged, the entire design and all its principles.²³

If they wanted to live in exile as they had in Jerusalem, with Yahweh in their midst, the Judaean exiles had to make themselves into a sacred zone, so to speak. There must be no dangerous fraternizing with the Goyim and no flirting with Marduk and other false gods. The House of Israel must make itself into a house for the God who had chosen to dwell among them. By meditating on this idealized cultic map, the Israelites would learn the nature and meaning of holiness, where every person and object had its place. They must find a center for their lives and a new orientation. It must have been consoling for the exiles, who must frequently have felt marginal in Babylon, to realize that they were closer to the center of reality than their pagan neighbors, who were not even on the map. A displaced people would have found this new description of where they really stood profoundly healing.

We can see a little more clearly what this holy lifestyle involved when we examine the Priestly writings (“P”) that were also begun in exile. P’s work appears throughout the Pentateuch but is especially apparent in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. P rewrote the history of Israel from the priestly perspective, and he has much in common with Ezekiel, who, it will be remembered, was also a priest. When P described the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and codified the laws that God was supposed to have given them on Mount Sinai, he imagined a similar series of graded zones of holiness. In the heart of the Israelite camp in the wilderness was the Tabernacle, the tent-shrine that housed the Ark of the Covenant and the “glory” of Yahweh. This was the holiest area, and only Aaron, the high priest, was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. The camp was also holy, however, and had to be kept clear of all pollution because of the Presence in its midst. Outside the camp was the godless realm of the desert. Like Ezekiel, P also saw Yahweh as a mobile god. In his portable shrine, he was continually on the move with his people. P never mentioned Jerusalem. This is partly because his narrative ends before the Israelites enter the Promised Land and long before the city was captured by King David. But, unlike the Deuteronomists, P did not seem to have envisaged a special “place” where Yahweh could set his name. In P’s vision, Yahweh has no fixed abode: his “glory” comes and goes and his “place” is with the community. For P, Israel became a people when Yahweh decided to live among them. He believed that this accompanying Presence was as important as the Law: he made Yahweh reveal the plan of his portable Tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as he revealed the Torah. Again, P’s was a consoling vision: it assured the exiles that Yahweh could be with his people wherever they were, even in the chaos of exile. Had he not already moved about with them in the desolate wasteland of Sinai?

The priests of Jerusalem had probably always had their own esoteric law: P’s chronicle was an attempt to popularize this and make it available to the laity. Because their old world had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the exiles had to build a new one. The creation was central to P’s vision, but he jettisoned the old combat myths, which were so closely associated with temples and fixed holy places. Instead he concentrated on the essence of those stories: the ordering of chaos to create a cosmos. In P’s creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, Yahweh brings the world into being without fighting a mortal battle with Leviathan, the sea monster. Instead, he peacefully separates one element of the primal tohu vohu from all others. Thus he separates night from day, light from darkness, sea from dry land. Boundaries are set up and each component of the cosmos is given its special place. The same separation and creative ordering can be discerned in the Torah, as described by P. When the Israelites were commanded to separate milk from meat in their diet or the Sabbath from the rest of the week, they were imitating Yahweh’s creative actions at the beginning of time. It was a new type of ritual and imitatio dei which did not require a temple or an elaborate liturgy but could be performed by men and women in the apparently humdrum ordering of their daily lives. By this ritual repetition of the divine creativity, they were building a new world and bringing order to their disrupted and dislocated lives in exile.

