Jerusalem and its Temple in the time of Christ:

Until it was destroyed by Romans in AD 70, the temple at Jerusalem was the official centre of Jewish worship, a great place of pilgrimage and an immensely powerful symbol. Although Jewish theology had increasingly stressed the transcendence and otherness of God, the temple was still regarded as being in a special way a divine dwelling place: the scenes reported by Josephus immediately before its fall suggest a confidence, even then, that God would not allow it to be harmed. The temple in the first century was, in fact, the third to be built, following Solomon’s temple destroyed in 587 BC and the one that replaced it after the return from Babylon. Herod the Great began work in 20/19 BC on the same site but according to a different ground plan, in the prevailing Roman-Hellenistic style of architecture. Construction went on for a long time, certainly until AD 64, and it may have been the case that the temple was still unfinished at its destruction. Nothing remains of the temple proper today, apart from the great platform now surmounted by the Dome of the Rock and the substructure of the massive surrounding walls. However, it can be reconstructed in the mind’s eye through the contemporary descriptions of Josephus and others.

The site of the temple was on a hill in the south-eastern part of the present Old City. A great paved court was laid on the temple platform, surrounded by magnificent collonades against the outside walls. This court was accessible to people of any race or faith, Gentiles included and was by no means reserved for purely religious activities. In common with other ancient temples, the Jerusalem temple was used as a safe-deposit for valuables and other quasi-commercial transactions were carried on there. Within the court was an enclosure surrounded by an embankment, with steps going up to a wall with nine gates. Inscriptions, the Greek text of one of which has been found, warned Gentiles against going further:

No foreigner may enter inside the barrier and embankment. Whoever is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.

At the heart of the temple lay the Holy Place, elevated by twelve steps. Within was a vestibule which gave on to the main doorway of the sanctuary.  Here were the sacred objects in gold, the seven-branched lampstand, the menorah, the table for the shew-bread and the altar of incense.> a curtain screened the Holy of Holies, containing no furniture whatsoever, which only the high priest might enter, once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Thus the elevation of the temple and its holiness increased progressively towards the centre, as did the elaborateness of its ornamentation. Built of great blocks of gleaming white stone and decorated with all possible splendour, it must have been a breath-taking sight. Josephus’ praise is lavish; he remarks that the outside of the building was covered with so much gold that the onlooker could scarcely look directly at it in bright sunlight. He adds that after the sack of Jerusalem the market of gold for the whole province of Syria was completely flooded so that the standard of gold was depreciated to half its value.

The foundation of the worship offered at the temple was the daily sacrifice, offered morning and evening on behalf of the people. It was never interrupted once during the rebuilding of the temple. A positive understanding of the joy taken in the ritual sacrifice of animals and the significance attached to it is perhaps the hardest thing for modern western Christians to understand, but there is abundant evidence of that joy and of the belief that sacrifice could bring forgiveness. This system was at its height in the last days of the temple, when more care and money was lavished on it than at any other time. Public sacrifice was accompanied by lengthy ceremonial and was followed by private sacrifices, both sin-offerings and votive offerings. The whole of Palestine was divided into twenty-four divisions, each of which was ‘on duty’ in turn for one week (Luke 1. 8f.). Priests and Levites from the course on duty were responsible for offering the sacrifices, and lay representatives were deputised to be witnesses on behalf of the whole people. A yearling lamb was killed and then followed a service of prayer: incense was offered and the lamb solemnly burnt; the priests pronounced a benediction and the choir of Levites sang the appointed psalm, the ceremony being accompanied by the blowing of trumpets.

More numerous sacrifices were offered on the Sabbath and on major festivals. The more important of these were the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), the Feast of Tabernacles (Succoth) following the Day of Atonement, and the Feast Of Passover. The feasts were of great antiquity, having accumulated many overtones of meaning. The Feast of Weeks was a thanksgiving for the grain harvest, but also commemorated the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai; the Feast of Tabernacles, or ‘booths’, recalled the time when the Israelites were wandering in the desert and lived in tents, but also contained an ancient prayer-ceremony for rain: the Passover, Pesach, while commemorating the deliverance from Egypt, was also associated with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which originally also had an agricultural significance. Pilgrims came to all these festivals, often covering vast distances to be present. Passover was the annual peak; one estimate gives the total number of pilgrims likely at that time as about 125,000 compared with the approximately 55,000 permanent residents of Jerusalem. The Passover meal was eaten in domestic surroundings, in table-fellowships of between ten and twenty; pilgrims had by law to stay that night within the limits of Jerusalem itself, as they were ritually interpreted. Despite the flexibility of this interpretation, the crush must have been immense. The ritual was carried out by twenty-four courses of priests and the same number of Levites, who were not in permanent residence. It has been estimated that there were some 7,200 priests involved, and a rather larger number of Levites, who functioned as singers, musicians, servants and guards.

 

The temple and its priesthood may have been the most striking symbol of Jerusalem, but had they been its exclusive centre, Judaism would never have survived their fall. The way in which it adjusted to the situation after AD 70 shows that there were other strengths; these had as their common basis the Law, and to a considerable degree the history of the different parties within Judaism is the history of different interpretations of the Law. Even while the temple still stood, even within Judaea itself, there seems to have been an increasing preoccupation with the scriptures and their implications, and this focus will have been even more characteristic of the Jews of the Diaspora. A movement like that found at Qumran would have been unthinkable without the scribal tradition of ‘the book’ in Rabbinic Judaism. The beginnings of this trend are to be found in the Babylonian exile and the post-exilic period. During this period the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, took final form and was accorded its place of honour as the Torah, the Law; the Prophets had taken a place beside it by the beginning of the second century BC and the scriptures were recognised during the first century AD.

‘Law’ is an inadequate translation to give a clear idea of the written basis of Judaism; the Hebrew word Torah means rather ‘instruction’ or ‘doctrine’ rather than ‘law’, since the Pentateuch is far more than a ‘dry’ book of laws, of ‘do’s’ and ‘dont’s’. Nevertheless, that is what it became as it was subjected to more and more intensive study. It is essential to try to see the positive elements which such detailed methods of study were believed to bring out, despite Jesus’ criticisms of some of the more life-denying aspects of the process. The Sadducees’ interpretation of Scripture was literal in contrast to that of the Pharisees, whose oral tradition they rejected. From this basic position stemmed their well-known denials of resurrection, future rewards and punishments, angels and spirits, and Providence. The Sadducees were more interested in their control of land and material resources than in spirituality; they seem to have been more concerned with politics of the Sanhedrin than theology.

The supreme Jewish council was known as the Sanhedrin, a Graeco-Aramaic term for an assembly. It consisted of seventy-one members. The sources differ over its composition and nature: Josephus and the writers of the Gospels and Acts present it primarily as a political institution, whereas Rabbinic literature presents a more religious aspect. The latter sources were probably reading back into it features which it took on after the fall of the temple, but the very nature of Judaism meant that political and religious questions were inextricably intertwined. The Pharisees were a broader, lay movement, which set out to embrace the whole of the Jewish people and had developed out of the earlier movement of Hasidism. Many Pharisees were Scribes by occupation, but they were more preoccupied with ritual matters than with theological concerns. Being a ‘separated one’ meant striving to be separated from impurity of all kinds. At the same time, the Law and the understanding of it were the means of avoiding impurity, so that the basic work of the scribe was indispensable. The leaders among the Pharisees were, therefore ‘middle-class’ scribes, whereas the Sadducees, although having their own scribes, had a leadership which was dominated by noble families.  By 70 BC the Pharisees had gained access to the Sanhedrin and from then onwards they never altogether lost power, while the Sadducees declined in importance, especially following the fall of the temple.  It was the Pharisaic/ Rabbinic development which shaped the future of Judaism.; the heightened prominence of the Law after the fall of the temple was accompanied by an institution which had been increasing in importance for some time before AD 70, the synagogue and its worship.

The Jewish Dispersion of the First Century:

During the first century, as ever since has been the case, there were more Jews living outside Palestine than within it. Estimates vary, but a rough guess would be that there were rather more than two million Jews in Judaea and about four million elsewhere. The diaspora had taken place in different stages and for a number of reasons; there were, of course, the forced deportations to Babylon, where about a million Jews lived, but trade had also taken Jews all around the Mediterranean well before that time. There were particularly close connections with Egypt, where there was a large Jewish community, but there were also Jews in North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy. These Jews had to preserve their identity in a culture which was predominantly Greek. They therefore organised themselves into communities, living in distinct quarters in cities, with considerable autonomy. Both the Greek states and the Roman government allowed a great deal of freedom to religious minorities, but the privileges of the Jews went far beyond this. In return for the favours of the state, however, they had to suffer the constant antagonism of their neighbours, which on occasion damaged official relations. Although the language of the Dispersion was Greek, these Jews still looked to the temple while it stood, and paid a great deal of money to support it. The synagogue, however, had become a far more regular influence in their day-to-day life. While Pharisaic Judaism culminated in the Rabbinic tradition, Hellenistic Judaism gave way to Christianity. It had no future in the context of Judaism, just as Jewish Christianity had no future in the context of the church. A modern Jewish comment is apt:

Jewish Christianity withered since it lacked survival power; Hellenistic Judaism withered since it lacked survival value.

