History of the Jews (12 page)

Much of the wealth Solomon derived from trade and taxes he poured into the royal capital. He built a sumptuous royal palace, with a great hypostyle hall on the lines of pharaoh’s palaces at Memphis, Luxor and elsewhere, its cedarwood roof supported by forty-five enormous wooden pillars, what the Bible calls ‘the house of the forest of Lebanon’. A separate palace was built for his chief wife, the Egyptian, since she kept her own pagan faith: ‘My wife shall not dwell in the house of David King of Israel, because the places are holy, whereunto the Ark of the Lord hath come.’
¹⁸⁴
Palace and royal quarter, barracks and inner fortifications were close to a new sacred quarter, or Temple, the whole being accommodated by extending the city of David 250 yards to the east.

There is now nothing visible left of Solomon’s Jerusalem, since it was either submerged beneath the enormous Temple building which Herod the Great later erected, or quarried away by the Romans.
¹⁸⁵
We are dependent entirely on literary sources, Chapters 6-7 of the First Book of Kings, for our description of Solomon’s Temple. But the details thus supplied show that it was similar to Late Bronze Age Canaanite temples at Lachish and Beth Sh’an, and a somewhat later, ninth century
BC
, temple excavated at Tel Tainet in Syria. Like these, Solomon’s had three rooms, each 33 feet wide, on an axis: the Ulam or porch, 16 feet long, the Hekal or holy room, 66 feet long, and the Holy of Holies, a square of 33 feet, which was kept entirely dark like the inner sanctum in an Egyptian temple.

This building was put up and equipped in a manner quite alien to the Israelites. Phoenician masons dressed the stone ashlars. Hiram of Tyre also sent an expert in bronze, a namesake, to cast the temple’s ceremonial vessels. These included a ‘basin on wheels’, a bronze laver on a stand, similar to pagan ones found at Megiddo and in Cyprus, and the great ‘molten sea’, containing 2,000 baths of water, used by the priests for their pre-sacrificial lustrations, which stood on twelve
bronze oxen. Two bronze pillars, Boaz and Jachin, each nearly 40 feet high, perhaps corresponding to the standing monoliths of the Canaanite high places, protected a gold-covered altar with ten gold candlesticks. The screen of the Holy of Holies was also of hanging gold chains. Cedar lined the floor and walls. The Holy of Holies, with its protective wooden Cherubim, covered in gold, was built to contain the venerated cult-relics of the ancient religion of Yahweh: the Ark of the covenant, first and foremost, and (according to Talmud tradition) the staff of Moses, Aaron’s rod, the manna-jar, and the pillow on which Jacob’s head rested when he had his ladder-dream.
¹⁸⁶
But by the time Jerusalem fell in 587
BC
, all these things had long since disappeared, and one must doubt whether they were ever there in the first place.

What is clear is that Solomon’s Temple, in its size and magnificence, and in its location within the fortified walls of a royal upper city or acropolis, had very little to do with the pure religion of Yahweh which Moses brought out of the wilderness. The Jews later came to see Solomon’s Temple as an essential part of the early faith, but that is not how it must have appeared at the time to pious men beyond the royal circle. Like the
corvée
, the tax-districts, the chariots, it was new, and in many ways simply copied from the more advanced pagan cultures of the Mediterranean coast or the Nile Valley. Was not Solomon embracing paganism, along with his foreign wives, his centralized monarchy and his ruthless ways with the old tribes? Was not his Temple an idolatrous place where objects were worshipped? The Ark itself must have looked out of place in its magnificent surroundings. It was just a wooden chest, 4 feet long, 2 feet 6 inches deep, carried on poles passing through rings on each side. Inside it were the Tablets of the Law. In strict Israelite belief, the Ark was simply a repository of God’s commandments. It was not a cult-object to be worshipped. Yet they were confused on this point, just as they were confused in their belief that God, though unrepresentable, had made man in his image. One of the old, primitive temples at Dan actually had a statue of God.
¹⁸⁷
Though the Ark was built to carry the tablets, the Israelites seem to have attached divine powers to God’s words, so in a sense they believed the deity lived in the Ark. They related portions of the wilderness years accordingly: ‘And it came to pass, when the Ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And when it rested, he said: Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel.’
¹⁸⁸

