by Simon Schama
The children and grandchildren of those who had come back would have needed to hang on to the promise and reassurance of the Cyrus decree, since they still lived every day amid the weedy rubble of destruction. And there were so pitifully few of them, probably no more than two thousand souls. Nehemiah wells with sorrow as he rides beside the low ruins. Behind him, at a shadowy, baffled distance, trot the few chosen men he had roused from their beds. The rest of Jerusalem, such as it is – the priests, the scribes, the local notables, Edomites and the like, who lord it over the tattered Jews, puffed up with the aggravated authority they imagine they hold from the Persian court – snores on oblivious. Nehemiah is cup-bearer to the Persian king Artaxerxes in the palace at Susa, his trusted man and deputed governor. The descendants of the Judaean king Jehoiachin, who was deposed and carried away by the Babylonians, still like to give themselves the airs of the House of David, but the truth is that there is no king in Judaea, and this exiled puppet court depends on Babylonian bureaucrats for its rations of oil.7 So Nehemiah is the next best thing – the man who holds decrees with the names of Persian emperors inked on them.
He sits upright in his saddle as the horse picks a careful way through the shattered stones. Through the Dung Gate goes Nehemiah, the stars over his head, the Judaean summer night pleasingly cool; past the deep well where the people say a dragon lies, allowing its waters to flow only when he sleeps with his wings furled, the claws retracted beneath his scaly body; on past the Water Gate, on to Siloam and the brook of Kidron, skirting the heaps of trash and the meandering line of ruin, on until his horse has no more room amid the rubble to trot or even to walk. Nehemiah guides the animal through the waste, and back into the alleys of the city. He can rest now. He knows what must happen.
In Elephantine at this time the Judaeans live as well as could be expected amid the Egyptians. Their neighbours are still Arameans, Carians, Caspians and Greeks. They have their own temple, their own way. Nehemiah understands this very well, but it is not his way and, so he tells us in his ‘memoir’ (one of the most powerful of the Bible), neither does he believe it is YHWH’s way.
The next day Nehemiah calls a meeting of the priests, chief men and scribes. ‘You see the distress we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, its gates burnt with fire; come, let us build up the wall that we be no more a reproach.’ Heartened, they follow the lead of the man who seemed to speak with the authority of the king. ‘Let us rise up and build.’ When local officials – Sanballat the Horonite and Geshem the Arabian – jeer at the temerity, Nehemiah stiffens. ‘The God of heaven will prosper us; but you have no portion or right nor memorial in Jerusalem.’
The Book of Nehemiah, short but exceptionally vivid, is called a ‘memoir’ even by the most sober scholars. Unlike other books of the Hebrew Bible (although like the Book of Ezra, with which it is always paired even to the point of reading them as a single narrative), it was almost certainly written close to the time of the events it describes.8 The long quotations from Persian royal decrees and charters invoked in Ezra correspond persuasively to Persian court-legal style of exactly the mid-fifth century BCE. They are, in effect, direct quotations. The overwhelming impression is of documentary immediacy, a book that in its material load of iron, stone and timber, seems physically of its moment.
That mid-fifth century BCE moment is weighty with formative significance. Something is being built, and it is not just masonry – although it is in Nehemiah that actual building happens: timber beams are aligned; stone slabs cleaned; rubbish carted away; studded gates are set again on massive, dependable hinges; the locksmiths busied. Nehemiah studiously lists the work gangs and their bosses and the local big shots of each quarter of the broken city: ‘the dung gate repaired Malchiah the son of Rechab, the ruler of part of Beth-haccerem, he built it, and set up the doors thereof, the locks thereof and the bars thereof. But the gate of the fountain repaired Shallun the son of Col-hozeh, the ruler of part of Mizpah; he built it, and covered it . . . After them the Tekoites repaired another piece, over against the great tower that lieth out, even unto the wall of Ophel.’ It is as if we are riding with Nehemiah on a tour of inspection: the non-stop hammering, the governor making sure his scribe takes careful notes so that no one responsible for construction or beautification would be forgotten, like modern donors who expect to have their names inscribed on grateful walls.
