Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  “She can even be like David.”

  Our final act in confronting David was to visit his tomb. Avner and I climbed from the hillside perch of the City of David, into the walls of the Old City, up endless crisscrossing staircases, until we reached the summit of Mount Zion. What today is called Zion is the highest peak in the Old City, in the southwest corner, just across from the King David Hotel. It is not to be confused with what the Bible calls Mount Zion, though that is confusing, too.

  The term Zion has at least four usages in the Bible. The first is the name for the Jebusite stronghold that David conquers and renames the City of David. Solomon builds the Temple on the ridge above this—today’s Temple Mount—which the Psalms refer to as Zion. During the Exile, this hill came to be associated with the entire city of Jerusalem and later the entire people of Israel. I “have said to Zion: You are my people!” God declares in Isaiah. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., Jews continued to pray for the restoration of Zion, a further metonymy that associates the people with its sacred homeland. This usage was picked up by the nineteenth-century movement of Jewish renewal and return to the land, which called itself Zionism.

  The hill that is today called Zion represents still another usage, introduced by medieval travelers who wrongly believed this summit once held the City of David. Today it houses an elaborate complex containing a school, a synagogue, and the room in which Jesus is said to have held the Last Supper. At the back of the small synagogue is a darkened niche containing the Tomb of David, an eight-foot-long cenotaph draped in royal blue velvet. It is embroidered with one Star of David for each year of Israel’s independence and an inscription from Psalm 137 that reads “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.”

  Is this really where David was buried?

  “For sure the first tomb was not here,” said Avner. “It’s too far from David’s city. But there is a hint in Josephus that his tomb might have been moved, maybe as far as here.”

  The building itself may date from the time of Josephus, in the first century C.E. In 1948 the Israeli archaeologist Jacob Pinkerfeld removed the marble floors and discovered three additional floors below: the first belonging to a Crusader church, the next to a Byzantine church, and the final one to a Roman church from the late first century C.E. Inscriptions suggest this synagogue was built not by Jews but by early Christian Jews, who believed Jesus was the messiah. The interfaith roots of David run deep in this soil.

  And even deeper in the architecture. Up a flight of stairs is the kind of room one finds only in Jerusalem. It’s a large hall, lined with Jerusalem stone and vaulted Gothic ceilings. In the corner is a mihrab, a Muslim prayer niche. The Gospel of Luke says Jesus held a Passover seder with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion in what the Greek calls an anogeon and the Latin terms a cenaculum, the kind of second-floor dining room in Greco-Roman homes. In English this term is rendered as cenacle, or Upper Room. So here is a room of Muslim prayer, holy for Christians as the site of a Jewish holy meal.

  “So was the Last Supper held here?”

  “It was held in a house,” Avner said. “But in the New Testament, Peter says they know where the Tomb of David was located. So it’s at least possible the two were in the same place.”

  We climbed a few more stories to the roof. The view was spectacular. We could see all the way from the Al Aqsa mosque to the terraced neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. The sky had its first hint of afternoon marigold-colored light and the air smelled of orange trees.

  We pulled out our Bibles. In I Kings 2, as David’s life is drawing to a close, he summons Solomon for a final blessing: “I am going the way of all the earth; be strong and show yourself a man.” Keep the charge of the Lord, David continues, walk in his ways, follow his commandments. If your descendants are scrupulous in their conduct, David quotes God as saying, “your line on the throne of Israel shall never end.” Suddenly the covenant that had been unconditional has become conditional: The Israelites must again uphold God’s laws in order to earn his blessing. “So David slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the City of David.” The length of David’s reign over Israel was forty years, including thirty-three in Jerusalem, yet another link later echoed with Jesus, who died at thirty-three.

  But unlike Jesus, David seems to end his life surrounded by few disciples, and even fewer loved ones. He is lonely and weak. He is pitiable. What lessons should we learn from his rapid rise and devastating fall?

  Avner and I were joined by Yair Zakovitch, dean of humanities at Hebrew University and a biographer of David. “The thing you have to remember about the Bible,” he said, “is that the events and characters are just vehicles to convey messages. The biblical narrative was written to educate our young nation, not so much to tell us what really happened.”

  Dr. Zakovitch is a gentle, mesmerizing scholar who looks like a shaman, with a brown plaid shirt, an entirely bald head, and large ears that point out from his pate in the manner of Yoda’s. I wanted to curl up at his feet and listen to him talk forever.

  “Biblical historiography is unique in many ways because it goes from one character to another, presenting our history through people. And that history is the story of the failure of our leaders. God is our blessing; our leaders are our punishment.”

  At this point I actually did sit down.

  At the time of Genesis, in the second millennium B.C.E., all nations have their kings, he continued. “And we are still a young, dysfunctional family. It is as if God were kind enough to give us a chance to learn from the mistakes of others. We see the failure of Adam and Eve, of Noah, of the Tower of Babel. Then we get Abraham, who makes mistakes as well—and we are still paying for those mistakes.

  “The Bible never presents us with perfect,” he went on. “Because what can I learn from a perfect person? Perfect people stand on a pedestal just looking at me. The Bible wants us to learn from our leaders.”

