History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  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 King
s 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’.

  Despite this triumphant vindication, Elijah was unable himself to eradicate paganism, or destroy the House of Omri, though he predicted its downfall. He was a lone figure, a charismatic man capable of swaying a huge crowd but not one to build up a party or a court faction. He stood for the individual conscience, perhaps the first man in Jewish history to do so; God spoke to him not in the thunder of the Mosaic era, but in ‘a still, small voice’. In his cursing of Ahab’s line over the killing of Naboth, he upheld the principle that a king’s behaviour should be no different from a private man’s: it must be guided by moral principle. Politics was about right, not might. But Elijah, though the first prophetic leader of the opposition, was not a politician. Much of his life he was a hunted fugitive. His last days were spent in the wilderness. Chapter 2 of the Second Book of Kings tells how he anointed his successor, Elisha, before being swept up in a whirlwind and mounting to heaven in a chariot of fire, leaving behind, for his heir to don, his sacral mantle.

  Elisha was of a different cast, however. The Bible narrative shows him performing remarkable acts: when mocked by ‘little children’ (or possibly teenage roughs) near Bethel, he summoned two she-bears from the wood, which tore to pieces no less than forty-two of the delinquents.196 But Elisha did not operate alone. He created an organized following, a college of prophets, and he worked with elements in the secular establishment to obtain the religious reforms Elijah had demanded. Ahab had maintained and enlarged Solomon’s chariot cities in the north. He and his successors had a large professional army, a source of both strength and weakness. Among the successful chariot generals was Jehu, son of Nimshi, who ‘driveth furiously’. Elisha engaged in a religious-military conspiracy with Jehu, had him anointed the future king and thus set in motion one of the bloodiest coups in history.197 Jehu had Jezebel thrown out of the window of her palace by her eunuchs, ‘and some of her blood was sprinkled on the walls, and on the horses; and he trod her underfoot’. Ahab’s seventy sons were decapitated and piled ‘in two heaps at the entering-in of the gate’. Jehu massacred Ahab’s entire royal house, ‘and all his great men, and his kinsfolk, and his priests, until he left him none remaining’. He then assembled and slaughtered all the priests of Baal, ‘And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.’198

  This ferocious religious purge may have re-established the official, sole worship of Yahweh for a time, but it did not resolve the perennial conflict between the need to maintain religious orthodoxy—to keep the people together—and the need to conform to the world—to keep the state in existence. Jehu, as was foreseeable, was soon behaving in as arbitrary a manner as the House of Omri; indeed, virtually all the kings of Israel broke with the religious purists sooner or later. To preserve his power, a king, or so it seemed, had to do things that a true follower of Yahweh could not countenance. The episode of Naboth’s vineyard was a case in point, a symbol of the spiritual-secular conflict. There is a famous passage in which God inspires Elijah to say to Ahab, ‘Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?’; and Ahab answers, ‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’199 Merely replacing Ahab’s sons by Jehu and his sons did not solve the problem. It is restated, in a rather different form, in the eighth-century Book of Amos. This book is contemporary with Hesiod’s Works and Days in post-Homeric Greece, and shows a similar concern for abstract justice, though in the case of Amos it is associated directly with the worship of Yahweh. He was a southerner from Judah, a dresser of sycamore trees, who came north to Israel to preach social justice. He was at pains to point out that he was not a prophet by birth and belonged to no college: just a simple working man who saw the truth. He protested about the elaborate ceremonies conducted by the priests at the northern shrine of Bethel, which he said were a mockery when the poor were downtrodden and starving. He has God saying: ‘I hate, I despise your feast-days…. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’200 Amaziah, the head priest of Bethel, objected strongly to Amos’ activities. The shrine, he argued, was the king’s chapel, part of the king’s court; the duties of the priests were to uphold the state religion with due decorum, and it was not part of them to play politics and interfere in economic processes. He said to Amos: ‘O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there.’ To the king, he complained that Amos had, in effect, raised a conspiracy against him in the royal precincts, adding—in a significant phrase—‘the land is not able to bear all his words’.201