The work proceeds apace over local opposition, which becomes so incensed that the gangs have to work with weapons by their side in case of attack. Nehemiah must arm the labourers who work with a trowel in one hand, a sword in the other or propped against the stone. He has to see that farmers and traders do not exploit the sudden need for provisions by charging outrageously for food; or worse, that the local Jewish elite doesn’t extort money from those who had mortgaged olive groves and pasture to join the effort. The repair of the walls is done in fifty-two days.
Walls separate; they may enclose and exclude. Even though Nehemiah’s message to Sanballat the Horonite and Geshem the Arabian was hostile – that they had no ‘portion’ or ‘memorial’ in Jerusalem – we must not make him a security-fencer of the fifth century BCE, although his walls were certainly meant to give the smashed and exposed city ruin some shape and definition (as they still do), and a sense of shared community to the people inside them, as well as those camped beyond and in the Judaean hills, groves and valleys of the country. That sense, however, could not be conveyed merely by stone, timber, brick, iron and mortar. Ultimately the house of common fate was – as it would be for millennia – built from words. So a month after the completion of the repairs to the walls, a second ceremonious action was called for.
According to Nehemiah’s fantastic enumeration, on the first day of Tishri exactly 42,360 of the Jews of Jerusalem, their manservants and maidservants (another 7,337), and certainly the 245 singing men and women (for there was and is no Israelite religion without music) were summoned to the open street before the restored Water Gate. Although the numbers are an absurd exaggeration (probably fewer than 40,000 Jews were then living in the entirety of Judaea and Samaria), there was some sort of crowd.
At the centre of what was orchestrated as a second moment of self-definition is Ezra, who, unusually, is both priest and scribe. This double vocation mattered, for it was scribal writing that was about to be sanctified. Ezra brings with him ‘the book of the Law of Moses which the Lord had commanded to Israel’. The congregation (which Nehemiah makes a point of saying consisted of women as well as men, and, like all the earliest sources, with no hint of separation) knew that a solemn moment was at hand. Ezra stood on an elevated wooden platform, designed for the occasion perhaps, on the rebuilt ramparts. To his right and left were a throng of priests and Levite scribes surveying the crowd which waited in silent expectation. When Ezra opened the scroll, everyone stood. Before proceeding to the reading, ‘Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God and all the people answered Amen, Amen, lifting up their hands and bowing their heads.’ Then the scribe began. For those out of hearing range there were Levite repeaters at hand, their names carefully listed by Nehemiah as if they were themselves involved in the production of the words, which in fact they were. Since the first language of many of their listeners would have been Aramaic not Hebrew, the Levites were needed to ‘cause the people to understand’ – a matter of both translation and explanation.
If the reading was not exactly call and response, it was nonetheless intensely participatory. The audience was not a passive receiving station for the words of God. Nehemiah (admittedly the official impresario) says it was the people themselves, ‘gathered as one man’, who took the initiative, asking Ezra to bring the scroll of Moses. This active connection between listener and reader was something new in the world of the ancient Near East, where people were more usually summoned to be stupefied by the power and sacred grandeur of the words of the king, required to attend to his acts of judgement, and venerate his cult image carried in procession. But the processions of Judaism have at
their devotional centre a scroll of words (treated with all the bowing and worshipful kissing through the fringes of a prayer shawl that would have been given to a cultic statue). Moreover, this was a kingless moment, and the urgency of the listeners and the high pitch of the declamation fastened together a unified community of the attentive. In all the scholarly concerns with flattening the differences between Israelite religion and the conventions, practices and images of its neigbours, it is easy to miss how momentous was this distinctively Judaic foregrounding of ‘the people’ in bonded, direct covenant with their single God, whose presence was embodied in sacred words. Whether errant or obedient, penitent or heedless, they are actors in their own history, not just a faceless chorus summoned or dismissed by priests, princes and scribes. From the start, Judaism – uniquely at the time – was conceived as a people’s religion.