Solomon took advantage of this confusion to push forward his religious reform in the direction of royal absolutism, in which the king controlled the sole shrine where God could be effectively worshipped.
In Chapter 8 of the First Book of Kings, Solomon emphasized that God was in the Temple: ‘I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in for ever.’ But Solomon was not a pure pagan, as this would imply, for if so he would not have bothered to exclude his pagan wife from the sacred area. He understood the theology of his religion, for he asked: ‘But will indeed God dwell on the earth? Behold the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?’ He effected a compromise between his state needs, and his understanding of Israelite monotheism, by supposing not a physical but a symbolic presence of the Almighty: ‘That thine eyes may be open towards this house night and day, even towards the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there.’ This was the way in which later generations fitted the Temple into the faith, the presence of the name of God alone in the Holy of Holies generating a powerful divine radiation, called the
shekhinah
, which destroyed any unauthorized person who approached it.

But, at the time, the notion of a central, royal temple was objectionable to many Israelite purists. They formed the first of the many separatist sects the religion of Yahweh was to breed, the Rechabites.
¹⁸⁹
Many northerners, too, resented the concentration of the religion in Jerusalem and its royal Temple, for the priesthood which served it soon put forward absolutist demands, claiming that only their ceremonies were valid, and that the older shrines and temples, the high places, and the altars venerated since patriarchal times, were nests of heterodoxy and wickedness. These assertions ultimately prevailed and became Biblical orthodoxy. But at the time they met resistance in the north.

This hostility to Solomon’s religious changes combined with his absolutist ways and exactions to make the united kingdom his father had constructed untenable in the long run. Solomon’s craft and success held it together, but there were signs of strain even during his last years. To Israelites for whom the past was very real, the forced-labour system was particularly odious because it reminded them of the Egyptian servitude. Their freedom and their religion were inseparable in their minds. By concentrating the cult in Jerusalem, Solomon downgraded northern shrines such as Shechem, associated with Abraham, and Bethel, with Jacob. To the northerners, then, Solomon and his line were increasingly seen as spiritual destroyers as well as secular oppressors.

Hence when Solomon died in 925/6
BC
, the northerners refused his successor, Rehoboam, a united coronation in Jerusalem, and insisted
he go north to Shechem to be crowned their king. Men who had fled to exile under Solomon, such as Jeroboam, returned, and demanded constitutional rule, and in particular the lifting of the forced-labour levies and the high taxes: ‘Now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.’
¹⁹⁰
There seems to have been a full-scale political conference in Shechem, in which Rehoboam, after consulting his father’s old advisers, rejected their conciliatory recommendations, and took a hard line, backed by his young knights, telling the northerners: ‘My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, and I will chastise you with scorpions.’
¹⁹¹

This extraordinary misjudgment destroyed the united kingdom. Rehoboam had not the military means and skill to hold it together by force, the northerners broke off and reverted to their own royal house, and in an age of rising empires—the Babylonians followed by the Assyrians—both these small kingdoms, Judah in the south, Israel in the north, went to their doom separately.

Yet this process of decline spanned several centuries, and in the course of it the Israelite religious culture underwent important changes. In the first instance, it was the northern kingdom which flourished. It was more populous than the south, had more fertile land and was closer to the trading centres of the time. Free of the southern yoke, it grew richer and, paradoxically, followed the pattern of constitutional and religious development Solomon had found necessary and which—when imposed by southerners—it had rejected. Like the House of David, the northern House of Omri became centralist and imitated the political and cultic patterns of successful neighbouring states. Omri himself was a formidable king, whose exploits were sorrowfully recounted in a tablet to the Moabite God Chemosh, which was discovered in 1866 and is known as the Moabite Stone: ‘Omri King of Israel…oppressed Moab many days because Chemosh was angry with his land. And his son succeeded him, and he also said I will oppress Moab.’