Many of the commandments (mitzvoth) are concerned with putting things in their correct place. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown that the beings and objects labeled “unclean” in the priestly code have stepped outside their proper category and invaded a realm that is not their own. “Filth” is something in the wrong place, whether an alien god in Yahweh’s temple or mildew on clothes, something which has left the world of nature and penetrated the realm of human culture. Death is the greatest impurity of all, since it is the most dramatic reminder of the fragility of culture and our inability to control and order the world.²⁴ By living in an ordered cosmos, Israelites would build the kind of world imagined by Ezekiel, centered on the God in their midst. While the Temple had stood in Jerusalem, it had given them access to the sacred. Now the mitzvoth would restore the intimacy that Adam and Eve had enjoyed with Yahweh when he had walked with them in the Garden. By means of the mitzvoth, the exiled Judaeans would create a new holy place which kept the confusion and anomaly of chaos at bay. But P was not simply concerned with ritual purity: crucial to his Holiness Code were the mitzvoth relating to the treatment of other human beings. Alongside the laws about worship and agriculture in the Holy Land are such stern commandments as these:

You must not steal nor deal deceitfully or fraudulently with your neighbor.…

You must not be guilty of unjust verdicts. You must neither be partial to the little man nor overawed by the great.…

You must not slander your own people, and you must not jeopardize your neighbor’s life.

You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart.…

You must not exact vengeance, nor must you bear a grudge against the children of your people. You must love your neighbor as yourself.²⁵

If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him … You must count him as one of your countrymen and love him as yourself-—for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.²⁶

Social justice had always been the concomitant to the devotion to a holy place and to temple ritual: in the Canaanite myths, the Zion cult and the oracles of the prophets. P goes further: there must be not only justice but love, and this compassion must also extend to people who do not belong to the House of Israel. The Goyim might be off Ezekiel’s map of holiness, but they must be included in the ambit of Israel’s love and social concern.

As the memory of the Temple became idealized in exile, the priests acquired a new prestige. Both P and Ezekiel stressed the role of the priesthood in the community. Originally there had been no priestly caste in Israel; David and Solomon had both performed priestly functions. But gradually the Temple service and the interpretation of the Law had been assigned to the tribe of Levi, who were supposed to have carried the Ark in the wilderness. Ezekiel narrowed this down still further. Because the Levites had condoned the idolatry in the Temple, they were demoted to a subsidiary role. Henceforth they would perform only menial tasks in the new Temple, such as preparing the animals for sacrifice, singing in choir, and keeping watch at the Temple gates. Only those priests who were direct descendants of Zadok would be allowed to enter the Temple buildings and perform the liturgy.²⁷ This injunction would be the cause of much future strife in Jerusalem, and it is ironic that the authentic traditions of Israel were to be enshrined in the House of Zadok the Jebusite. The more exclusive nature of the priesthood reflected the growing transcendence of God, whose sanctity was more dangerous than ever to the uninitiated and unwary. Both P and Ezekiel gave detailed instructions regarding the behavior of the priests in the sanctuary of Yahweh. When they entered the Hekhal, for example, they must change their clothes, since they were passing to a realm of sanctity that demanded a higher standard of purity. The high priest alone was permitted to enter the Devir, and that only once a year.²⁸ The new regulations enhanced the Israelites’ sense of the holiness of Yahweh, who was a reality that was entirely separate from all other beings and could not be approached in the same way.

It is a striking fact that these elaborate descriptions of the sanctuary, its liturgy, and the priesthood were evolved at a time when there was no hope of their being implemented. The Temple was in ruins, but the most creative exiles imagined it as a fully functioning institution and drew up an intricate body of legislation to regulate it. In Chapter 8 we shall see that the rabbis did the same. Thus the most detailed Jewish texts regarding sacred space and the sanctity of Jerusalem describe a situation that no longer existed at the time of writing. “Jerusalem” had become an internalized value for the exiled Judaeans: it was an image of a salvation that could be achieved far from the physical city in the desolate territory of Judah. At about the same time in India, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, discovered that it was possible to enter into the ultimate reality by the practice of meditation and compassion: it was no longer essential to walk into a temple or other sacred area to attain this transcendent dimension. In the spirituality of the Axial Age it was sometimes possible to bypass the symbols and experience the sacred in the depths of the self. We have no idea how their contemporaries understood the writings of Ezekiel and P. Doubtless they hoped that one day the Temple would be rebuilt and Jerusalem restored to them. Yet it remains true that when they finally had the chance to return to Jerusalem, most of the exiles elected to stay in Babylon. They did not feel that their physical presence in Jerusalem was necessary, since they had learned to apprehend the values of Zion in a new way. The religion that we know as Judaism originated not in Judaea but in the diaspora and would be conveyed to the Holy Land in the future by such emissaries from Babylon as Nehemiah, Ezra, and Hillel.