The public reading before the Water Gate rehearsed ancient customs of oral recitation. The Hebrew for reading presupposes vocalisation before an audience: the word qra means literally ‘to cry out’, and miqra derived from it is the noun form of a gathering of listeners and readers.9 That same reading obligation would become the characteristic practice of Jewish observance outside the Temple, where the spectacle of sacrifice defined membership of the believing community. While Temple sacrifice was a hierarchically organised business in the hands of the priestly caste, reading was intrinsically a shared, common experience, the impact of its vocalisation not even dependent on literacy. What was said was now becoming a written literature, but it is telling that the written form paradoxically exalted a long and cherished history of moments of dictation, all the way back to Moses himself taking dictation directly from the Almighty. Deuteronomy had imagined Moses being ordered to ‘read the Torah in the presence of all Israel, in their ears. Gather together the People, men, women and children and the strangers in your gates, that they may hear, learn.’10 Ezra’s elevation above the rapt multitude is not just a reiteration of that first Mosaic transcription but a self-conscious re-enactment of it. Nehemiah writes about it as though it was to reacquaint people who had lost those words with their substance: the Law and the history revealed as if freshly given, brought to life by the spark of public voice. The scroll itself must have been significant too: the compact roll of portable memory, something that had a chance of being carried through the fires of disaster.
Nehemiah, the orchestrator of the spectacle, knew what he was doing. Though Mesopotamian law codes were of immense significance in establishing the king as sovereign adjudicator, Babylonian and Persian court rituals, often enacted before monumental statuary, were principally designed to astonish the eye. The performance assigned to Ezra was all about mouth and ear, about the living force of words. It established, very early on, the Jewish philosophy of reading as unquiet. Jewish reading in the style of the Hebrew Bible, at the dawn of this people’s self-consciousness, is not done in silent solitude (the invention of monastic Christianity); nor is it done for the enrichment of the reflective conscience (though that is not entirely ruled out). Jewish reading is literally loud-mouthed: social, chatty, animated, declamatory, a demonstrative public performance meant to turn the reader from absorption to action; a reading that has necessary, immediate, human implications; reading that begs for argument, commentary, questioning, interruption and interpretation; reading that never, ever shuts up. Jewish reading refuses to close the book on anything.
Ezra’s performance takes on the austerity of a legal code – the Torah – into the realm of collective public theatre: a holy show. It is the climax of a three-act drama of reconsecration and reawakening: first the repair of Jerusalem’s walls; then the building of a second Temple in situ, and finally the public manifestation of the law of Moses without which the other two acts would have had no meaning. None of these deeds were merely ceremonial. Together they meant to assert an unapologetic Jewish singularity: the Yahwist difference. The rebuilt walls were an architectural declaration that Jerusalem was the citadel of David, that the core of the Yahwist royal cult had risen again even though there was no longer any king in Judaea. The rebuilt House of YHWH would stand as the only true Temple of the Jews, the arbiter of what was and what was not proper observance, and the authorised Law of the Land as, in effect, the Jewish constitution. The words of the Torah, giving people the governing content of their singularity, did not need a king, much less a god-king, for their authority. Behind them stood the belief in an invisible YHWH, whom Talmudists much later would even depict as consulting a pre-existent Torah, before proceeding to create the universe!11
As long ago as the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza, inaugurating biblical criticism by insisting that the Pentateuch was a historical document written by human authors many generations after the events described, identified Ezra as the most likely candidate for prime authorship.12
All this was needed because Ezra and Nehemiah were acutely conscious of the difficulties they faced in redefining who was and who was not a true member of this community of YHWH. Both scribe and governor belonged to the elite uprooted by Nebuchadnezzar, along with the royal clan, its judges and magistrates, perhaps most of the literate class, and taken to Babylon in 597 BCE. Perhaps some of the rest of the Judahite population (their ranks swollen by the descendants of the thousands of Israelites from the north who had come to Jerusalem after the Assyrian destruction of their kingdom in 721 BCE) followed in the train of the elite class. There were, after all, no less than three mass deportations – in 597 BCE, in 587 BCE and then again in 582 BCE. The archaeological record shows an indisputably brutal shrinkage in the number of villages in the Judaean highlands in the sixth century BCE. Vineyards, olive groves and pasture went to waste. Soldiers were left to fend for themselves as the foothill fortresses of Judaea fell one by one and travelled, as the Book of Jeremiah suggests, to Egypt, to the Nile cities and to Pathros, the south country of the first cataract.
