by Bruce Feiler
“Because the remains are under the Temple Mount, and we can’t dig there. We must rely on the text.”
We pulled out our Bibles. Immediately after David’s death, Solomon faces trouble. Adonijah, David’s son by an earlier wife, tries to execute a coup. “You know the kingship was rightly mine,” he says to Bathsheba. He asks her help in allowing him to marry Abishag, David’s former consort, a gesture tantamount to claiming the throne. Solomon responds swiftly, by having his half brother killed. The echoes haven’t dimmed on the trumpets of Solomon’s coronation, and already he is assassinating his siblings. Like father, like son.
But the story is sending other messages, too. Earlier heroes of the Bible have a distant, mythic air to them: Adam lives to be 930 years old; Noah, 950; Abraham, 175; Isaac, 140; Jacob, 147. With Joshua and David, history comes skidding into the picture, and the characters suddenly seem, well, mortal. David reigns for a downright earthly 40 years, as does Solomon. Solomon doesn’t even get a honeymoon before his profane character is put on display. The one area where Solomon is allowed to be larger than life is women. The Bible tells us he has seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Even if he spent merely one night with each (on their anniversary?), it would take him nearly two years to see them all—and almost another year for his mistresses.
The obvious conclusion is that these numbers are typological, designed to show his epic powers in love. Actually what they show is his epic powers in international politics. “Marriages in the ancient world were expressions of power,” Avner said. “The fact that he had so many wives indicates he had broad-reaching power.” The best example occurs in I Kings 3, which says, “Solomon allied himself by marriage with the Pharaoh king of Egypt. He married Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her to the City of David.”
“Before Solomon, Near Eastern kings would send their daughters to Egypt to marry,” Avner said. “Hearing about the daughter of Pharaoh coming to Jerusalem to marry is quite a change. The Bible says Solomon ruled from the Euphrates to the Nile. We have no evidence of his having such a large territory, but at least we can conclude he had a well-established one.”
To cement this power, Solomon decides he needs the one mark of authority that everyone in the region can understand. He needs a temple. “It’s the culmination of a long process,” Avner said, “that begins when the Israelites leave the desert and start becoming an urban society. Becoming an urban society means adopting a completely new language, and that vocabulary includes a capital, an army, and a temple. And the bigger your temple, the stronger your god.”
To understand the meaning of Solomon’s Temple is to understand three things. The first is the message of its location, which superimposes Solomon’s religion over the Canaanite faith that preceded it. When David first dreams of building a temple, he selects a location, “the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” The Hebrew word for “threshing floor” is goren, Avner’s surname. “My grandfather’s name was Galperin,” Avner said. “He emigrated from Romania in 1910. At the time Israel was becoming a state, lots of people adopted Hebrew names. I was born Galperin, but my father changed our name right before I went to first grade. On my first day, the teacher called out, ‘Galperin.’ I said, ‘No, no. It’s Goren!’ ”
In antiquity, a threshing floor was generally located in a high place, where bedrock was exposed and wind could blow the chaff from the wheat as it was winnowed. Because food was believed to come from the gods, Canaanites often built prayer niches at such sites to honor the spirits of fertility. A goren, in other words, was a holy place. David’s decision to erect God’s Temple on a Canaanite holy place is consistent with the ancient practice of co-opting preexisting sanctified spaces. The message they hoped to send was “My god is stronger than yours.” Though Jews and Christians would later complain that Muslims co-opted their sacred spot by building the Dome of the Rock over the ruins of the Temple, the truth is, David did the same thing first. The first lesson of the Temple Mount is that religious rights and wrongs cannot be refereed by claiming first dibs. If they could, Jerusalemites today would be worshiping the god of bread.
The second message is that sanctuaries cost money, and to raise money leaders often burden their subjects. Solomon pays for his Temple in a variety of ways. The first is levies on international trade. Solomon’s most famous wife, the Queen of Sheba, meets him as part of a trade delegation. Living in Arabia, she hears of Solomon’s fame and travels to Jerusalem “with a very large retinue, camels bearing spices, a great quantity of gold, and precious stones.” He answers her queries, shows off his palace, and even wows her with his table manners; she is left breathless, hands over her wealth, receives a few gifts, and returns home his wife.
