History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  David’s subsequent behaviour in Jerusalem confirms the view that it was of great political importance to him. He did not massacre the inhabitants, or expel them. On the contrary he seems to have been anxious to turn them into faithful personal adherents of his. He repaired the walls and the terracing or Millo, occupied the citadel, or Zion as it was called, built a barracks for his ‘mighty men’, a palace for himself, and purchased from the last ruler of the city the land on which a central shrine for the entire Israelite people could be erected. He then brought the Ark, which was the most precious religious relic the Israelites possessed and the symbol of their unity, and placed it in his own city under the protection of his throne and personal army. All these acts were to strengthen his personal position and to identify the national religion, the entire people, and the crown with himself and his line.

  But what he did not do was as important as what he did do. David seems to have been much more conscious of the nature of the Israelite religion and community than either Saul or any of his own successors. Like Gideon, he grasped that it was indeed a theocracy and not a normal state. Hence the king could never be an absolute ruler on the usual oriental pattern. Nor, indeed, could the state, however governed, be absolute either. It was inherent in Israelite law even at this stage that, although everyone had responsibilities and duties to society as a whole, society—or its representative, the king, or the state—could under no circumstances possess unlimited authority over the individual. Only God could do that. The Jews, unlike the Greeks and later the Romans, did not recognize such concepts as city, state, community as abstracts with legal personalities and rights and privileges. You could commit sins against man, and of course against God; and these sins were crimes; but there was no such thing as a crime/sin against the state.171

  This raises a central dilemma about Israelite, later Judaic, religion and its relationship with temporal power. The dilemma can be stated quite simply: could the two institutions coexist, without one fatally weakening the other? If the demands of religion were enforced, the state would have too little power to function. On the other hand, if the state were allowed to evolve normally, according to its nature, it would absorb part of the essence of the religion to itself, and sterilize it. Each had an inherent tendency to be parasitical upon the other. If the Israelites tried to survive simply as a religious community, without a state, they would sooner or later be attacked, scattered and absorbed into the local paganisms. Thus the worship of Yahweh would succumb to external assault. That, of course, was what nearly happened during the Philistine invasion, and would have happened had the Israelites not turned to the secular salvation of kingship and a united state. On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and the worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption. The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today.

  One solution was for the Israelites to adopt kingship and the state only in times of great peril, as during the Philistine invasion. The evidence suggests that David would have liked to adopt this, but came to think it impractical. To defend his people and their faith, to make both secure from their external foes, he had not only to create a kingdom-state but immobilize its surrounding peoples. This meant he had to found and consolidate the House of David, with Jerusalem its capital and central shrine. But he plainly did not regard his kingship as normal. He understood the religion of Yahweh; he saw himself as a religious man; he had an additional role as a prophet-priest and often performed as one in his music, writings and dancings. It is significant that he established hereditary kingship without endorsing primogeniture. Three of his elder sons, who might have succeeded, Absalom, Amnon and Adonijah, all broke with him and died violently. In his old age, David designated his successor. The son he chose, Solomon, was not an active general but a scholar-judge, in the Mosaic tradition, the only one of the sons capable of discharging the religious duties of kingship which David evidently felt essential to preserve the Israelite constitutional balance.

  It was also significant that David, while transferring the Ark to Jerusalem to give his capital’s status religious sanction, did not build a grandiose temple, associated with his crown and royal line, to house it. The Ark was a humble piece of religious furniture which originally contained the covenant itself. It was dear to the Israelites, reminding them of their lowly origins, and standing for the pristine orthodoxy and purity of their theocratic creed. The Bible account gives later justifications for David’s failure to build a temple for it: God would not allow him, as he was above all a warrior, a ‘man of blood’; it was also said that he was too busy making war.172 The first excuse is certainly false for war and the Israelite religion were closely associated. The priests had special war-calls for their trumpets; the Ark could be, and sometimes was, carried on to the battlefield as a war-emblem; David’s wars were in the highest degree blessed by divine approval.173 The second excuse is more plausible, but David reigned in Jerusalem thirty-three years, many of which were peaceful, and if he had wanted to build a temple he would have given it high precedence among his extensive building activities there. The likelihood is that he did not wish to change the nature and balance within the Israelite religion, and he felt that a central royal temple would do exactly that.