The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans:

When Emperor Tiberius died in AD 37, the new emperor, Caligula, made his friend Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, king of Philip’s former tetrarchy. He accused Herod Antipas of being in league with the Parthians. Antipas was duly banished, and his tetrarchy and revenues were given to Agrippa. Although Judaea had been a Roman province for thirty-three years, it was in a thoroughly unsettled condition. The Jews felt themselves to be a unique people, and though the basis of this claim was religious, under conditions of foreign occupation its manifestations were bound to be political. Each of the main religious sects thus had its own political ‘line’, most obviously expressed in the extreme nationalism of the Zealots. The disturbed situation of the province, with these insurgents active in the countryside and with continual sectarian conflict among the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, resulting in frequent changes in the high priests now appointed by the governor, needs to be remembered as the background to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Agrippa had used his friendship with Caligula to persuade the latter to abandon his orders for the erection of a large statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem in AD 41. In the same year, Caligula was assassinated, and Agrippa was largely instrumental in securing the succession of Claudius. The new emperor rewarded him by abolishing the province of Judaea and adding it to his territories, thus reconstituting the kingdom of Herod the Great. Agrippa reigned for only three years, but during that time he demonstrated considerable ability. He made Jerusalem his official residence once more, signifying that Judaea was once more Jewish, and he became popular with his subjects. He had James, son of Zebedee, executed, and arrested Peter, two of the leaders of the growing and widely unpopular Christian community (Acts 12. 1-18). On his death, Claudius wished to appoint his son, Herod Agrippa II, to the throne of Judaea, but the boy was only seventeen, and Claudius was persuaded to make the area a province once more, though this time it included the whole of his father’s kingdom. The first two Roman governors, according to Josephus, left native customs alone and kept the nation at peace, but with the third, Cumanus, troubles began again, his government being marked by disturbances and further disasters to the Jews. These continued under the fourth and fifth governors, and on the death of the fifth, the Sanhedrin again took the law into its own hands, executing James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem.

According to Tacitus, the endurance of the Jews lasted until Gessius Florus was governor, of whom Josephus claimed that it was he who compelled us to take up arms against the Romans, thinking that it was better to be destroyed at once than by degrees. Florus became governor in AD 64, and the Jewish War began in AD 66. Its short-term causes were a clash in Caesaria between Jews and Greeks, in which Florus supported the latter. Shortly afterwards, he provoked further antagonism in Jerusalem by demanding a large sum of money from the temple treasury on the grounds that it was required by the emperor. In the demonstrations which followed, Florus allowed his troops to loot, and many innocents were killed, including Jews with Roman citizenship. At this stage, Agrippa II sought to intervene, but his attempt to calm his citizens ended with them stoning him, forcing him to leave Jerusalem. Within a month the rebels had taken control of Jerusalem and the greater part of Judaea and had captured the fortress of Masada with its huge arsenal. The disturbances then spread to the predominantly Greek cities of the Decapolis and the coast, and even to Alexandria. In all of them, there were violent clashes between Greeks and Jews, until the governor of Syria, was compelled to intervene and marched south with an army of thirty thousand. Despite early successes, he failed to control the uprising.

Emperor Nero appointed Vespasian, an experienced general, to the command of Judaea. In AD 67 he reconquered Galilee, where the young Josephus was in command, and the next year pressed on into Samaria and Transjordan. Meanwhile, factional struggles in Jerusalem, amounting to a civil war, seriously weakened the ability of the inhabitants to resist the Roman advance. In AD 70, Titus, Vespasian’s son, who had been left in command of the army when his father returned to Rome to become emperor, laid siege to the city. The story is graphically told by Josephus. An attack was only possible from the north or north-west, where the assailants would have to breach three walls in turn. ; even then, there remained the temple itself and the upper city, both of which could serve as well-defended inner citadels. The siege began in May, with the Romans deploying all their resources in siege warfare, building huge ramps and towers, attempting to mine the walls or battering them with huge boulders thrown by their artillery. They eventually constructed a wall of five miles in length running right around the city.  Nevertheless, it was not until the end of September that the whole city was in Roman hands. City and temple were razed to the ground.

Mopping-up operations continued for a further three years, culminating in the long siege and heroic defence of Masada, the great fortress which towers over the western shore of the Dead Sea. When further resistance proved impossible, the surviving defenders of nearly a thousand set fire to the fortress and killed themselves, with only two women who hid in underground water cisterns living to tell the tale to Josephus. The result of the war brought to an end the Jewish state. The Sanhedrin and the high priesthood were abolished, and worship in the temple was forbidden. There were further Jewish rebellions and revolts in AD 115 and 132, but the final guerrilla war, led, with some initial success, by Simon bar Kochba, was finally defeated in AD 135, following which Emperor Hadrian built a new city for Gentiles, from which the Jews were excluded, and a pagan temple was built on the site of Herod’s temple. Zion was no more.

According to Josephus, it was chiefly the belief in the imminent advent of a Messianic king that launched the Jews upon their suicidal war in 66 AD. Even after the destruction of the temple, Simon bar-Kochba was still greeted as Messiah. But the bloody suppression of that rising and the annihilation of political nationality put an end both to the apocalyptic faith and to the militancy of the Jews.  Although in later centuries a number of self-styled messiahs arose among the dispersed communities, what they offered was merely a reconstitution of the national home, not an eschatological world-empire. Moreover, they very rarely inspired armed risings, and never amongst European Jews. It was no longer Jews but Christians who cherished and elaborated prophecies in the tradition of Daniel’s dream and who continued to be inspired by them.

The Samaritans:

Had it been prophesied around AD 30 that the only movements to survive the next two thousand years would be the successors of the Pharisees, the followers of Jesus and the Samaritans, such a forecast would have been worthy of ridicule by contemporaries. Yet this was precisely what happened.

A group of the despised Samaritans still lives and worships near Mount Gerizim, despite the long-troubled history of Palestine. Their survival represents a thorn in the side for those Christians and Jews who view Jerusalem as the sole, exclusive and undivided capital of the Jewish people as represented by the modern state of Israel. The Samaritans were the inhabitants of what was once the northern kingdom of Israel. In New Testament times it is clear from both Jewish and Christian sources that there was hatred and hostility between them and the Jews in Judaea and Galilee, so much so that Galileans on pilgrimage to Jerusalem avoided Samaria by crossing the Jordan rather than using the Jericho Road which Jesus described in his parable of ‘the Good Samaritan’.

The Samaritans regard themselves as the true Israel, separated from the rest of the people when the latter were tainted by the sin of Eli, a priest at Shiloh in the time of Samuel. Though they were deported at the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 BC, they returned fifty-five years later. The Judaeans and Galileans, on the other hand, regard the Samaritans as descendants of gentile colonists who repopulated the northern kingdom after the Assyrian conquest. They therefore regarded Samaritan religious observances as totally tainted. The Samaritan view may not be historically accurate, but the ‘Jewish’ view is also exaggerated in the opposite direction. It is not possible, at the present time, to establish the truth of exactly what happened, but it seems that it was post-exilic concerns which led to the constant rivalry between the ethnic groups. It probably began with the extent of inter-marriage between Samaritan ‘Jews’ and gentiles during the period of the two exiles, accentuated by the different experience of exile encountered by the Judaeans in Babylonia. The conflict reached its climax when the Samaritans built their own temple to replace the earlier one at Bethel. This new temple was erected on Mount Gerizim. The exact date of its construction is unknown, but it was certainly there by the early second century and does not appear to have been totally new then.

In 129 BC, John Hyrcanus destroyed the temple on Gerizim, adding to Samaritan hatred. Herod married a Samaritan woman, suggesting that relations might have been slightly easier during his reign, and it is even possible that the Samaritans had access to the Temple in Jerusalem. However, Josephus reports that a new act of defilement, the scattering by Samaritans of human bones in the temple grounds, once more stirred up tensions. The first century was a bad period for Galileans on pilgrimage when they were set upon and attacked. In the end, Galileans and Judaeans alike regarded the Samaritans as Gentiles. This may be one reason why Mark describes Jesus and his disciples as crossing into Transjordan to teach before his final week in Jerusalem. Earlier references to the Samaritans contain a number of vivid sayings about their impurity; John 4. 9. has an old comment about the practice of Jews and Samaritans not using the same water vessels for this reason. Yet the Samaritans shared the same Torah with the Judaeans, though not the same prophetic and other literature. These were the people whom Jesus chose to illustrate gratitude and love, deliberately choosing to identify the hero of his story by his ethnic origin and ‘label’.  They provide yet another example of how ancient and first century Palestine was a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic region comprising a patchwork of territories under Roman rule, far different in nature from a twenty-first-century nation-state.