Ezekiel and P had both been able to look beyond the earthly symbols of their faith to the eternal reality to which they pointed. Neither mentioned Jerusalem directly in their vision of the future, and P concluded his narrative on the threshold of the Promised Land. Their vision was essentially utopian, and perhaps they did not expect it to be fulfilled in their own lifetime. Their attitude to Jerusalem may have been similar to its use in the Passover seder today, where the words “Next year in Jerusalem!” always refer to the future messianic age and not to the earthly city. When Ezekiel imagined the return to Zion, he looked forward to a spiritual transformation: Yahweh would give his people “a new heart” and “a new spirit.” In the same way, Jeremiah had foretold that one day the Law would no longer be inscribed on stone tablets but deep in the hearts of the people.²⁹ If they did look forward to a redemption, the architects of the new Judaism did not believe that it would be accomplished by a political program alone. They understood that salvation meant more than a new Temple and a new city: these could only be symbols of a more profound liberation.

Yet suddenly it seemed that political redemption was at hand. It might indeed be possible for the Judaean exiles to return to the land of their fathers and rebuild Jerusalem. People in Babylon who were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the rule of King Nabonidus, the successor of Nebuchadnezzar, were watching the career of Cyrus II, the young King of Persia, with much interest. Since 550, when he had conquered the Kingdom of Medea, he had been steadily building a vast empire for himself, and by 541 Babylon was entirely surrounded by Cyrus’s territory. The priests of Marduk were especially heartened by Cyrus’s propaganda, since they felt that Nabonidus had neglected their cult. Cyrus, on the other hand, promised that he would restore the temples of the empire and honor the gods. He would rebuild the ruined cities and restore a universal peace in his domains. This message also appealed to the anonymous Judaean prophet who is usually known as Second Isaiah. He hailed Cyrus as the Messiah: he had been anointed by Yahweh for the special task of rebuilding Jerusalem and its Temple. Second Isaiah turned instinctively to the old myths and liturgy of Zion. Through his instrument Cyrus, Yahweh would initiate a new creation and a new exodus. He would overcome the current enemies of Israel as he had once overcome Leviathan and Rahab, and the Judaean exiles would return to Zion through the desert, which had lost its demonic power.³⁰

This return would have implications for the whole of humanity: the returning exiles would be the pioneers of a new world order. Once they had returned to Jerusalem, they would at once rebuild the Temple and the “glory” of Yahweh would return to its holy mountain. Once again, he would be enthroned in his own city “in the sight of all the nations.”³¹ The Jerusalem liturgy had long proclaimed that Yahweh was not only the king of Israel but the king of the whole world. Now, thanks to Cyrus, this was about to become a demonstrable reality. The other gods were cowering in terror: Bel and Nebo—important Babylonian deities—were cringing; their effigies were being carted off ignominiously on the backs of common beasts of burden.³² Those foreign gods who had seemed to lord it over Yahweh had been made redundant. Henceforth all the nations of the world—Egypt, Cush, Sheba—would be forced to submit to Israel, dragged to Jerusalem in chains and forced to admit:

With you alone is God, and he has no rival:

there is no other god.³³

The Zion liturgy had always asserted that Yahweh was the only god who counted; with Second Isaiah that insight had developed into an unequivocal monotheism. As the setting for this world triumph, Jerusalem would be more glorious than ever before. It would glitter with precious stones: rubies on the battlements, crystal on the gates, and the city walls would be encrusted with jewels—a splendor that amply demonstrated the integrity and sanctity of the city within.³⁴