  In the old days, the Ark had been the physical focus of Israelite worship. It was a symbol of theocratic democracy. Once they settled in Canaan, the Israelites gave thanks and sacrificed at ‘high places’, open altars on hills and mountains; or at more elaborate historic shrines, where roofed buildings or temples were erected. We know of a dozen or so: Shiloh, Dan, Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah, Bethlehem, Hebron, and five smaller ones. Their location followed the spinal core of the country from north to south. They ensured some element of decentralization to the Israelite cult, as well as continuity with the past—for all these temple-shrines had important associations for those who worshipped at them. It is likely that David, anxious as he was to ensure sufficient centralization of the community to provide its effective defence, did not wish to emasculate still further its democratic base. Hence his unwillingness to imitate the other kingly despots of his age and turn Israel into a royal temple-state. Hence also, one suspects, his death-bed charge to his designated heir, the learned Solomon, to follow the Mosaic law in its purity: ‘And keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his judgments and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses.’ That, he added, was the only way the throne would survive—by ensuring that the law in its plenitude and strictness balanced the demands of the new state.174 Later generations sensed the depth of David’s religious impulse, which illuminated his statesmanship. That is perhaps the final reason why they venerated his memory, and wished a return to his rule; and it is no accident that he occupies more space than any other sovereign in the Old Testament.

  But David’s heir, Solomon, was of a totally different stamp. Where David was passionate, rash, wilful, sinful but repentant, conscious of sin, ultimately pure in heart and God-fearing, Solomon was a secular person: a man of his world and age to the bottom of his heart, if he had a heart. The psalms which are attributed to David in the Bible are essentially spiritual in tone and content; they are close to the core of the religion of Yahweh. On the other hand, the Biblical literature associated with Solomon, the wise sayings and the voluptuous poetry of the ‘Song of Solomon’, though fine of their kind, are much closer to the other ancient Near Eastern writings of the period; they lack Israelite-Jewish transcendentalism and God-awareness.

  What Solomon became was a Near Eastern monarch of outstanding skill. But his reputation for wisdom was based on a willingness to be ruthless. Though co-opted as king during his father’s lifetime, when David’s death made him sole ruler he marked the change of regime and direction by eliminating all his father’s former ministers, some by murder. He also made a
critical change in military policy. In describing the revolt of Absalom against David, the Second Book of Samuel distinguishes between the old tribal levies or ‘the men of Israel’, who supported the son, and the mercenaries, or ‘servants of David’, who naturally defended the king.175 It was these same ‘servants’ who ensured Solomon’s sole succession and enabled him to eliminate his opponents right at the beginning of his reign. David, while building up a mercenary army, had still used the ‘men of Judah’, or the tribal levy of the south, as the core of his main army. But the tribal levies of the north, or ‘men of Israel’, remained neutral or hostile to the crown, and Solomon decided to abolish them altogether.

  Instead, he introduced the corvée or forced labour, which was applied to Canaanite areas and to the northern part of the kingdom—Judah itself being exempt. As a form of national service, forced labour was less honourable than serving in the levy, and more arduous; therefore, more resented. Solomon employed it on a huge scale for his building programmes. The First Book of Kings, using government records, says that there were 80,000 men in the quarries, led and watched by 3,300 officers, 70,000 men hauling the stones to the sites, and 30,000 men, sent in rotating batches of 10,000 each, who went to the Lebanon to cut timber for beams.176 Construction work included the enlargement and glorification of David’s rather elementary scheme to turn Jerusalem into a national-religious royal centre. But it also involved building three new royal fortress-cities in various parts of the country: ‘And this is the reason of the levy [forced labour] which King Solomon raised: for to build the house of the Lord, and his own house, and Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer.’177