Omri, like Solomon, consolidated his power by judicious foreign marriages. He espoused his son Ahab to the King of Sidon’s daughter Jezebel, thus linking his inland kingdom to the sea and its trade routes. Like Solomon, he was a great builder. On a hill at Samaria, from which the sea can be seen 20 miles away, he founded and built a new city: we can even date its foundation to approximately 875
BC
. Like Solomon’s royal cities, it had a fortified royal acropolis. Ahab too was a great builder. At Samaria he constructed what the Bible calls an ‘ivory
house’, that is a palace with a throne-room lined with ivory carved in low-relief-a luxury which only the richest kings of the time possessed. When Samaria was excavated in 1931-5, pieces of these ivory decorations were found in the rubble. Ahab, like his father Omri, was a highly successful warrior-king, who reigned for twenty-five years and twice defeated the King of Damascus, until, as the Bible says, during a chariot fight ‘a certain man drew a bow at a venture’ and his arrow struck between the joints of Ahab’s armour, and fatally wounded him.
¹⁹²

But the House of Omri, worldly and successful like Solomon, also aroused bitter social and moral resentment. Great fortunes and estates accumulated. The gap between rich and poor increased. The peasants got into debt, and when they could not pay were expropriated. This was against the spirit of the Mosaic law, though not strictly against its letter, since what it insists is that you must not remove a neighbour’s landmarks.
¹⁹³
The kings were opposed to the oppression of the poor by the elite, because they needed poor men for their armies and labour-gangs; but any actions they took were feeble. The priests, at Shechem, Bethel and other shrines, were salaried, closely identified with the royal house, preoccupied with ceremonials and sacrifices, and uninterested—so their critics claimed—in the distress of the poor. In these circumstances, the prophets re-emerged to voice the social conscience. Like Samuel, they were uneasy about the whole institution of monarchy, perceiving it as inherently incompatible with the democratic theocracy. Under the House of Omri, the prophetic tradition was suddenly reinvigorated in the north by the astonishing figure of Elijah. He came from an unidentified place called Tishbe, in Gilead east of the Jordan, right on the fringes of the desert. He was a Rechabite, a member of that ultra-austere, wild and fundamentalist sect, ‘an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins’. Like nearly all Jewish heroes, he came from the poor and spoke for them. The tradition said he lived near the Jordan and was fed by the ravens.
¹⁹⁴
No doubt he looked not unlike John the Baptist, a thousand years later. He worked miracles on behalf of the poor, and was most active in times of drought and famine, when the masses suffered.

But of course Elijah, like other strict worshippers of Yahweh, was critical of the House of Omri not just for social but above all for religious reasons. For Ahab neglected the cult of Yahweh and slipped into his wife’s cult of Baal: ‘But there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up. And he did very abominably in following idols.’
¹⁹⁵
It was Jezebel, too, who tempted Ahab to possess himself of
Naboth’s vineyard by an act of despotic power, Naboth being sent to his death, a crime against the whole ethos of the Israelite theocracy.

It is evident that Elijah could rouse a mass following, especially in time of hardship, when no rain fell. He was a formidable public preacher. Chapter 18 of the First Book of Kings describes the dramatic scene when he gathered an immense crowd of Israelites on Mount Carmel and challenged the priests of Baal and ‘the prophets of the grove’—‘which eat at Jezebel’s table’—to a rain-making contest. His aim was to settle the religion of the people once and for all, saying to the assembly: ‘How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ The priests of Baal went through all their rituals, cutting themselves with ‘knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them’; but nothing happened. Then Elijah built his altar and offered sacrifice to Yahweh, and immediately ‘the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice’. Then all the people ‘fell flat on their faces and said: The Lord he is the God, the Lord he is the God.’ Elijah and his mob took the pagan priests to the Kishon Brook ‘and slew them there’, and, after further prayer on the summit of Carmel, Elijah summoned up ‘a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand’; soon, ‘the heaven was black with clouds and winds, and there was a great rain’.