(to be continued…) 

Roman Occupation, the Pharisees and Zealot Resistance:

 

In relation to Rome, the Pharisees were advocates of ‘passive resistance’. By contrast, the chief characteristic of the Zealots, who otherwise had much in common with the Pharisees as fervent nationalists, was their advocacy and use of violence in defence of their faith. There are also probable connections between the Zealot movement and the Maccabees, but its beginning is usually taken to be a revolt against Quirinus’ census in AD 6. Judas, the leader of the revolt, was a Galilean, the son of Eleazar who was executed by Herod; his son led the last stand of the Zealots at Masada. The Zealots take their name from their zeal for the temple and the Law, as illustrated in the writings of Josephus, who writes very disapprovingly, labelling them Sicarii (‘assassins’). He could hardly do otherwise in his position, as they also refused to pay Roman taxes. Luke’s list of Jesus’ apostles includes Simon, called ‘the Zealot’ (Luke 6.15; Acts 1. 13); the parallel passages in Mark (3.18) and Matthew (10. 4) refer to him as ‘the Canaanaean’, an Aramaic form of the same word.

Simon had been a member of the Zealot resistance movement, and Jesus must have known others. The very name by which He became known, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean’, meant, to the people of Judaea, something like ‘rebel’ or ‘anarchist’ from the home of the Zealots, or freedom fighters, and Galileans were renowned as ‘born fighters’. The presence of a Zealot among Jesus’ followers, coupled with recorded actions of Jesus like the cleansing of the temple and the fact that he was crucified by the Romans on a quasi-political charge has prompted elaborate theories about the connection between Jesus and the Zealots. There is not enough evidence to make out a case, one way or the other, but what evidence there is, is intriguing. The gospels record him meeting, early in his ministry, with several thousand of them hiding in the hills above the fishing port of Capernaum, on Lake Galilee. The ‘crowd’ of hill villagers and fishermen from the lakeside towns were also men of the Resistance Movement, ‘freedom fighters’ whenever the chance came. Jesus felt they were like sheep without a shepherd, a leaderless mob, an army without a general. Though some of them wanted to become that ‘shepherd’ or ‘general’, he refused the offer to join them. Instead, he got them to sit down, under command, in companies of fifty to a hundred, rank by rank and shared a common meal with them. Jesus had come to believe that violence was not God’s way, and he became their critic. Many of his stories were aimed at them as well as at the Pharisees. Many of them abandoned him, and whenever he returned to Galilee from Judaea, he travelled ‘incognito’.  He continued to be appalled by the suffering that even a just cause brought, and referred to the poems of the prophets which were ignored by the Zealots, poems which spoke of an alternative form of resistance:

If only today you knew how to live for peace instead of war!

You cannot see what you are doing.

The time will come when

your enemies will throw up a palisade round you,

besiege and attack you on all sides,

dash down your buildings and your people,

leave not a wall upstanding;

all because you did not see that God has already come to you

in love, not war.

Luke 19, 42-44.

For the Zealots, as well as for the Pharisees in Jerusalem and his own people in the synagogues, Jesus of Nazareth was no-one special. But neither public debate in the hills, or on street corners, nor sermons in the meeting houses, were how he got his message across. Years later, his friends reflected on the man they knew and remembered Isaiah’s poem (42. 3-4) about God’s ‘servant king’ which seemed to describe him precisely:

His is no trumpet call,

no demagogue he, 

holding forth at street corners!

He is too gentle to break a bruised stalk,

to snuff a flickering wick!

 

But his no flickering wick,

his no timid heart;

honest and plain-spoken

he makes the heart of religion clear. 

Yet, even at the time of his last visit to Jerusalem, Jesus’ friends still had great difficulty in getting out of their heads the widespread Jewish conviction that God’s chosen leader, when he came, would establish some kind of national kingdom, with its king and government. They had grown up with this idea and took it for granted. The Zealots thought of this leader as a military ruler, establishing his power by military conquest, as David and the Maccabees had done. Many others who were not zealots thought in much the same way, though some believed that God alone would defeat the Romans. Jesus would have nothing to do with such ideas. He had not come to be that kind of king or to establish that kind of kingdom. After his death, his followers, calling themselves Christians, came to accept this and abandoned the path of violent resistance. The Jews in general, and the Zealots, in particular, did not.

The Synagogues of First-century Palestine and the Middle East:

According to the Gospels, the synagogues of Galilee were important focal locations for Jesus’ ministry in the north, though some scholars have questioned whether they even existed at this time. The Greek word synagogue is used in the Greek Old Testament to translate the Hebrew word, Eda, meaning ‘congregation’. In such cases it does not, of course, refer to a building at all. So when did groups of people begin to meet together for prayer and the study of Scripture, and when did these meetings begin to take place in a building specially designed for the purpose? Jewish sources trace the institution of the synagogue, like everything else, to Moses; the earliest beginning, however, is likely to be the movement with which  Ezra was connected in the first century BC, and there will have been other contributory factors in different places.

 

In Alexandria, Jews encountered Greek religious associations which met regularly; in many places, Jews may well have had regular meetings as part of municipal life. It is even possible that there may be some connection between the local synagogues and the meetings of members of the course on duty at the temple in Jerusalem. Those who did not go to Jerusalem are thought to have met together in their homes for prayer when the sacrifice was being offered in the Temple. By the first century AD, there was certainly a strong tradition of regular meetings for prayer and study of the Scriptures held in specially appointed buildings. There is written evidence to suggest that throughout the first century, synagogues were widespread. In addition to the New Testament references to synagogues in Galilee and throughout the Mediterranean world, Josephus makes special mention of synagogues in Caesarea and Tiberius, and Rabbinic writings mention synagogues in Jerusalem itself. The archaeological evidence suggests no set pattern or sequence of architectural development. Those closer to Jerusalem were influenced by the external decorations of the Temple, whereas in Babylon more attention was paid to interiors.

 

The synagogue was more than a place of worship; it was also something of a village centre with secular uses, a place for judicial, political and religious gatherings. It was certainly a centre for education, where children received elementary instruction and where teaching was given to adults who wanted help in reading the Scriptures. Above all, in the Dispersion, the synagogue was an important factor in unifying the Jews who lived in a particular place. There was no permanent ‘minister’ of a synagogue; the principal officer was the ‘head of the synagogue’, who played a chief role in all the synagogue functions and was ultimately responsible for the conduct of services, and may have chosen the lessons. The synagogue also had its ‘council of elders’ who, in predominantly Jewish villages, would also have been civic officials. The central act of worship was the reading of the Scriptures, both from the Torah and the prophets. In Palestine, this would be in Hebrew, sometimes accompanied by a translation into Aramaic; in the Dispersion, Greek was used. The reading of the lessons was followed by a sermon, and there seems to have been a custom of inviting any visiting teacher to deliver this address (Acts 13. 14).

Recent archaeological evidence has shown that Galilee was not the rural backwater and isolated Jewish enclave in the hills that scholars once imagined. They have plumbed the political, economic. and social currents of first-century Palestine to discover the forces that gave rise to the man and his mission. He has been viewed variously as a religious reformer, a social revolutionary, an apocalyptic prophet and even as a Jewish ‘Jihadist’. By far the mightiest force at the time shaping life in Galilee was the Roman Empire, which had subjugated the whole of Palestine some sixty years before Jesus’ birth. Almost all Jews felt oppressed by Rome’s excessive taxation and idolatrous religion, and this seething undercurrent of social unrest set the stage for the ‘Jewish agitator’ to burst onto the scene denouncing the rich and powerful and pronouncing blessings on the poor and marginalised.

Others have imagined the onslaught of Greco-Roman culture moulding Jesus into a less Jewish, more cosmopolitan champion of social justice. In 1991, John Dominic Crossan published his seminal book, The Historical Jesus, in which he put forward the thesis that the real Jesus was a wandering sage whose countercultural lifestyle and subversive sayings bore a striking resemblance to those of the ‘Cynics’ of ancient Greece. Like Jesus, they had little time for social conventions and the pursuit of wealth and status. Crossan’s unorthodox thesis was inspired partly by archaeological discoveries in Galilee which showed that the whole region was becoming more urbanised and romanised during Jesus’ day than scholars once imagined. Jesus’ boyhood home of Nazareth was just three miles from Sepphoris, the Roman provincial capital. Although the city isn’t mentioned in the Gospels, an ambitious building campaign sponsored by Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas, would have attracted skilled workers from all the surrounding villages. It’s therefore not unreasonable to imagine Jesus, as a young craftsman, working at Sepphoris and testing the boundaries of his Judaistic upbringing.

In Capernaum, the fishing port on the northwest shore called the Sea of Galilee where Jesus met his first followers, Franciscan archaeologists were, in 1968, excavating an octagonal church built 1,500 years ago, when they discovered that it had been built over the remains of a first-century house. There was evidence that this private home had been transformed into a public meeting place over a short span of time. By the second half of the first century, just a few decades after the Crucifixion of Jesus – the home’s rough stone walls had been plastered over and household kitchen items replaced with oil lamps, characteristic of a community gathering place. Over the following centuries, entreaties to Christ were etched into the walls, and by the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the dwelling had been expanded into an elaborately decorated house of worship. Since then the structure has commonly been known as Peter’s House, though it’s impossible to say whether the disciple actually inhabited the home. The Gospels record Jesus curing Peter’s mother-in-law at her home in Capernaum. Word of the miracle spread rapidly, we are told, and by evening a suffering crowd had gathered at her door.