The spices in this story are almost certainly frankincense, the mysterious resin prized around the region for its role in concealing malodors at sacrifices. Frankincense trees grow naturally only in southern Arabia, in modern-day Yemen, and the resin was transported via camel caravans across the desert to Gaza, where it was distributed around the Mediterranean. The fact that Sheba treks months through the sand to scope out Solomon, then leaves him with levies, suggests the vastness of his influence as a trader.
But the real source of wealth used for the Temple comes from taxes and slaves. Solomon forces the provinces to up their monthly contribution; then he imposes hard labor. He sends thirty thousand slaves to Lebanon to harvest cedar and conscripts another seventy thousand porters and eighty thousand quarriers. Even if these numbers are inflated, as seems likely, the irony is too rich to ignore: The Israelites, whose suffering at the hands of Egypt inspires God to free them from bondage, have now become slaveholders and taskmasters themselves. The northern tribes, who suffer most, actually seek alliance with Egypt. What a turnabout. A new pharaoh has arisen over the region, one who enslaves the Israelites, forces them to build a monument to his god, and drives them into rebellion. It sounds like the pharaoh of Exodus. Only this pharaoh’s name is Solomon.
The final lesson of the Temple is that no religion in the Ancient Near East is unique. The English word temple is the most common translation for the Hebrew word hekal, which is related to Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Canaanite words meaning “great house.” While the English word connotes a public structure, the Hebrew connotes a residence, as in a dwelling place for the deity on earth. The same connotation applies to another word commonly used to describe the Temple, bet elohim, House of God.
As detailed in the text, the basic ground plan of the Temple is a rectangle—165 feet long, 85 feet wide—the precise dimensions of the White House. The building is 52 feet high, just shy of the White House. The Temple is relatively simple on the exterior, save two enormous bronze pillars flanking the entrance. Inside are three successive chambers: a small entrance hall, a large main room illuminated by tiny windows, and a holy inner sanctum, called the Holy of Holies, hidden by olivewood doors. Only priests were allowed to enter the Temple, and they could enter the Holy of Holies only once a year, on Yom Kippur.
Both the central space and the inner sanctum are lined with cedar panels, which were carved with cherubim, palm trees, and flowers, then covered with gold. Since the Temple is designed to be God’s residence, the two inner chambers have furnishings—wooden furniture plated with gold leaf—as well as numerous altars, lamps, tables, and other ritual objects for sacrifices and offerings. Inside the Holy of Holies, two cherubim with wingspans of 15 feet protect the prized possession, the Ark of the Covenant, the portable wooden altar that is the representation of God’s presence on earth.
The Temple is such a transcendent and elusive icon of antiquity—the architectural equivalent of the Lost City of Atlantis—that one can easily imagine it as the singular achievement of Israelite culture. But in fact, it is commonplace. The idea of a temple to house one’s deity was well known across West Asia, and Solomon’s Temple drew heavily from its neighbors. The exterior was similar to that of Phoenician temples from the time; the three inner sections were similar t
o those of Canaanite temples and ones from North Syria. The entire structure was nearly identical to the Egyptian temple at Karnak, which was 45 feet high and 65 feet long, with a forest of internal pillars, and a windowless inner sanctum. The bottom line is this: The size of the Temple may have been impressive, but few viewing it during its lifetime would have thought it proclaimed that the God of the Bible was manifestly different from or superior to other gods.
The wandering God of Abraham may finally have found his mountaintop home, but his power still lay more in his wilderness narrative and less in his house of stones.
Avner and I walked down Herod’s steps to the extensive excavation in front of the southern wall. Flat ground gave way to the familiar crosshatch grid of modern archaeological sites. Archaeologists don’t remove all of one layer in order to get to the one below; they dig in squares, like a three-dimensional checkerboard in which all the white squares are at ground level and all the black are, say, three thousand years old. This method enables future generations to excavate alongside today’s work with more sophisticated equipment and revised theories.