These hopes were brought one step nearer to fulfillment in the autumn of 539, when Cyrus’s army defeated the Babylonians at Opis on the River Tigris. A month later, Cyrus entered Babylon and was enthroned as the representative of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila. At once he carried out what he had promised. Between September and August 538, all the effigies of the Assyrian gods which had been captured by the Babylonians were returned to their native cities and their temples were rebuilt. At the same time, Cyrus issued a decree stating that the Temple of Jerusalem should be rebuilt and its vessels and cultic furniture restored. Cyrus’s Persian empire was run along entirely different lines from the empires of Assyria and Babylon. He gave his subjects a certain autonomy because it was cheaper and more efficient: there would be less resentment and rebellion. Rebuilding the temples of the gods was one of the chief duties of any king, and Cyrus probably believed that he would not only earn the gratitude of his subjects but also win divine favor.

Accordingly, some months after his coronation in Babylon, Cyrus handed over the gold and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had confiscated from the Jerusalem Temple to one Sheshbazzar, a “prince” (nasi) of Judah. He set out with 42,360 Judaeans, together with their servants and two hundred singers, for the Temple.³⁵ If the returning exiles had left Babylon with the prophecies of the Second Isaiah ringing in their ears, they must have come down to earth very quickly when they arrived in Judah. Most of them had been born in exile and had grown up amid the magnificence and sophistication of Babylonia. Judah must have seemed a bleak, alien place. There could be no question of building a new Temple immediately. First the returning exiles had to establish a viable community in the desolation. Few of them actually stayed in Jerusalem, which was still in ruins, and the majority settled in more comfortable parts of Judah and Samerina. Some of those who stayed may have settled in the old city, while others established themselves in the countryside south of Jerusalem, which had remained uninhabited since 586.

We hear nothing more about the Golah, the community of exiles, until 520, the second year of the reign of Darius, King of Persia. By this time Sheshbazzar was no longer in charge of the Golah in Judah: we have no idea what happened to him. The building work had come to a standstill, but enthusiasm revived when, shortly after Darius’s accession, Zerubbabel, the grandson of King Jehoiachin, arrived in Jerusalem from Babylon with Joshua, the grandson of the last chief priest to officiate in the old Temple. Zerubbabel had been appointed high commissioner (peha) of the province of Judah. He was the representative of the Persian government, but he was also a scion of the House of David, and this put new heart into the Golah. All the immigrants gathered together in Jerusalem to build a new altar on the site of the old, and when it was finished, they began to offer sacrifice and observe the traditional festivals there. But then the building stalled again. Life was still a struggle in Jerusalem: the harvests had been bad, the economy deplorable, and it was difficult to be enthusiastic about a Temple when there was not enough to eat. But in August 520 the prophet Haggai told the immigrants that their priorities were all wrong. The harvests could not improve until the Temple had been built: the House of Yahweh had always been the source of the fertility of the Promised Land. What did they mean by building houses for themselves and leaving Yahweh’s dwelling place in ruins?³⁶ Duly chastened, the Golah went back to work.

The foundations of the Second Temple were finally laid by the autumn of 520. On the feast of Sukkoth, they were rededicated in a special ceremony. The priests processed into the sacred area, followed by the Levites, who were singing psalms and clashing cymbals. But some of them were old enough to remember the magnificent Temple of Solomon, and when they saw the modest site of its successor they burst into tears.³⁷ From the very start, the Second Temple was a disappointment and an anticlimax for many of the people. Haggai tried to boost morale: he assured them that the Second Temple would be greater than the old. Soon Yahweh would rule the world, as Second Isaiah had foretold. Zerubbabel would be the Messiah, ruling all the Goyim on Yahweh’s behalf.³⁸ Haggai’s colleague Zechariah agreed. He looked forward to the day when Yahweh would come back to dwell on Zion and establish his reign through the two messiahs: Zerubbabel the king and Joshua the priest. It was important not to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, so that the city would be able to accommodate the vast numbers of people who would shortly flock to live there.³⁹