 

Another dramatic discovery occurred at the site of ancient Magdala, the hometown of Mary Magdalene. Again, it was Franciscan archaeologists who began excavating part of the town during the 1970s, though the northern half lay under a defunct lakeside resort, who was building a pilgrims’ retreat in Galilee. As construction was about to begin in 2009, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority arrived to survey the site. They discovered a synagogue from the time of Jesus – the first such structure to be unearthed In Galilee. This find was especially significant because it put to rest an argument made by sceptics that no synagogues existed in Galilee until decades after Jesus’ death and that synagogues were few and far between in Israel and Judah in general in the first half of the first century. Had the sceptics been right, their claim would have shredded the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus as a devout Jew who often proclaimed his message and performed miracles in these meeting places.

As archaeologists excavated the ruins, they uncovered walls lined with benches and a mosaic floor. More importantly, at the centre of the room, they found a stone about the size of a foot rack that revealed carvings in relief which showed some of the most sacred elements of the Temple in Jerusalem. This has come to be known as the Magdala Stone, and its discovery struck a death-blow to the once-fashionable notion that Galileans were impious country ‘bumkins’ detached from Judaea’s centre of ‘civilised’ devotion. Moreover, as archaeologists continued to dig, they discovered an entire town buried less than a foot below the surface. The ruins were so well-preserved that some began calling Magdala the Israeli Pompeii. The remains include storerooms, ritual baths and an industrial area where fish may have been processed and sold on an open market, the stone stalls of which remain intact. Considering the fact that the synagogue was active during the ministry of Jesus and was only a brief sail from Capernaum, there is no reason to deny or doubt that Jesus was in Magdala, preaching in the synagogue and walking with his fishermen friends.

Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem and his ‘Last Week’:

His journey south and his movements until the last week in Jerusalem are shrouded in obscurity. Mark summarises them in one sentence, short yet significant (10. 1):

On leaving those parts (in the north) he came into the regions of Judaea and Transjordan; and when a crowd gathered around him once again, he followed his usual practice and taught them. (NEB)

 

The quoted words seem to imply a wider ministry than the account which follows seems to allow for. They suggest that he may have moved down south in the late spring, passing down the eastern side of the Jordan River, finally arriving in Jerusalem at the beginning of the Passover festival week. The account as we now have it had been used in the worship of the church where all the events of the Passion week were celebrated together, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. The journey may, in reality, have taken much longer, and have involved longer sojourns east of the river before the visit to Jerusalem. Some scholars have suggested that the Gospel accounts comprise two visits to the city, the first in October for the Feast of the Tabernacles, when he dealt with the shopkeepers in the Foreigners’ Court of the temple and was involved in an open debate with the religious authorities.

Whatever the evidence for this, Jesus had made up his mind to make his final appeal to his people when they gathered for the feast of Passover the following spring. He did not intend to have his hand forced, so he spent the winter outside the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem authorities in Transjordan and returned to the city a few days before he was arrested. It is probable that the elaborate preparations that were made to secure his arrest away from potential popular intervention by ensnaring one of his friends would have taken more than a few days, and would have had to involve Pilate (depicted above), as governor, at an early stage.

During the first part of The Last Week, Jesus lodged outside the city at the house of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, at Bethany, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. From Bethany to Bethpage is a steep walk of about half an hour up a stony path. It was here, at the top of the Mount of Olives that Jesus mounted the ass on which he rode towards Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was at this spot that he paused and wept over the coming fate of the city. When Jesus took his last journey from Bethany into Jerusalem, he went up the stark Jericho road whose loneliness had given such point to his parable of the Good Samaritan; he knew the way; his disciples followed apprehensively behind. At the highest point of the road, just behind the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem appears suddenly in all its beauty, dominated by the magnificence of the temple. With a facade 150 feet high, facing eastward, it was made of light marble with decorations of pure gold. Surrounding the main building were collonaded courts and vestibules; in the very centre crowning the whole edifice was the Tabernacle, which, according to the historian Josephus, sparkled like a snow-capped mountain. The massive walls of the city, rising 250 metres high above the surrounding valley, embraced other well-known buildings: the Roman fortress Antonia on the north-east side, Herod’s palace on the west with its three enormous towers, 130, 100 and 80 feet high, a little below that was the house of the high priest, also a strong-hold with its own prison. These four buildings were to play their part in the drama that followed. Today none of them remain, since the destruction of the city by the Romans in AD 70, but the sites are there and modern archaeology has revealed evidence of their authenticity; while the breathtaking beauty of the city remains, for the Muslims erected on the site of the Jewish temple two magnificent mosques, which scintillate, the one with golden and the other with silver decorations, even as the original temple must have done. The first is ‘The Dome of the Rock’, the second ‘The Mosque of Al-Aqsa’.  Christian pilgrims today are invited by their Arab guides to stop and praise God when they first set eyes on this most Holy City, even though it bears little resemblance to the place where Jesus walked and taught.

 

Further on, He would have passed the Garden of Gethsemane, and then down into the valley of the brook, Kedron, and on up the steep slope into the city itself. During this week he preached in the courtyards of the temple, where he challenged the authorities. It was during these final visits to the Temple in Jerusalem, whether they happened in the autumn or the following spring of his southern ministry, that Jesus carried out two ‘acted parables’ which showed that, while he followed a path of nonviolent resistance, he was also willing to challenge the temple authorities over, and at, the heart of their religion. The entry into the city made clear his whole approach to God’s work. He had made secret preparations for it, arranging for the hire of a donkey with a farmer in a village near to the city, possibly Bethany itself, or Bethpage. He rode in to claim his right as God’s chosen leader, perhaps recalling the days of a thousand years before when his ancestor David, following the southern rebellion, rode back on a warhorse to reclaim the city, along the same road (II Sam. 19. 15.-20.2). He was no such military leader, and the words of Zechariah’s poem were probably in his mind:

Lo, your King comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on an ass,

on a colt, the foal of an ass (Zech. 9.9)

All he had said and done in the preceding ministry was symbolised in this act. It must have been intended for his friends, as was the symbolism of ‘the Last Supper’. If it happened in October, he would have joined pilgrims coming into the city for the feast of Tabernacles, using the occasion for his own purposes. Had it been a public claim to Messiahship, it is strange that the authorities, looking around for evidence to incriminate Jesus, did not seize upon this occasion as the kind of evidence they were looking for. The significance of the ‘acted parable’ was quite clear.

Jesus’ ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ was the second acted parable and was also a very public one, this time inside the city and the Temple itself. In the Temple were several open courts, one of which was known as the Court of the Gentiles. This was a large area where sympathetic foreigners could share in Jewish worship. It was being used in Jesus’ time as a market, a bank and a shortcut through the Temple, anything but a place of worship for foreigners. It looked as if nobody bothered whether foreigners worshipped there or not. Jesus cleared the courts, his very righteous indignation took the stall-keepers and bankers by surprise; foreigners, Jesus was saying, had a place in God’s worship. The Temple was not exclusively for the use of Jews. He made a declaration of the universality of the Good News – My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a robbers’ cave. The Jewish leaders confronted him afterwards:

As he was walking about the Temple, Jewish leaders came up to him. ‘Who told you to do this sort of thing?’ they asked. ‘Who gave you the right to act like this?’ 

‘I’ll ask you a question first,’ said Jesus. ‘You answer my question and I’ll answer yours. You remember John the Baptist; was he God’s messenger, or just another of these mob-leaders? You tell me.’

They didn’t know what to say… They were frightened of the crowd, for everybody thought that John was one of God’s messengers.

‘We don’t know,’ they said at last.

‘Well, I’m not telling you, then, who gave me power to do what I’m doing,’ said Jesus…

The Jewish leaders now made up their minds to get hold of Jesus,… but they were frightened of the crowd; so they left Jesus and went away. 

Mk. 11. 27-33, 12. 1-12.

Rather than answer their question, which he suspected was not really a genuine question, but one intended to trap him (he didn’t intend to be caught out as simply as that), Jesus had told them a parable about a landowner who let out his estate to farmers when he went abroad. At harvest-time, he sent a slave for his share of the market, but they beat the slave and sent him away empty-handed. So he sent another slave, but the farmers hit him on the head and shouted insults at him. So the landowner sent his only son, thinking that they would respect him. But the farmers saw this as an opportunity to claim the estates for themselves, so they killed him and threw his body outside the walls of the estate. Jesus then asked them what the landowner would do, answering his own question by telling them that the landowner would come himself and destroy the farmers and give the estate to others.

In challenging his critics, he adapted a story which Isaiah had once told to his people about a farm where only wild grapes would grow. The Jewish leaders would recognise immediately what he was doing and also see that the estate was a picture of the Jewish people and that he was criticising them directly by casting them as the farmers who had wanted to take over the estate and exploit it for themselves.; the Jewish leaders were now making the Temple their temple, not God’s. They weren’t asking what God really wanted them to do. No wonder that, then and there, they made up their minds that they weren’t having any more radical talk like this, and resolved to get rid of him somehow. If this took place in October, by the spring they were ready for him.

They were frightened that the common people would take him seriously, as they had John the Baptist. If they did, the whole Jewish way of life and their leadership hopes would disappear, or be changed into something its current leadership could hardly recognise. The Jewish leaders saw his intentions more clearly than his own friends did. If this incident took place in October, by the spring they were ready for him. They caught him at night in the orchard on the side of the Mount of Olives. His trial and execution could happen swiftly afterwards.