Though the population collapse was extreme, Judaea and Samaria were not entirely emptied. Some thousands must have clung to their terraces and ancient villages in the hope of subsisting after the flares of war had turned to cold ash. In the traumatic circumstances of the Babylonian onslaught, there is every reason to suppose that those who did stay behind clung for comfort and hope not just to YHWH, but to the household and local gods and cults of their own ancient traditions. Cultic pillars, amulets, even inscribed references to gods other than YHWH – not least his female consort Asherah – have survived from an earlier generation, even at the time when the scribally written books were doing all they could to promote uncompromising monotheism. In Samaria in particular – where some of those most badly affected by the Babylonian fire invasion must have fled – the survivors would have been open to gods other than the one who had manifestly failed them against Nebuchadnezzar.
The targets of Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s public proclamations of Torah Rule were precisely local survivors suspected of acquiring ‘foreign’ cult practices along with ‘foreign’ wives. The truth was that it was the fierce ‘Yahweh Alone’ book-fixed monotheism that was the novelty, not the ancestral habits of keeping a little, full-breasted hearth goddess figurine at home or in larger houses even a small uninscribed standing stone. But the Ezra–Nehemiah exclusivism now held co-religionists to a higher stricter standard, and they presented their version of YHWH worship as having always been that demanding, even though this was historically not the case. For the first time (but not the last), the ‘who is a Jew’ debate was sounded, with Ezra launching a comprehensive and merciless winnowing out of those considered to have been contaminated by ‘foreign’ cults. This happened at precisely the time – the mid-fifth century BCE – when the Yahudim of Elephantine, innocent of the new Judaean puritanism, were marrying Egyptians and cheerfully invoking in their solemn vows the pagan gods of their Aramean neighbours, sometimes in the same breath by which they also swore by YHWH. The argument between a narrow and a broad view of what it means to be Jewish had got under way.
E
zra was hardline, fasting out of mortification that ‘the children of the captivity’ had taken ‘strange wives’, thus compounding ‘the trespass of Israel’. In keeping with his assumption that those who had intermarried needed to be shamed from their sin, the final twenty-five long verses of the Book of Ezra consist of nothing except a list of the ignominious, including many priests and Levites. (Needless to say we do not hear the names of their unfortunate wives.) The culprits ‘gave their hands that they would put away their wives and being guilty offered a ram of the flock for their trespass’. In reality there would have been many thousands. Ezra’s motivation was precisely to weed out heterodoxy, to make Jerusalem the sole Temple for pilgrim festivals and sacrifices, and to place in the hands of the Temple priests the judgement over those who could, and those who could not, be admitted to this reborn, re-covenanted nation.
The scroll-book itself was supreme as the object of orthodox allegiance, exalted by Ezra as both law and history. It was the instituted cult of the Book and the obligation of shared reading out loud which, more than the worship of a single god, made this Israelite Yahwist religion unique in its time and place. The eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt had also proclaimed the exclusive cult of a single sun god and effaced all images of him save the sun-disc. Egyptian, Babylonian and Zoroastrian cults were embodied in statuary and relief sculpture, both in fixed specific shrines and temples, and the great epic inscriptions that proclaimed the divine judgements and wisdoms of the king were likewise inscribed – in cuneiform – on immovable, monumental stone. When Assyrian and Babylonian armies went into battle they did so with just the images of gods and deified kings to fortify them. Israelites, on the other hand, were commanded to take with them their sacred scrolls.13