Avner led me to the edge of a narrow walkway, where we jumped down into a hole and, hugging a small tree, shimmied into a pit nearly ten feet below. At the bottom were the remains of an old stone tower, discovered by Charles Warren in 1886. “When Mazar excavated here in the 1960s,” Avner said, “he found remains from the time of Solomon, the only remains we have in the area of the Temple Mount.” The stones were covered in ash, which Avner said was likely from the sacking of the compound in 70 C.E. I rubbed my fingers across the soot and brushed some on my cheeks.
As I did, I heard rustling on the ground above us. The tree began to shake. A voice started barking, in Hebrew: “Who is that? What are you doing here?” It was a woman. “Come out, now!” Avner looked at me. “You might want to use more of that ash,” he said dryly. He started answering, “Don’t shoot,” and climbed out the pit. By the time I got to the top, Avner and the woman were hugging.
Eilat Mazar looks like a fireplug; she’s squat, colorful, and has red hair. At rest, she is quiet and sturdy, but angry, she can positively gush. The granddaughter of Benjamin Mazar, Israel’s digger in chief, Eilat grew up skipping around these stones, dreaming of the past, and ogling the celebrities who came to pay homage to her grandfather. “Everyone came in those days,” she said. “Ariel Sharon, Golda Meir, Ben-Gurion. You have to understand, this dig was something unique—ten continuous years, a monster thing for archaeology.”
When Mazar died in 1996 at age ninety, his granddaughter assumed his legacy.
“So let me ask you a question,” I said. We sat down on the stones. “It seems that the Second Temple gets all the press, and the First Temple is overlooked.”
“The reason is connected with politics,” she said. “I got my Ph.D. at Hebrew University, and we grew up believing that Solomon built the Temple. I dug here in 1989 and found lots of pottery that we could date from the tenth or ninth century B.C.E. We don’t know precisely which one. I was young and quite stupid, so I thought that to be careful I should date it to the later time. Suddenly Israel Finkelstein and his cohorts at Tel Aviv University began to suggest that Solomon didn’t build the Temple. It was built later, they said. But I disagree.”
“So what’s the most concrete thing you found from Solomon’s time?”
“It’s where you just were,” she said.
“You mean the wall?”
“It’s not just a wall. It’s a city gate, it’s a tower, it’s part of a whole complex. The Bible says Jerusalem reached its apex under Solomon, and I believe it.”
“But do you believe it was an empire? Finkelstein has written that the city of Jerusalem at the time was not large enough to be the center of a regional power.”
She laughed. “He’s such a troublemaker.” Then she turned serious. “If you really look at the construction from the time of Solomon, it shows power. The stones are too big, the buildings are too strong. Just look at the size of the stones you were just touching. Do you realize they are nearly twice as big as the Byzantine ones right next to them—and the Byzantine stones come from fifteen hundred years later! No weak ruler could ever build such an enterprise.”
While Jewish archaeologists claim that their inability to excavate under the Temple Mount has hindered them in these debates, some Muslims have pounced on the lack of evidence of Solomon’s Temple as an opportunity. After Israel recaptured the Temple Mount in 1967, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, seeking peace, quickly returned control of the plaza atop the complex to the Muslim religious authority, the Wakf. Jews were forbidden from worshiping on the plaza. Some rabbis even urged Jews not to set foot on the hilltop, because they could not know for sure where the Temple actually stood. Israeli soldiers kept Jews away, in part to keep out fanatical groups who wanted to build a Third Temple to make way for the messiah.
But the Wakf had other ideas. It refused to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the exterior walls of the compound and over time began to question whether a Temple had ever been constructed. The Haram was the site of a mosque from the time of Adam, the Wakf maintained. As the chief Palestinian Muslim, Mufti Ikrima Sabri, said days before my visit: “There is not even the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history.” On the ground, this policy led to ruinous results, like a 1986 Palestinian building project that tore through a Herodian wall. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that it violated Israeli law but did nothing to halt the work. The issue was simply too explosive.