 

From the top: Caesarea, The Wilderness of Judaea, Miriam’s Gate, Jerusalem

The Resurgence of Jewish Nationalism: The Maccabees

It seems that, in the interests of peace and unity in his Syro-Hellenic empire, Antiochus was trying to eradicate Jewish nationalism, if not the Jewish nation itself, in what would have been an act of genocide of unprecedented proportions. He both underestimated the strength of Jewish national feeling, supposing that their attitude towards religion was much the same as that of the Greeks, and over-estimated Jewish support for his attempt to introduce Hellenistic culture. Not all among the upper classes opposed it, certainly, and there were even those among the priests who supported Antiochus’ general policy, though perhaps more from weak-mindedness than on principle. Opposed to them were the Hasidim, the ‘pious’, who in contrast to those who had abandoned the holy covenant for a covenant with the Gentiles. The Hasidim saw themselves as mighty warriors of Israel who chose to die rather than profane the holy covenant. They first took part in passive resistance, but many then joined the more militant Maccabees to help them to restore the Temple and to regain their right to the observance of their religion.  Mattathias, the leader of this rebel group, was the head of a priestly family who lived near Jerusalem. He had five sons, but it was Judas ‘Maccabeus’, a nickname deriving from a Hebrew word for ‘hammer’, who emerged as their military leader.

One of the first signs of revolt against Antiochus was an incident in the Temple itself. Mattathias saw one of his own people, a Jew, preparing to take part in a service of sacrifice to the heathen god. Mattathias struck him down and, turning to the Syrian guard, killed him. For their immediate safety, he and his sons fled to the hills where they gathered around them a strong resistance movement. From the hills, Judas laid raid after raid against the Syrians, making their occupation of Judaea more and more dangerous and hazardous. They organised themselves into guerilla army, destroying altars and forcibly circumcising babies. They campaigned both against Hellenising Jews and persecuting Gentiles (1 Macc. 2. 1-48). In the midst of all the fighting, Judas regularly assembled his followers to observe the Jewish religious ceremonies, to watch and pray, and to read the Divine Law, the Torah.

It was therefore hardly surprising that the fiercest reaction to Antiochus’ policy came from the Maccabees under Judas’ leadership. Their first aim was the regaining of freedom to obey the Jewish law and the recovery and purification of the temple. This was achieved after two years of fighting in 166-165 (1 Macc. 3. 10-4, 35), In December of 164 BC, Judas and his followers recaptured the temple and the priests reconsecrated the Holy Place, erecting new altars to the true God. It was also now protected by external fortifications, which were complemented by a permanent guard provided by the Maccabees. The colourful Jewish festival of Hannuka, also known as the Feast of Lights, commemorates the re-dedication of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 165 BC.  It is said that when the perpetual lamp of the Temple had to be re-lit, only one day’s supply of non-desecrated oil could be found but miraculously this oil lasted eight days until a fresh supply could be brought. This is why the festival lasts for eight days and is commonly known as The Feast of Lights. The day which sees the start of the festival is the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the ninth month, which can fall on any day in December. The central part of the ceremony is the lighting of a candle on the eight-branched candelabra on the first day, with an additional candle lit on each of the seven successive days recalling the eight days of light provided by the miraculous oil when the Temple was re-dedicated. In 163 BC Judas’ campaign of resistance was extended to the defence of Jews resident among the surrounding Gentiles (I Macc. 5). The Syrians counter-attacked successfully, but the death of Antiochus forced them into offering terms to the Jews, allowing to live by their laws as they did before (I Macc. 6. 59).

The Pharisees also began to develop in this post-exilic period, fostering a lay spirituality for the whole nation, thus ensuring Israel’s continuity after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. The Essenes, a group referred to by Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder, and the related Qumran community broke away from the official orthodoxy of the temple and priesthood in the belief that the future lay with the ‘elect’, separated from the pollutions of the world. The movement of which the community at Qumran formed a part may be seen as an extreme form of Pharisaism, taking the principle of separation to new heights. It probably originated during the Maccabean period. Details of the community are provided by the site itself and two documents containing regulations, found in what came to be known as the Dead Sea scrolls. These documents are known as ‘the Community rule’, formerly called the Manual of Discipline, and ‘the Damascus Rule’, so-called because it describes a group which migrated to Damascus and entered into a new covenant. The latter document was found in the Cairo synagogue, but fragments have also turned up at Qumran; it probably represents a different stage in the development of the community. A third document, ‘The War Rule’, describes the final battle between the spirits of light and darkness, which would be paralleled on earth by a similar battle before a final victory was won.

These future expectations helped to condition the day-to-day life of the sect and were an important reason for their continued purity. Their negative attitude to the rest of Judaism around them led to a rejection of the traditional calendar and of temple worship. Their own worship centred on the common meal, which probably represented the eschatological feast that would be celebrated in the last days. The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and their contents at first led to some exaggerated ideas about the significance of the Qumran sect in relation to Christianity. In fact, very few direct connections between the two can be demonstrated, and none on matters of central importance. A reading of the scrolls alone will make it quite clear that their main importance is in the light that they shed on the different forms of Judaism to be found at the beginning of the Christian era.

The death of Menelaus, one of the leading Hellenising Jews led to the victory of the Hasidim over the priesthood. The Maccabees, however, continued to resist the Hellenising high priest, Alcimus, who had begun his high priesthood by murdering sixty of the Hasidim. The Maccabees defeated the Syrian Army sent to support him at Adasa in 160 BC. II Maccabees ends with this victory, but two months later the Syrians killed Judas in battle and re-occupied Judaea. The Maccabees fled to the wilderness to regroup under Judas’ brother, Jonathan; Alcimus died and the Syrians departed. For two years there was peace in Jerusalem and in Judah. But now the Maccabees wanted nothing less than political freedom, and the Hellenists did not feel secure while they could be harried from the wilderness. They asked the Syrian general Bacchides to capture Jonathan (157 BC), but Bacchides was defeated and made a final peace with Jonathan, who settled at Michmash, a stronghold north-east of Jerusalem (I Macc. 9. 73; see map above). Like the judges of old, he began to judge the people, and he destroyed the ungodly out of Israel. The Maccabees had won, and until the arrival of the Romans in 63 BC, Judaea was virtually independent. The Seleucid empire was weakening as the Parthians became more powerful to the east. In 142 BC, the yoke of the Gentiles was removed from Israel, and the people began to write in their documents and contracts, “in the first year of Simon the great high priest and commander and leader of the Jews”  (I Macc. 13. 41f.).

However, in 134 BC Simon and two of his sons were killed by Ptolemy. A third son, John, in command of the army near Gezer, heard the news in time to reach Jerusalem before Ptolemy, and John was welcomed as high priest and ruler (I Macc. 16. 11-22). The Seleucid king made a further successful attack on Jerusalem, but in 128 BC was killed by the Parthians, and the internal struggles within the Seleucid empire prevented any further persecution of the Jews. There were a series of civil wars fought for control of the temple between the Sadducean party and the Pharisees. Salome ruled for the Pharisees, appointing Hyrcanus II as her high priest, while his brother Aristobulus led the Sadducees. When Salome died in 67 BC, Aristobulus defeated Hyrcanus, becoming both king and high priest. Then Hyrcanus made fresh alliances, defeated Aristobulus and besieged him in Jerusalem.

Roman Intervention and Imperialism: Herod the Great.

This was the point at which the Roman general Pompey arrived in Syria. Both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus appealed to him to come to their aid. When he reached Jerusalem, some Jews opened the city gates to him, while others barricaded themselves in the temple-fortress. Pompey built a ramp on the north side and brought up his great siege-engines. For three months the strong temple walls stood up to the battering rams before a great tower gave way, and the legionaries poured through the breach. The city surrendered, but no fewer than twelve thousand people were reported to have died in the massacre that followed. Pompey himself broke into the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest was allowed to go, to find out what Jewish religion was all about, an act which the Jews could not forgive.

After his sacking and desecration of Jerusalem, Pompey removed Aristobulus to Rome, reinstating Hyrcanus as high priest. It was Hyrcanus’ ally Antipater who gained most, however, for the Romans relied on him to establish a stable government and later gave him the title of procurator of Judaea. His son was Herod the Great, and among his grandsons was Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee in the time of Jesus of Galilee. Once again, religious and political authority was separated and it is noteworthy that even in the independent Jewish state the combination of the two was not popular. The Jews seemed to prefer a secular state as, of course, was the case under Roman rule into the first century. Before we get to the Christian New Testament, these issues were reflected in the previous Hebrew literature, especially the book of Daniel, and in those books included in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made at Alexandria, known to Christians as the Apocrypha. 