But not everybody shared this vision of an open city. As soon as the people of Samerina, in the old northern Kingdom of Israel, found that work on Yahweh’s new Temple was seriously under way, they came to Zerubbabel and offered their services. The Chronicler tells us that they were the descendants of the foreigners who had been settled in the country by the Assyrians in 722. Some would also have been Israelites, members of the ten northern tribes, and others Judaeans, the children of those who had stayed behind in 586. Naturally these Yahwists wished to help with the rebuilding of Zion. Zerubbabel, however, brusquely refused.⁴⁰ The Golah alone constituted the “true” Israel; they alone had been commissioned by Cyrus to rebuild the Temple. Thereafter these other Yahwists were seen not as brothers but as “enemies,” known collectively as the Am Ha-Aretz, the “people of the land.” In Babylon, Ezekiel and P had seen all the twelve tribes as members of Israel and worthy of holiness. Only the Goyim, the gentile nations, were excluded from the sacred area. But the returning exiles had an even narrower perspective. The Am Ha-Aretz were regarded as “strangers,” but the exiles were not prepared to welcome them into their city as the Holiness Code had enjoined. Consequently, instead of bringing peace to the country, the new Jerusalem became a new bone of contention in the Holy Land. The biblical authors tell us that henceforth the Am Ha-Aretz “set out to dishearten and frighten the Judaeans from building any further.”⁴¹ They tried to enlist the support of Persian officials, and on one occasion in about 486 the governor of Samerina wrote to warn King Xerxes that the Judaeans were building the walls of Jerusalem without permission. In the ancient world, this was usually regarded as an act of rebellion against the imperial power, and the work was forcibly stopped until Cyrus’s original decree was discovered in the royal archive at Ecbatana.

Meanwhile the building of the Second Temple continued slowly. We hear no more of Zerubbabel after his rejection of the Am Ha-Aretz. Perhaps the messianic hopes of Haggai and Zechariah had alarmed the Persian government. He could have been removed from office when King Darius passed through the country in 519. No member of the House of David was appointed peha of the subprovince of Judah again. But despite the failure of this messianic dream, the immigrants did succeed in completing their Temple on 23 Adar (March) 515. It was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, of course, to ensure continuity with its sacred traditions. It also reproduced the old tripartite plan of Ulam, Hekhal, and Devir. It was separated from the city by a stone wall: a double gateway led into an outer court surrounded by various offices, storehouses, and apartments for the priests, which were built into the walls. Another wall separated this courtyard from an inner court where the altar of sacrifice stood, made of white, unhewn stone. This time, however, there was no royal palace on the Zion acropolis, since Judah no longer had a king. Another crucial difference was that the Devir was now empty, as the Ark of the Covenant had vanished without trace. The vacancy symbolized the transcendence of Yahweh, who could not be represented by any human imagery, but others may have felt that it reflected his seeming absence from this new Temple. The extravagant hopes of the Second Isaiah were not fulfilled. If Yahweh’s “glory” did come and take up residence in the Devir, nobody would have known it. There was no dramatic revelation to the Goyim, and the gentile nations did not troop to Jerusalem in chains. There was a new sense of God’s immense distance from the world, and in these first years of the Second Temple the very idea that the transcendent Deity could dwell in a house seemed increasingly ridiculous:

Thus says Yahweh:

With heaven my throne

and earth my footstool

what house could you build me?

what place could you make for my rest?⁴²

All people could do was to hope against hope that Yahweh would condescend to come down to meet them.

Instead of being drawn to splendid temples as in the past, Yahweh was more attracted these days by a “humbled and contrite spirit.”⁴³ The cult of the First Temple had been noisy, joyful, and tumultuous. Worship in the Second Temple tended to be quiet and sober. In exile, the Golah had become aware that its own sins had been responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, and the cult reflected the “broken and crushed heart” of the Golah. This was especially apparent in the new festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the chief priest symbolically laid the sins of the people onto a goat, which was then driven out into the desert. But this enabled Israel to approach the sacred once more. Yom Kippur was the one day in the year when the chief priest entered the Devir as the people’s representative. The element of expiation was also evident in the sacrifices that were offered daily in the Temple court. The people would bring bulls, sheep, goats, or pigeons as “guilt” or “sin” offerings, according to their means. They would lay their hands on the animal’s head as a symbol of its surrender to Yahweh. After the beast had been killed, parts of it were given to the person who offered it, and he or she would share it with family and friends. The communion feast on earth mirrored the restored harmony with the divine.