  “And what should we learn from them?”

  “That they won’t solve all our problems. Moses is presented as the ultimate leader, but he makes mistakes. Then comes Joshua, who makes mistakes, too. But God saves them. He gives land to the people of Israel, yet they are not grateful. They turn to worship idols. All through Judges we have the same pattern: the people sin, they are punished, they cry, God sends them a savior. Again and again. But God loses his patience, and the quality of the saviors deteriorates throughout the book.

  “And then you hear the voice of the people,” he continued, “ ‘Send us a king!’ But already in Deuteronomy 17 the Bible tells us what it thinks of kings. The monarchy is an institution initiated not by God but by the people. It’s a bad idea, a very bad idea. And we know that kingship won’t lead us anywhere. It will lead us to exile.”

  “Then why have so many kings?” I asked. “For four hundred years the Bible presents us with kings.”

  “Because the Bible has its sense of humor. If any leader gets onstage for a moment, you are optimistic and have some hopes that it will work. King Saul: ‘Wow! This tall, handsome guy looks like he’s really going to save us.’ Two chapters later he is already failing. Same thing with David: ‘Wow! Such a nice guy, this little boy, like a male Cinderella. He kills Goliath, he gives this great speech about God.’ But then he becomes a tyrant. And you have this tension between David’s success—he gave us Jerusalem, he conquered an empire with us—and his failures as a family man. So kingship is not the answer. The same thing happens with Solomon. Soon enough, we get to the point God warned us about in the Torah. That’s why I say our leaders are our punishment.”

  “So what is the message the Bible is trying to send by highlighting this tension between David’s public success and his private failure?”

  “That morality matters. If you fail as a person, even your success as a king won’t help. If your character is weak, your whole nation will pay for it.”

  “So this leads me to the big and obvious question,” I said. The sun had begun t
o set behind us, leaving a silvery purple sheen to the sky. “If David’s character is so weak, why does God give eternal blessing to his family?”

  Dr. Zakovitch dropped his voice to a near whisper, causing me to draw closer to him.

  “Because we got used to having a king. Even though the individuals may not have been stellar, the royal line was quite strong. It lasted four hundred years. That’s why all the prophets, who come later, say we will have a king in the future. But if you read these visions carefully, particularly the ones that play an important role in the New Testament, like Isaiah 11, ‘A shoot shall grow out of the stump of Jesse,’ or Micah 5,

  And you, O Bethlehem of Ephrath,

  Least among the clans of Judah,

  From you one shall come forth

  To rule Israel for me.

  “Many of them don’t mention the name of David. They talk about his father, Jesse, or his hometown, Bethlehem, but not David specifically, because David was already considered far from perfection.

  “They seem to be saying, ‘We’ll go back to the woods, we’ll try again, who knows, maybe this time we may succeed.’ They present a compromise between those who want a king and those who don’t. And the compromise is: There will be a king, but his powers will be limited. He’ll be God’s deputy on earth. It will be clear that he doesn’t have the authority to be the one who saves.”

  In other words, the legacy of David’s life is as a warning against having again the likes of David, one who attempts to husband profane and sacred power in his own hands. This may be his most startling legacy of all: the first biblical figure who effectively merges church and state becomes the reason that the Bible all but endorses separating church and state. Secular leaders must be strictly curtailed and kept out of spiritual terrain.

  “The best example of this is the prophet Zechariah, chapter 9,” Dr. Zakovitch said.

  Your king is coming to you.

  He is victorious, triumphant,

  Yet humble, riding on an ass.

  “The new idea of a king is one who is gentle. He’s not riding a horse. Kings ride horses. A horse is associated with military power. If you compare this prophecy with the one in Deuteronomy, you will see the limits now put on the king. He shouldn’t be rich. He shouldn’t have lots of gold and silver. He shouldn’t even have a horse. He should have only a donkey. He should understand that God has the real power, not him.”

  “But if David’s legacy is so tarnished, why do the Gospels want to link Jesus to David at all?”

  “Look, the Gospels are a very good piece of Jewish literature, and they understand that one cannot have a messianic leader who is not Davidic. If you want to convince the Jews that Jesus is the one, he has to be linked with David. He has to fulfill the prophecies. A messiah king has to be born in Bethlehem, he has to come to Jerusalem. Sure enough, when Jesus enters Jerusalem he enters on a donkey, because that’s what we read in Zechariah 9.”

  The afternoon had become evening now, the time of day when the air has a chill but the stones still emit a memory of warmth. Few people were entering the Old City at this hour; most were departing. I was left with a feeling of emptiness. I remember the first day I came to Jerusalem, a friend greeted me with a hug and the words “Welcome to the City of David.” I felt a boyish pride. Yes, this is a place of triumph, I thought, even for a people with few triumphs in our history. Now I felt no such pride.