From the annexation of Palestine by Pompey in 63 BC down to the Roman-Jewish War of AD 66-72, the struggles of the Jews against their new masters, the Romans, were accompanied and stimulated by a stream of militant apocalyptic literature. As it was addressed to the common people this propaganda made great play with the fantasy of an eschatological saviour, the Messiah. This fantasy was already very ancient; if for the prophets, the saviour who was to reign at the end of time was usually Yahweh himself, in the popular religion of the post-exilic period, the future Messiah seems to have played a considerable part. Originally imagined as a particularly wise, just and powerful monarch of Davidic descent who would restore the national fortunes, the Messiah became more superhuman as the political situation became more hopeless. In Daniel’s dream, the Son of Man who appears riding on the clouds seems to personify Israel as a whole. Already Daniel may have imagined him as a superhuman hero, and in the Apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra, which belong in the main to the first century AD, the superhuman being is incontestably a man, a warrior-king endowed with unique, miraculous powers.

In the Book of Ezra the Messiah is depicted as the Lion of Judah at whose roar the last and worst beast – now the Roman eagle – bursts into flame and is consumed; and again as the Son of Man who first annihilates the multitudes of the heathen with the fire and storm of his breath and then, gathering together the lost ten tribes out of alien lands, establishes in Palestine a kingdom in which a reunited Israel can flourish in peace and glory. According to Baruch, there must come a time of terrible hardship and injustice, which is the time of the last and worst empire, the Roman. Then, just when evil has reached its greatest pitch, the Messiah will appear. A mighty warrior, he will rout and destroy the armies of the enemy; he will take captive the leader of the Romans and bring him to chains to Mount Zion, where he will put him to death; he will establish a kingdom which shall last to the end of the world. All the nations which have ever ruled over Israel will be put to the sword, and some members of the remaining nations will be subjected to the Chosen People. An age of bliss will begin in which pain, disease, untimely death, violence and strife, want and hunger will be unknown and in which the earth will yield its fruits ten-thousand-fold. Such a Kingdom was worth fighting for, and these apocalypses had at least established that in the course of bringing the Saints into their Kingdom the Messiah would show himself invincible in war.

Under the procurators, the conflict with Rome became more and more bitter. In 40 BC, the Parthians invaded Syria with the son of Aristobulus and pretender to the throne of Judah. He attracted strong support from the Judaeans, and within a short time, Judaea was in revolt. High priest Hyrcanus was captured and Herod was forced to leave Jerusalem secretly. He and his brother Phasael, who committed suicide, had been made tetrarchs of Judaea by Mark Antony following the murder of Caesar and defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC.  Herod was now forced to leave his family in the strong fortress of Masada and then fled to Petra, eventually making his way via Egypt and Rhodes to Rome, where he appealed for Antony’s support. The latter, …

… recalling Antipater’s hospitality and filled with admiration for the heroic character before him, decided on the spot that the man he had once made tetrarch should now be king of the Jews.

However, it was not until 37 BC that Herod was able to enter Jerusalem, escorted to his capital by a force of Roman legionaries. He continued to be popular with the Roman rulers, including the Emperor Octavian (now Augustus) and Agrippa, Augustus’ junior partner in ruling the Empire. He was able to secure the latter’s support for the Jews of the Dispersion in Asia Minor, who were being persecuted in the Greek cities where they now lived. Herod never enjoyed the same success in his relations with the Jews in Judaea. He was an Edomite and therefore could not combine the offices of king and high priest. The separation of the two offices served as a permanent reminder to his subjects that he was a usurper and the nominee of a foreign power. It was also a lasting contradiction of what the historian Josephus called the theocratic tradition of the Jews. Nevertheless, his achievements on the material level were far from negligible. He developed the economic resources of his kingdom, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, and founded two new cities – the port of Caesarea, which took twelve years to complete, and a city in Samaria which he also named after Augustus. When severe famine struck Judaea in 25 BC, he acted promptly and vigorously, selling the gold and silver furnishings from his palace to buy corn from the Roman governor of Egypt. Notable among the concessions made by the Romans towards the Jews of the Dispersion was the right to contribute to the temple in Jerusalem. Herod’s reign seemed to characterise the desire for ‘good government’ which the Jews had longed for since the days of Saul, David and Solomon.

It is difficult to reconcile this vital and capable ruler with the tyrannical monster who, in the story told in Matt. 2. 16f. ordered the massacre of the innocents. This appears to have been a local incident, which the gospel-writer seems to have used to demonstrate the fulfilment of a prophecy and to emphasise the significance of the infant king Jesus as a very different ‘King of the Jews’ to Herod. The story is not recorded anywhere apart from the gospel, and a more historical view of Herod derives from the way in which he had to deal, on his death-bed, with a feud within his extended family. In 5-4 BC he was seriously ill when his son Antipater began plotting against him and his half-brothers, Archelaus and Philip, over the succession. Among the symptoms of Herod’s terminal illness were rapid swings in mood and delusions of persecution. In 4 BC, amid mounting pressures from the Pharisees and only a few days before his death, Herod had Antipater executed, and ordered the execution of a number of other leading nobles, either in order to prevent civil war after his death and/or so that the Romans would mistake the mourning of their families for mourning for him, demonstrating his popularity among his own people. He then issued his fourth and final will, under the terms of which the kingdom was to be divided between three of his remaining sons. Archelaus, only eighteen, was to be king of Judaea, Edom and Samaria; his brother Antipas became tetrarch of Galilee and Transjordan; their half-brother, Philip, tetrarch of the north-eastern territories of the kingdom. The kingdom remained divided into these tetrarchies, with a succession of Roman governors as ‘procurators’ of Judaea (see below), the fifth and most infamous of which was, of course, Pontius Pilate, responsible, together with the Judaean Sanhedrin, for the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth.

(to be continued)

The Decline and Break-up of Israel:

Under the rule of David and Solomon, Israel was more than simply a united kingdom; the territories amounted to an empire. But, just as it would be a gross anachronistic error to equate an ancient empire, or kingdom, with a modern nation-state, it would also be wrong to confuse the multi-ethnic and multi-faith city of Jerusalem in the tenth century BC with a complex hub of government, administration and communications in the twenty-first century.  Modern capitals, and the ‘temples’ within them, are perhaps less ‘magical’ and ‘mystical’ than were ancient ‘capitals’, in an era in which the ideals of democracy are more important, and the exercise of power far less arbitrary. The idea of a city being ‘eternal’ in religious or cultural terms is not incompatible with it being a modern political capital, provided that both religious and political leaders of all traditions, identities and parties are able to demonstrate their mutual respect and shared loyalty to the city. The Old Testament prophets issued continual warnings to both kings and peoples not to persecute or exclude gentiles from the city and the temple courts. When they were ignored, they warned that what would result would be the destruction of Jerusalem, the desolation of its temple and the disintegration of its peoples.

The political history of Israel in the period 922-587 B.C. is characterised by increasingly rapid decline, punctuated by brief periods of partial recovery but ending in total annihilation. This fate befell not only Israel but all her neighbours as well. The rise of new centres of imperialism in Mesopotamia probably made this probable, but not inevitable. It was a process which was determined and accelerated by the foolish policies frequently pursued by the victims. Rehoboam (922-915), Solomon’s son and successor, chose to ignore the weakness of his position in the northern part of his kingdom, rejecting the demands for reform made by the northern tribes. All at once, the simmering resentment they felt at being ruled by Judaean, which had troubled both David and Solomon, boiled over into a full-scale insurrection. They declared their independence and selected Jeroboam, their former champion who had just returned from exile in Egypt, as their first king (I Kings 12. 1-20).

The new kingdom took for itself the name of Israel, which had previously been used to designate the whole undivided kingdom. The remnant in the south, remaining loyal to the dynasty of David, became known as Judah. With this division, Jerusalem was no longer the capital of Israel, now divided into two independent kingdoms, bitterly hostile to each other, and so the era of the Israelite empire was over. Of the two kingdoms, Israel was both the larger and the more prosperous. It included most of the larger Canaanite cities, the main trade routes, and the best land on both sides of the Jordan. Judah, by comparison, was a small state in the hills, remote from the main roads and sources of wealth. This remoteness made it strategically and economically less important to the great empires which, in turn, enabled it to survive for more than a century longer than its northern neighbour.

Jeroboam made certain religious changes in an attempt to discourage the annual pilgrimages which his subjects continued to make, in spite of the political schism, to Jerusalem. He established two royal temples of his own at the ancient sanctuaries of Bethel and Dan, where the God of Israel had been worshipped for centuries. Here, as a kind of compensation for the ark, he set up golden bull images, not originally intended to represent pagan deities, but which later became centres of a debased, pagan worship (Hos. 8. 3 f.; 10.5; 13.2). At the beginning of the ninth century,  there were decades of open ‘civil’ war in the rump kingdoms of Palestine and Syria, with first Judah and then Israel allying with the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus to attack the other.