Even though Yahweh never returned to Zion in the way that Second Isaiah had predicted, people continued to dream of the day when he would create “a new heaven and a new earth” in Jerusalem. The old hopes did not die, and Jerusalem became a symbol of that final salvation: integration, harmony, intimacy with God, and a return to paradise. The New Jerusalem would be like no other city: everybody would live a long and happy life there; everybody would be settled in his own place. There would be no weeping in the city, and the pain of the past would be forgotten. The gentiles would be astonished by the city of peace, which would establish life as it had been meant to be.⁴⁴ But other people were more disillusioned. There were social problems in the city, some prophets pointed out, and the inhabitants still flirted with the old paganism.⁴⁵ There were worries about the new exclusive attitude of the Golah: should not the City of God be open to everybody, as Zechariah had suggested? Perhaps Jerusalem should open its doors to foreigners, outcasts, and eunuchs—people regarded as “unclean” by the priests. Yahweh had proclaimed, “My house will be a house of prayer for all the peoples”: one day he would bring these outsiders into the city and let them sacrifice to him on Mount Zion.⁴⁶

Yet in the fifth century, there seemed little chance of Jerusalem’s becoming a cult center for either Judaeans or gentiles. The city was still largely in ruinous condition and underpopulated. Jerusalem might even have suffered fresh damage in 458 during the disturbances that broke out all over the Persian empire when King Xerxes ascended the throne. In about 445 the news of the city’s plight reached Susa, the Persian capital, and shocked the community of Judaeans there. One of the leading members of this community was Nehemiah, who held the post of cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I. He was so distressed to hear of the humiliation of the Golah in Jerusalem, whose walls were still in ruins, that he wept for several days in penitence for the sins that his people and family had committed, which had caused this calamitous state of affairs. Then he begged the king to allow him to go to Judah and rebuild the city of his ancestors. The king granted his request and appointed Nehemiah the peha of Judah, giving him letters of recommendation to the other governors in the region and promising him access to timber and other building materials from the royal park.⁴⁷ Artaxerxes probably hoped that Nehemiah would be able to bring stability to Judah: a reliable Persian bastion so near to Egypt would enhance the security of his empire.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah consist of a number of unrelated documents, which an editor has attempted to string together. He thought that Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries and makes Ezra arrive in Jerusalem before Nehemiah. But there are good reasons for dating Ezra’s mission much later, in 398, during the reign of King Artaxerxes II.⁴⁸ So Nehemiah probably set out from Susa in about 445. He would have regarded his post as a religious challenge, since the building of fortifications had long been a sacred duty in the Near East. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he stayed in the city incognito for three days and then went out secretly one night to ride around the walls. He paints a grim picture of the old fortifications “with their gaps and burned-out gates.” At one point he could not even find a path for his horse.⁴⁹ The next day he made himself known to the elders, urging them to put an end to this shame and indignity. The whole city responded in a massive cooperative effort, priests and laity working side by side, and managed to erect new walls for the city in a record fifty-two days. It was a dangerous task. By this time relations with the Am Ha-Aretz had seriously deteriorated, and Nehemiah constantly had to contend with the machinations of some of the local dynasts: Sanballat, governor of Samerina; Tobiah, one of his officials; and Gershen, governor of Edom. The situation was so tense that the builders constantly feared attack: “each did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other. And as each builder worked, he wore his sword at his side.”⁵⁰ There was no attempt to fortify the old Mishneh suburb on the Western Hill. Nehemiah’s city simply comprised the old ’Ir David on the Ophel. From the biblical text we can see the way it was organized. The markets were ranged along the western wall of the city; the priests and temple servants lived next to the Temple on the site of the old Ophel fortress. Artisans and craftsmen inhabited the southeastern quarters, while the military were concentrated in the northern district, where the city was most vulnerable. Nehemiah also built a citadel, probably northeast of the Temple on the site later occupied by the Hasmonean and Herodian fortresses. On 25 Elul (early September) 445 the new walls were dedicated: Levites and choristers from the surrounding villages were divided into two huge choirs and processed in contrary directions around the new walls, singing psalms, before filing together into the Temple courts; the music and shouts of rejoicing could be heard from miles away.