  What surprised me most about the portrait of David I now had was that it appears at all in the Bible, which by all accounts was heavily edited by his apologists. If this is the authorized version of David’s life, one can only imagine what a good critic might have done with the unvarnished truth. But to me, the story delivers a powerful message. David is an experiment. The people wanted to wrest control from God and invest it in a secular leader. That David turns out to be so flawed suggests that God wants us to accept the limitations of political leadership and return at least our spiritual allegiance to him. No matter how powerful we become, we still need God. No matter how much we accomplish, our moral conduct still determines our fate.

  But how do we achieve a personal relationship with God? That question remains unanswered in the books of Samuel, which offer few clues for how people should interact with the divine. Prayer, worship, communal gathering, even reading the Torah are all alien concepts in the tenth century B.C.E. For this reason, David is ultimately a transitional figure, the bridge between Moses and the prophets. David brings the Israelites the geopolitical power they must have to survive in the region, but he stops short of bringing them the moral clarity they need to become a shining example to the world. To achieve that, the children of Israel must generate a national identity grounded not in the behavior of their leaders but in the conduct of their people.

  They must form a religion.

  . 3 .

  THE HOUSE OF THE LORD

  I had an idea. What if I tried to walk around the most contentious real estate in the Middle East? I wanted to draw closer to Solomon. I wanted to touch ground zero in the battle for God. But mostly I wanted to challenge my growing ambivalence over the fact that the most sacred icon of my religion is a wall. Was it time to replace this icon?

  “What if we try to circumnavigate the Temple Mount?” I said to Avner.

  “It can’t be done,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “So where do we start?”

  The southwest corner of the Temple Mount is my favorite spot in Jerusalem. It’s a peaceful, rarely visited harbor of antiquity that manages to seem serene, even divine, although it’s just a few steps south of the Western Wall, a few steps north of a Palestinian slum, and a few feet under the Al Aqsa mosque. The area consists of an extensive excavation that has been turned into a park. Dozens of stone blocks, the size of refrigerator-freezers, lie toppled on one another like alphabet blocks spilled from a toy chest. These blocks once formed the upper part of the wall King Herod erected around the Second Temple. Burned and pitched overboard by the Romans in 70 C.E., they remain untouched since being exhumed in the 1970s. For me, they are the best place to experience the raw presence of the Temple without the pressure to conform to the aggressive proselytizers at the Wall.

  “The thing about Herod’s Temple Mount,” Avner said, “is that it’s not square. It’s a trapezoid. The eastern wall is shorter than the western wall, so the other walls actually slant.” The compound covers thirty-five acres, the size of an average Roman city at the time.

  “But this was only part of the city,” Avner added, “which shows you how big the complex was, and even more how big Jerusalem was. This was the largest complex ever built on earth—at the time of Herod and for many centuries later.”

  “And how did it compare with Solomon’s Temple?”

  Herod’s Temple was actually the third Israelite temple constructed on this hill. The first was built by Solomon around 964 B.C.E. and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. The second was begun in 520 B.C.E., after the Israelites returned from exile. This building was remodeled but fell into disrepair. Herod, the reviled Roman governor who ruled Palestine in the decades before Jesus, initiated a major rebuilding in 20 B.C.E.

  “Herod’s temple was the same size as Solomon’s,” Avner said, “but his complex was much bigger—and Solomon’s included a palace.”

  I ran my fingers down the corner of the wall, a rough edge that felt like the crust of stale bread. The retaining wall here is the height of seventeen limestone blocks, almost sixty feet. The stone was cold, even in the sunshine. I noticed a slightly recessed, beveled edge around the perimeter of each block that reminded me of a picture frame. And then the biggest shock of all: There was no mortar between the blocks, no cement. Nothing.

  “The stones were so immense they held themselves in place,” Avner said. “I was part of the team that excavated here with Benjamin Mazar beginning in 1968, and we were amazed that the stones are completely level. You cannot put a piece of paper in between them, and not only because there
wasn’t paper then.” He gestured for me to follow. “And Mazar made an impressive discovery.” He led me toward a broken stone on the ground. It bore a Hebrew inscription: “To the place of trumpeting.”

  “Josephus explains that the beginning and end of every Sabbath were announced by the priest blowing a trumpet. This stone would have stood at the corner of the Temple complex. It fell here during the destruction.” I looked up: I could almost hear the rocks tumbling, the Temple collapsing, a culture crumbling, the people running. “Flee for refuge,” cries the prophet Jeremiah.

  Blow the trumpet of Tekoa.

  For evil is appearing from the north,

  And great disaster.

  We walked around the corner to the start of the southern wall. We were now directly in between the Temple Mount and the City of David. Pigeon droppings cover the blocks here. The centerpiece of the southern wall is a monumental staircase that served as the main entrance to Herod’s Temple. The grayish steps, alternating between narrow and broad, are carved directly into bedrock in places. To the left is a group of rock-hewn ritual baths where worshipers cleansed themselves before entering the holiest site in Judaism. People passed into the compound through two arches that are visible on the wall.

  “If you were participating in a sacrifice, you would enter one gate, walk in one direction around the plaza, then exit through the other. People in mourning would walk the other way, so everyone would know something was wrong.” He paused. “That was during the Second Temple.”

  “But what about Solomon’s Temple?” I said. “Why is it so mysterious?”