Both countries were, however, to enjoy one final period of prosperity. Damascus, Israel’s traditional enemy, was destroyed by the Assyrian king in 802, and thereafter Assyria left Syria and Palestine in peace for half a century. During the long reigns of Jeroboam II (786-746) in Israel and Uzziah (783-742) in Judah, both countries made swift recoveries. Jeroboam recovered the whole of his northern and trans-Jordan territories at the expense of Damascus. Judah had already reconquered Edom in the early eighth century and went on to make further conquests (II Chronicles 26. 6-15). Taken together, the two kingdoms were almost as extensive as Solomon’s empire had been, but they remained as separate kingdoms. Later in the century, however, Hoshea, King of Israel, made the mistake of withholding tribute from the Assyrian throne of Shalmaneser (727-722), while at the same time making a treaty with a minor ‘king’ in Egypt. Shalmaneser attacked Israel in 724 and besieged its capital, Samaria. After two years, Samaria fell to Sargon II, succeeding Shalmaneser, and Sargon deported a large number of the inhabitants of Israel to other parts of his empire, replacing them with other ethnicities (II Kings 17. 5 f., 24). Judaean independence continued for more than a century until the defeat and death of Josiah by the Egyptians in 609. Judah again passed under foreign control, this time that of Egypt. With the defeat of the Egyptians by Nebuchadnezzar (605-562), at the battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C., Judah fell into the hands of the Babylonians, but continued intrigues with the Egyptians, so that in 597 Nebuchadnezzar arrived in Judah and besieged Jerusalem, which surrendered to him. The young king of Judah was deported to Babylon together with a great number of the upper classes of Judaean society. Fresh intrigues with Egypt led the Babylonians to invade once more in 588, devastating the entire country and destroying its cities. In 587 Jerusalem itself was captured and destroyed, together with the temple. King Zedekiah, a puppet king, was forced to witness the execution of his sons and was taken to Babylonia with many of his people (II Kings 25. 1-21).

So, like the people of Israel following the Assyrian deportations in the previous century, the Judaean people were now also torn in two. It is difficult to say which was in the worse plight; the exiles in Babylonia, deprived, it seemed, of the hope of ever returning to their homes, or the wretched lower classes, left mainly to their own devices in a land devastated, its crops ruined and its houses destroyed, a prey to hunger and disease and to the depredations of wild beasts and of the Edomite tribes from the south who raided their land, anxious to gain revenge on their former oppressors.

God’s ‘Chosen People’ and the Returning ‘Remnant’:

What so sharply distinguished the Jews from the other peoples of the ancient world was their attitude towards history and in particular towards their own role in history. The Jews were alone in combining an uncompromising monotheism with an unshakable conviction that they themselves were the Chosen People of the one true God. At least since the exodus from Egypt, they had believed that the will of Yahweh was concentrated upon on Israel, that Israel alone was charged with the realisation of that will. At least since the days of the Prophets, they had been convinced that Yahweh was no mere national god, however powerful, but the one and only God, the omnipotent Lord of History who controlled the destinies of all nations. There were many who, like the ‘Second Isaiah’, felt that divine election imposed a special moral responsibility upon them, an obligation to show justice and mercy in their dealings with all men, including the poor of their own nation. In their view, the divinely appointed task of Israel was to enlighten the Gentiles and so carry God’s salvation to the ends of the earth. But alongside this ethical interpretation, there existed another which became ever more attractive as the fervour of an ancient nationalism was subjected to the shock and strain of repeated defeats, deportations and dispersals. Precisely because they were so sure of being the Chosen People, Jews tended to react to peril, oppression and hardship by fantasies of the total triumph and boundless prosperity which Yahweh, out of his omnipotence, would bestow upon his Elect in the fulness of time.

Already in the Prophetic Books of the Old Testament, some of them dating from the eighth century BC, there were passages that foretold how out of an immense cosmic catastrophe, there would arise a Palestine which would be nothing less than a new Eden, Paradise Regained, to borrow from John Milton. Due to their neglect of Yahweh the Chosen People would have to be punished by famine and pestilence, war and captivity, they must indeed be subjected to a shifting judgement so severe that it would effect a clean break with a guilty past. There must indeed be a Day of Wrath when sun and moon and stars would be darkened, the heavens would be rolled together and the earth would be shaken. There must be a Judgement when the disbelievers – those in Israel who have not trusted in the Lord and also Israel’s enemies, the heathen nations, would be judged and cast down, if not utterly destroyed. But this would not be the end, a remnant would return from exile, and through that remnant, the divine purpose would be accomplished.

When the nation would be regenerated and reformed, Yahweh would cease from vengeance and become the Deliverer. The righteous remnant would be assembled once more in Palestine and Yahweh would dwell among them as ruler and judge. He would reign from a rebuilt Jerusalem, a Zion which has become the spiritual capital of the world, where wild and dangerous beasts have become tame and harmless. The moon will rise as the sun and the sun’s light will be increased sevenfold.  Deserts and wastelands will become fertile and beautiful. There will be an abundance of water and provender for the flocks and herds, for men, there will be an abundance of water, corn, water, fish and fruit; men and flocks and herds will multiply exceedingly. Freed from the disease and sorrow of every kind, doing no more iniquity but living according to the law of Yahweh now written in their hearts, the Chosen People will live in joy and gladness.

The dream of a ‘homeland’ in Palestine:

In the period 312 to 63 BC, the Jewish people were involved in a struggle for a united, independent homeland, a period when the Palestinian Jews attempted to establish their own state and live according to their own religious conscience, while the Jews abroad were forced to work out for themselves how they should live and express their faith in order to bear clear witness to their faith in the alien, dominant Greek, or Hellenic culture around them. In the apocalypses of this period, which were directed to the lower strata of the Jewish population as a form of nationalist propaganda, the tone is cruder and more boastful than in the earlier literature. This was already striking in the earliest apocalypse of the period, the vision or dream which occupies Chapter VII of the Book of Daniel and which was composed about the year 165 BC, at a particularly critical moment in Jewish history. For more than three centuries, since the end of the Babylonian exile, the Jews in exile had enjoyed a measure of peace and security, at first under Persian, later under Ptolemaic rule; but the situation changed when, in the second century BC, Palestine passed into the hands of the Syro-Greek dynasty of the Seleucids.  From 198 BC, Palestine belonged to the Seleucids, taking their name from Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s officers who had established himself as ruler over the eastern part of Alexander’s empire in 312 BC and by 301 had gained most of what is part of Turkey, as well as Antioch in Syria, which he named as his capital. Seleucus’ rival was Ptolemy, who had annexed Palestine following Alexander’s death, starting a struggle between ‘the kings in the north’ and ‘the kings in the south’, as described in chapter 11 of the Book of Daniel.

For nearly a century Palestine had been the battleground between these opposing forces and was frequently conquered and reconquered until the Seleucid Antiochus III took all Palestine, concluding a treaty with Ptolemy V. There had been Jews in Egypt since the time of Jeremiah (Jer. 43, 5ff.), and in 312 BC, Ptolemy I had settled captives in Alexandria, where they were greatly influenced by the Greek way of life. Ptolemy II had had the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek for the benefit of the new Greek-speaking Jews of the city. Judea itself was also influenced by the Hellenistic way of life, founded on the Greek polis (city), with its urban civilisation and tradition of training young men in athletic prowess and literary skills. The Jews were bitterly divided, for while the worldly upper-classes eagerly adopted Greek manners and customs, the common people clung all the more resolutely to the faith of their forefathers.

In 169 BC, Antiochus IV campaigned in Egypt, aiming to extend and unify his kingdom by including Judaea.  When the Seleucid monarch tried to intervene on behalf of the pro-Greek party and went so far as to forbid all Jewish religious observances, the response was the Maccabean revolt. Antiochus proclaimed himself by title Epiphanes meaning ‘God made manifest’. The Jews could never subscribe to this for their God was Yahweh, who had been their shield and saviour from earliest times. Upon hearing that Judaea was in revolt, Antiochus raided and took control of Jerusalem, plundering houses, desecrating the Holy of Holies in the Temple, rededicating it to Zeus, as well as profaning the fortress by setting up his own citadel overlooking the Temple (Dan. 11. 30). He then instituted a campaign to unify his empire and rid the region of all evidence of the Jewish faith, slaughtering large numbers of Jews in the process, whom he then left under a governor who was more barbarous than the man who appointed him (II Macc. 5. 22).  He also decreed in Palestine (I Macc. 1. 4ff.) that all should be one people, and that each should give up his customs. He wrote to the Jews, directing them, on pain of death, …

… to follow customs strange to the land, to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary, to profane sabbaths and feasts, to defile the sanctuary and the priests, to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols, to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised.   

In the dream in the Book of Daniel, composed at the height of the revolt, four beasts symbolise four successive world-powers, the Babylonian, the (unhistorical) Median, the Persian and the Greek, the last of which shall be more diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces. When this empire, in turn, was overthrown Israel, personified as the ‘Son of Man’,

… came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days… And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away… The greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven was given to the people of the saints of the most High…

This goes much further than any of the Prophets beforehand: for the first time, the glorious future kingdom is imagined as embracing not simply Palestine but the whole world. Already here one can recognise the paradigm of what was to become and to remain the central ‘fantasy’ of revolutionary eschatology. The world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness, a power which is imagined not simply as human but as demonic. The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable, until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it. Then the saints themselves, the holy, chosen people who hitherto have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, will, in their turn, inherit dominion over the whole earth. This will be the culmination of history; the Kingdom of the Saints will not only surpass in glory all other previous kingdoms, it will have no successors.  It was thanks to this dream that Jewish apocalyptic, through its derivatives, held such a fascination for the discontented and frustrated of later ages, and continued to do so long after the Jews themselves had forgotten its very existence.