  These last three cities, strategically sited, were virtually rebuilt by Solomon from scratch, using Israelites for the heavy labour, but imported masons for the skilled work. Excavation shows an altogether higher level of craftsmanship than the Israelites had yet demonstrated; it also reveals that the prime purpose of the cities was military—to provide bases for Solomon’s new chariot army.178 David had never possessed a chariot force, the mark of a major power at this period. Solomon had about 1,500 chariots and 4,000 horses in his various stables.179 At Megiddo, strategically the most important of the lot, overlooking what was later to be known as the Plain of Armageddon, he built a high, defended royal quarter, with an immensely powerful gateway, and buildings which would house 150 chariots and 400 horses. Hazor, an abandoned city, was likewise given a royal quarter, gatehouse, walls and huge stables. Gezer, a city he acquired by dowry, and which controlled the route to Egypt, he transformed into another royal chariot-city.180 The very existence of these heavily defended royal quarters; rising above the ordinary houses of the city, was an affront to the Israelite theocratic democracy. Solomon needed his carefully disposed chariot forces to protect his trade routes and defend the realm from external assault. But it is clear that their purpose was also to maintain internal order, which they did with great efficiency, for the tribes had no chariots.

  For his ambitious programmes, Solomon needed not only labour but money. So he taxed the tribes too. David had prepared the way for this by holding a census. But he had been ferociously criticized for this, as contrary to the Israelite religion, and he had recognized his sin. The episode was characteristic of his hesitation and ambivalence in building up the state at the expense of the faith. Solomon had no such scruples. On the basis of the census returns he divided the country into twelve tax districts and imposed a further levy to provide supplies for his chariot-cities and other royal depots.181 But the resources of the kingdom were not enough. So Solomon rationalized his father’s conquests, retreating from Damascus, which was too expensive to defend, and yielding other territories in the north-west to Hiram, King of Tyre, whom he made his firm ally, in return for skilled craftsmen and supplies. But he also expanded commerce, trading extensively on his own account through ‘king’s merchants’, and encouraging traders both domestic and foreign to use his routes, so he could tax them.

  The economy of the Near East was now entering fully into the Iron Age—we find the first iron blades used for ploughing about this time—and the world was becoming richer. Solomon ensured by his activities that his royal house received a princely share of this new prosperity. He expanded trade by marrying daughters of all the neighbouring princes, with the slogan ‘trade follows the bride’. He ‘made affinity with Pharaoh King of Egypt’ by marrying his daughter—that is how he obtained Gezer. The Bible tells us of other matrimonial alliances, saying he ‘loved many strange women together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians and Hittites’.182 His diplomacy and his trade were intertwined. The visit of the Queen of Sheba, who came from South Arabia, was concerned with trade, for Solomon controlled the Arabian trade, chiefly in myrrh, frankincense and spices. Josephus tells us that Solomon held riddle-contests with Hiram of Tyre, another great trading monarch. This was a not unusual form of diplomatic exchange in the early Iron Age, involving heavy cash forfeits—sometimes cities—and was part of the bartering process. Solomon and Hiram jointly ran a fleet of ships from Ezion-Geber in the south to Ophir, their name for East Africa. The two kings dealt in rare beasts and birds, sandalwood and ivory. In addition, Solomon was an arms-merchant. He bought horses from Cilicia which he sold to Egypt in return for chariots, which he then resold to kingdoms to the north of him. Solomon, in fact, was the arms-supplier for a considerable part of the Near East. Near his port at Ezion-Geber, the American archaeologist Nelson Glueck found the copper refinery he built, on the island of Hirbet el-Kheleifeh, where the high prevailing winds worked the flues of primitive blast-furnaces. This refined not only copper but iron, and produced finished articles.183

  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-re
lics 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