Nehemiah had brought new hope to Jerusalem, but it was still not much of a city. No new families were growing up there, and the people were reluctant to move in. Constantly fearing attack from the Am Ha-Aretz, the citizens had to organize themselves into a watch to guard the new gates. Nehemiah managed to bring the population up to about ten thousand by organizing a lottery whereby every tenth man had to move into the city.⁵¹ The settlers who “volunteered” in this way were regarded as performing a pious action. During Nehemiah’s twelve years in Jerusalem, the city gradually superseded Mizpah as the capital of the province: he built a residence for the peha in Jerusalem. Gradually the city became the center of the life of the Golah in Judah. But there was a power struggle going on within Jerusalem itself: some of the priests had close links with the Am Ha-Aretz, including Sanballat, who seems to have been the most dangerous of Nehemiah’s opponents. He also had to curb the greed of some of the wealthier citizens, who were seizing the sons and daughters, vineyards and fields of the poor, when they proved unable to pay off their loans with interest. With considerable popular support, Nehemiah forced the nobles and officials to take a solemn oath to stop charging interest.⁵² It was an attempt to make Jerusalem a refuge for the poor once again, but it naturally antagonized the upper classes, who tended to turn more and more to their allies in the neighboring territory. There seems to have been considerable tension in the country. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gershen could see perfectly well that fortifying the city was a bid for political control and preeminence.

In his second term of office, which began in about 432, Nehemiah also made new legislation to prevent members of the Golah from marrying the local people. He expelled the chief priest Eliashib, who was married to Sanballat’s daughter; Eliashib took up residence in Samaria, where he was probably joined by other malcontents from the priestly caste. The question of mixed marriage became an increasingly contentious issue in Jerusalem. Nehemiah’s legislation was not designed to ensure the purity of the race in the twentieth-century sense but was an attempt to express the new sacred geography developed in exile by such prophets as Ezekiel in social terms: the Golah must live apart from the Goyim, as befitted God’s holy people. In Babylon, the exiles had been concerned to preserve a distinct Judaean identity, centered on the presence of Yahweh in Israel. The same centripetal pull was also evident in social life. The Torah obliged the people of Israel to marry beyond the basic family unit, but it was considered better to marry people who were as closely related as was legally possible. People inside the family were regarded as acceptable marriage partners, while those outside were undesirable. These series of concentric circles stopped at the border of Israel: the Goyim, who were off the holiness map, were literally beyond the pale.⁵³ A marriage “outside” was equivalent to leaving the sacred enclave and going out into the godless wilderness, where the scapegoat was dispatched on Yom Kippur. It was an attempt to make Israel a “holy” and separate people and defined the Judaean identity by marking out the people who were “outside” and “not-like-us.” But in Judah, the Golah were being asked to reject people who had once been members of the Israelite family but had now been pushed into the role of strangers and enemies.