In 1999, the conflict finally erupted. The Wakf commenced its most extensive renovation, creating an emergency exit for a little-known prayer area underneath the Al Aqsa mosque. Crusader Christians had worshiped here and erroneously labeled the rooms Solomon’s Stables. The Wakf explained that contemporary Muslim worshipers needed a place to pray when it rained. It drove bulldozers onto the Haram and opened an entrance that was two hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide. Using hundreds of dump trucks, many in the middle of the night, the authority then hauled twenty thousand tons of debris to the Kidron Valley and dumped them over the hill.
Soon a bulge appeared on the southern wall of the Temple compound, which Jewish critics claimed was caused by the renovations. The bulge protruded more than two feet and stretched one hundred feet long. “The wall could collapse,” said Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. “It will collapse,” said Eilat at the time. But the Palestinians refused to let Jewish officials examine the damage up close. “This bulge has been under our monitoring since the seventies and has neither grown nor shifted in thirty years,” said the director of the Wakf. “We don’t feel there is a dangerous situation.” The shouting escalated; tempers flared; and finally Jordanian engineers were summoned to replace some stones. Years later, the work had not been completed.
“For most of the last century, the Temple Mount has been a political battlefield,” I said to Eilat. “Is the struggle getting worse, or has it always been this bad?”
“No question it is getting worse. Since the beginning of the last century, the only people who were ruling the Temple Mount were Muslims. And the place suffered. There was the earthquake of 1927. There were wars. And the only buildings that were reconstructed were the Muslim ones. The whole mound is an ancient site, three thousand years ancient, that nobody really took care of. It’s just a matter of time before a crack appears in one of the walls and something collapses.”
“So you’re saying the compound is so unstable that one of the buildings will actually fall?”
“It’s obvious. Because it’s so neglected. No treatment has been done, ever, on this ancient compound.”
“But that’s World War III.”
“Well, I’m waiting for it. It’s not going to be small, that’s for sure.”
“Do you think the Muslims are trying to wipe out Christian and Jewish history?”
“I think we
’re dealing with people who don’t give a damn about anything other than their religion. Period. And it’s not like they’re really battling to destroy other religions, it’s like other faiths don’t even exist. And they say it.”
“But what about fanatics on the Jewish and Christian sides?” I said. “Do you think they should build a Third Temple?”
She squirmed at bit at this question. “Well, you know, it’s my nature that I don’t like extremes. I don’t think violence brings a better life to anybody. So, no, I don’t think so. But I don’t think that letting the Islamic fundamentalists do whatever they wish is the right thing, either. First of all, an ancient archaeological site should be preserved and taken care of. And then, of course, freedom of religion should be permitted. Not everybody should be satisfied, but the mainstream should be satisfied. The Muslims can have their mosques and pray, but it’s not only theirs. It’s ours, too.”
We said good-bye and continued our journey. The eastern wall of the Temple Mount is by far the most treacherous. As the eastern border of the Old City, this stretch of Herod’s compound sits on a narrow ledge, about fifty feet wide, which drops off precipitously into the Kidron Valley. On the far side is the Mount of Olives. The valley takes its name from the brook of Kidron, which means “turbid,” after the amount of sediment in its water. In antiquity, the valley was considerably deeper, but centuries of destruction in the Old City have filled it with debris. Today it’s a tense passageway linking two Palestinian neighborhoods. Jews are not permitted to walk here.
“Join me for an adventure?” Avner said.
“We haven’t broken the law all day,” I said.
We walked around the corner, hopped up on a low stone guardrail, and prepared to climb to the base of the wall. Instantly a shout came from above. An Israeli officer bolted from his guard post, gripped his machine gun at the ready, and ordered us to stop. Avner told him we were on an academic mission. The soldier was unimpressed. We nodded and returned to street level but continued walking forward. Within fifty yards, we spotted a small grove of olive trees. We ducked into the trees, checked to make sure we were out of eyeshot of the guard, then tiptoed to the base of the wall.