  The debate was, and indeed is, important. The later Jewish seers, and in their turn most Christian moral theologians, endorsed Amos’ view. The Talmud laid down: ‘The commandment of righteousness outweighs all the commandments put together.’202 But the Talmudists did not have the responsibility of holding the state together; that was all in the past and they could now afford the luxury of moral absolutism. In Amaziah’s day, however, a compromise between the secular and spiritual authorities was essential if the state was to survive at all. If prophets from the south were allowed to go around stirring up class warfare in the name of God, the community would be fatally weakened and at the mercy of its external enemies, who would wipe out the worship of Yahweh altogether. That was what he meant when he said that the land could not bear Amos’ bitter words.

  Throughout the ninth century the power of Assyria had been growing. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser shows that, even in Jehu’s day, Israel had been forced to pay tribute. For a time Israel bought the Assyrians off, or formed coalitions of other small states to halt their advance. But in 745 BC the cruel Tiglath-pileser III ascended the Assyrian throne and turned his warlike race into a nation of imperialists. He inaugurated a policy of mass deportation in conquered territories. In 740 his annals record: ‘As for Menahem [King of Israel] terror overwhelmed him…he fled and submitted to me…silver, coloured woollen garments, linen garments…I received as his tribute.’ In 734 he broke through to the coast, then advanced down it to ‘the Brook of Egypt’. All the elite, the rich, merchants, craftsmen, soldiers, were transported to Assyria and resettled there; in their place were established Chaldean and Aramaean tribesmen from Babylonia. Then Tiglath pushed inland. Stricken internally by religious and social divisions, the northern kingdom of Israel was in no condition to resist. In 733-4, Tiglath-pileser conquered Galilee and Transjordan, leaving only Samaria. Tiglath died in 727, but his successor, Shalmaneser V, took Samaria in the winter of 722-1 and the following year his successor, Sargon II, completed the destruction of the northern kingdom, removing the entire elite and sending in colonists: ‘I besieged and captured Samaria,’ Sargon records in the Annals of Khorsabad, ‘carrying off 27,290 of the people who dwelt therein.’ The Second Book of Kings echoes mournfully: ‘So Israel was carried out of their own land to Assyria unto this day…. And the King of Assyria brought down men from Babylon, and
from Cuthat, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof.’203 There is abundant confirmation of the catastrophe in the archaeological record. At Samaria, the royal quarter was totally destroyed. Megiddo was levelled and new, Assyrian-type buildings set up on the rubble. The walls of Hazor were torn down. Shechem disappeared completely. So did Tirzah.

  Thus the first great mass tragedy in Jewish history took place. It was, too, a tragedy unrelieved by ultimate rebirth. The holocaust-dispersion of the northern people of Israel was final. In taking their last, forced journey into Assyria, the ten tribes of the north moved out of history and into myth. They lived in later Jewish legend, but in reality they were simply assimilated into the surrounding Aramaean population, losing their faith and their language; and the spread of Aramaic westwards, as the common language of the Assyrian empire, helped to conceal their evanescence. In Samaria, Israelite peasants and artisans remained, and intermarried with the new settlers. Chapter 17 of the Second Book of Kings, which records these melancholy events, says that while the exiled elite in Assyria still worshipped Yahweh, they sent back one of their priests to live in Bethel and instruct the leaderless people. But it adds: ‘Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and put them into the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made,’ and it then paints a fearful picture of the confused paganism into which the northern kingdom collapsed. The way in which the north had worshipped Yahweh had always been suspect in Judah. This doubt about northern orthodoxy reflected the division of the Israelites which took place at the time of the entry into Egypt, and which was never really healed after the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. In the eyes of Jerusalem and its priests, the northerners had always mingled with the pagans. The fall and dispersal of the northern kingdom, and the intermarriage of the remnant with aliens, was used to deny the Samaritans their original Israelite heritage. From this point onwards, their claim to be part of the chosen people, and to inhabit the Promised Land in full righteousness of possession, was never again acknowledged by the Jews.