During the fifth century, the exiles in Babylon had been engaged in a remarkable religious reform, which resulted in the religion of Judaism. The question of identity was still crucial: the exiles had stopped giving their children Babylonian names, preferring such names as Shabbetai, which reflected their new religious symbols. The Torah now played a central role in their religious lives and had taken the place of the Temple. By observing the mitzvoth, the Judaeans of Babylon could make themselves a sacred community which enshrined the divine Presence and established God’s order on earth. But that meant that the ordinary Jews had to be instructed in the intricacies of the Torah by experts. One of these was Ezra, who “had devoted himself to the study of the Law of Yahweh, to practicing it and to teaching Israel its laws and customs.”⁵⁴ He may also have been the minister for Jewish affairs at the Persian court. In 398 he was sent by Artaxerxes II to Judah with a fourfold task. He was to accompany a party of Jews who wished to return to their homeland; he would take gifts from the Jewish community in Babylon to the Temple; once he had arrived in Judah, he was “to conduct an inquiry into the situation in Judah and Jerusalem on the basis of the law of [their] god”; and finally, he had to instruct the Jews in the Levant in this law.⁵⁵ The laws of other subject peoples were under review at this time. Artaxerxes was supporting the cult of the Jewish Temple, which was central to the life of the province of Judah. He had to be sure that it was compatible with the interests and security of the empire. As a legal expert in Babylon, Ezra may have worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between the Torah and the Persian legal system, and Artaxerxes needed to be certain that this law was also operating in Judah. Ezra would promulgate the Torah in Jerusalem and make it the official law of the land.⁵⁶

The biblical writer sees Ezra’s mission as a turning point in the history of his people. Ezra’s journey to Judah is described as a new exodus and Ezra himself, the lawgiver, as a new Moses. He arrived in Jerusalem in triumph, but was appalled by what he found: priests and Levites were still colluding with the Am Ha-Aretz and continued to take foreign wives. The people of Jerusalem were chastened to see the emissary of the king tear his hair and sit down in the street in the posture of mourning for a whole day. Then he summoned all the members of the Golah to a meeting in Jerusalem: anybody who did not attend would be cast out of the community and have his property confiscated. On New Year’s Day (September/October), Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and, standing on a wooden dais and surrounded by the leading citizens, he read the Law to the assembled crowd, explaining it as he went along.⁵⁷ We have no idea what he actually read to them: was it the whole of the Pentateuch, the Book of Deuteronomy, or the Holiness Code? Whatever its content, Ezra’s Law was clearly a shock to the people, who had obviously never heard it before. They were so tearful that Ezra had to remind them that this was a festival day, and he read aloud the passage from the Torah which commanded the Israelites to live in special booths during the month of Sukkoth, in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the wilderness. He sent the people into the hills to pick branches of myrtle, olive, pine, and palm, and soon Jerusalem was transformed by the leafy shelters that appeared all over the city. The new festival had replaced the old Jebusite rites of Sukkoth; now a new interpretation linked it firmly to the Exodus traditions. There was a carnival atmosphere in the city during the next seven days, and every evening the people assembled to listen to Ezra’s exposition of the Law.

The next assembly was a more somber occasion.⁵⁸ It was held in the square in front of the Temple, and the people stood trembling as the torrential winter rains deluged the city. Ezra commanded them to send away their foreign wives, and special committees were set up to examine individual cases. Women and children were sent away from the Golah to join the Am Ha-Aretz. Membership of Israel was now confined to the descendants of those who had been exiled to Babylon and to those who were prepared to submit to the Torah, which had now become the official law code of Jerusalem. The lament of the people who had now become outcasts may have been preserved for us in the book of Isaiah:

For Abraham does not own us

and Israel does not acknowledge us;

yet you, Yahweh, yourself are our father.…

We have long been like people who do not rule,

people who do not bear your name.⁵⁹

A ruthless tendency to exclude other people would henceforth become a characteristic of the history of Jerusalem, even though this ran strongly counter to some of Israel’s most important traditions. As one might expect, there were many people who opposed this new tendency. They did not want to sever all relations with the people of Samerina and the surrounding countries. They feared that Jerusalem would become parochial and introverted and that the city would suffer economically. But others responded to the new legislation with enthusiasm. We know very little about Jerusalem in the generations succeeding Ezra, but within the next eight generations the Law had become as central as the Temple to the spirituality of the people of Judah. When these two sacred values were imperiled, there was a crisis in Jerusalem which nearly resulted in the city’s losing its new Jewish identity.