(to be continued…)

‘Fake History’ versus Religious Literacy:

‘Fake News’ has apparently now found a supplement in ‘Fake History’ for the Trump administration in the United States of America. At the beginning of Advent 2017, in a move mainly concerned with pleasing the religious right in America rather than appeasing Israel, the ‘peacock’ President unilaterally declared Jerusalem as the (exclusive) capital of Israel and promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to the city. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this action in terms of an ultimate two-state solution in Palestine, the justification that it is based on three thousand years of history is, quite simply, in error, whether one looks at the historical, archaeological or biblical evidence. It is more connected with literal and heretical interpretations of the Book of Revelation among extreme evangelicals than with the records contained in the Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles, viewed in the context of other contemporary sources. It is also based on a view which is at best misguided and at worst purely ignorant of the nature of the territories and kingdoms of Israel and Judah in ancient times, in relation to their neighbours, as well as with regard to the role of Jerusalem in ancient times. We live in a time when a decline in religious and historical literacy has allowed a literal fundamentalism to become predominant in church and politics, at least in the USA. A leading American evangelical, Gary M. Burge, has recently expressed his frustration at the failure of his fellows to grasp and articulate the true message of the Old Testament about the true mission of the peoples of Israel:

Numerous evangelicals like me are less enamored of the recent romance between the church and Republican politics, and worry about moving the U.S. embassy. For us, peacemaking and the pursuit of justice are very high virtues. We view the ethical teachings of the scriptures as primary, and recognize that when biblical Israelites failed in their moral pursuits, they were sorely criticized by the Hebrew prophets and became subject to ejection from the Holy Land. … We need people like them now to remind the White House that in the Middle East, even symbolic gestures can have very real, dangerous consequences. But we also need evangelicals to do this. Trump listens to his evangelical advisers—and they are the ones who can lead him back to the Hebrew prophets, where a different point of view can be found.

In this series of ‘postings’, I have chosen to return to the basic sources which I used as a student of Biblical Studies and Church History and informed my early career in teaching History and Religious Education. In doing so, I want to demonstrate how important it is to understand the parallel development of the ancient history of Palestine and Israel with the evolution of an oral and literary tradition of first Jewish and later Christian eschatology, concerned to provide the persecuted faithful with a sustained vision of divine power. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the two are connected in the figure and person of the Messiah breaking through into human reality. This time of year, Advent, Hannukah and Christmas are redolent of these themes.

The Empire of David and Solomon:

The history of Jerusalem as a Hebrew or ‘Israelite’ capital begins with David’s capture of it from the Philistines, following his establishment of his united, independent rule over the whole of the territory of the ten tribes (II Samuel 5. 17-25). The Philistine empire had been swept away overnight by a man who, unlike the current American President, had won his way to power through his sheer intellectual ability. After the battle of Mount Gilboa (c. 1,000 BC), in which both King Saul, the first Hebrew king, and his son Jonathan were both killed (1 Sam. 31), it had seemed that the Israelite kingdom was at an end and that Philistine power was unchallenged. David’s first steps towards national leadership were taken under Philistine auspices. They thought that they had every reason to trust him, and no doubt approved on his first action, which was to advance on Hebron, the chief city of Judah (II Sam. 2.2-4). They underestimated his status as a ‘national hero’ to the Judaeans, who needed no show of force to choose him as their king. However, to the Philistines, this ‘kingship’ was a title without substance: as far as they were concerned, he was governing Judea as a vassal state on their behalf.

David spent his next few years consolidating his territorial position. He accepted the invitation of the local elders to become king of the north and east (II Sam. 5.1-3). Although his defeat of the Philistines was decisive, he did not annex their home territory: he left them still independent but unable to harm him (II Sam. 8.1). Instead, he went on to conquer the neighbouring states of Moab, Edom and Ammon, and the Aramaean kingdoms of Zobah and Damascus (II Sam. 8; 10. 15-19; 12. 26-31), in such short order that the more distant states of Hamath and Tyre quickly established friendly relations with the new power which had appeared in Palestine. As a result, during his lifetime, no foreign power attacked the Israelite territories. Apart from his capture of Jerusalem, we are not told what happened to the city-states of Canaan. Some had been conquered by the Philistines, others remained independent. Only later in the biblical narrative are they referred to as ‘cities in Israel’. We may assume that they capitulated to David, as it was unlikely that he would have tolerated independent enclaves within his home territory when setting out on foreign campaigns.

Therefore, by the mid-tenth century BC, a ‘country’ which, only a few years previously, had consisted of a few loosely-organised tribes under foreign domination had now become an Israelite empire, stretching from the border between Egypt and Gaza to the Euphrates. Its creator, David, was to rule it for almost forty years, until 961 B.C. Internally, David took some shrewd steps to consolidate his position. Although his capture of Jerusalem probably took place later than is suggested in the biblical account (II Sam. 5. 6-9), he then transferred his capital there from Hebron. He thus not only secured an extremely strong, fortified city as the centre of his government but also forestalled tribal jealousies. Had he continued to rule from Hebron, the northern tribes might have seen him as a Judaean upstart; but Jerusalem had no tribal connections at all, so he was able to project himself as an impartial king of ‘all Israel’.

Even more successful was David’s transfer to Jerusalem of the ark of the Covenant. This was a sacred object, once the rallying point of the tribal league, which had been captured by the Philistines. It still had the power to command the old loyalties to the priesthood which had existed before Saul became king, and by placing it in his new capital, David made another shrewd move to strengthen loyalty to himself and to allay any suspicions that more conservative factions might have had that he intended to sweep away old traditions and institutions in establishing a new type of monarchy based on the pagan model of the imperial rulers in the region. By this action, he proved both his piety as an Israelite of old and his concern to give the old tribal league a permanent centre where the traditional worship of the God of Israel would be carried on as before.

He was greatly assisted in these policies by what must have seemed to his subjects and contemporaries as miraculous success in everything he did. No-one, it was believed, could have been so successful without at least a measure of divine favour. This is the constant narrative theme of the Hebrew scriptures about him, becoming almost a ‘theological dogma’ in II Sam. 7 where God is represented as confirming David’s position as the divinely appointed and anointed leader through whom God’s will for his people was achieved. There is no reason to doubt that David himself believed this, and saw himself as the servant of the God of Israel. At the same time, however, he was well aware that his was a composite, multi-ethnic kingdom, comprising Canaanites as well as Israelites. The cooperation of the latter was not only essential for the safety of the state, but also of great potential benefit to it. They were the heirs of centuries of civilised urban living and superior to the Israelites both in warfare and in the arts of peace. Unassimilated, they constituted a serious existential threat; assimilated, they provided David with much-needed administrative and military expertise. In return for their loyalty, David seems to have recognised their autonomy over their own local administration, also allowing them the freedom to practise their own religious traditions.

Thus in his religious policy, David steered a careful middle course. At Jerusalem, the worship of the God of Israel centred upon the ark was modified by elements borrowed from the pre-Israelite Canaanite cult. In this way, Canaanites who worshipped in the city did not feel that the Hebrew worship was entirely alien, imposed on them by a foreign conqueror. A similar policy was adopted in the former Canaanite cities, and the worship of their gods, thus tolerated, continued to flourish throughout the period of the monarchy. David was no religious fanatic, though believing himself to be under the favour and protection of the God of Israel. In fact, this ‘multi-cultural’ approach contributed considerably to his success as a ruler by divine right.

David’s systematic monarchy was very different from the chaotic rule of Saul. As a powerful political state, Israel rapidly developed institutions which were entirely new to the Israelites, in many respects modelled on those of its neighbours. The business of efficient government required a professional civil service which David recruited from both Israelite and Canaanite sources, also employing skilled scribes from other countries which had greater experience in administration, especially from Egypt. This central government at Jerusalem provided the king with advice on political problems in the ‘wisdom’ tradition of the Near East. It also administered justice under the king as chief judge, collected taxes and dues, organised a state labour force, kept administrative records and dealt with foreign affairs, maintaining diplomatic correspondence with foreign powers and negotiating international treaties.

These ‘wise men’ were also known as ‘scribes’, belonging to an educated class which was international in character and identifiable throughout the ancient Near and Middle East. It comprised statesmen and administrators as well as men of letters, and it exerted great influence on the affairs of Judah from the time of David to the fall of the Judaean state. They were products of a higher education whose aim was to inculcate a religious mental discipline and to provide hard-headed and clear-thinking men to fill important diplomatic and administrative offices in the state. The title of ‘scribe’ was given to such high officials in Egypt as well as to their counterparts in Babylonia and Assyria. The title ‘scribe’ or ‘secretary’ does not simply mean that the person is a skilled writer, nor does it show that the office he holds is one which calls for linguistic dexterity. It implies that without these skills a man did not possess the essential qualifications for office, and is a reminder that the mastery of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform scripts required intellectual concentration of a high order. In II Sam. 8. 16-18 and 20. 23-25 there are official lists of the leading members of David’s establishment, ecclesiastical, civil and military. Of the two political officials named, Seraiah is ‘the secretary’ of state, and Jehoshaphat is ‘the recorder’. Both are of the highest rank in the government.  Solomon’s principal officials are called ‘statesmen’, and a hereditary principle is seen to apply in both civil and ecclesiastical spheres. The office of secretary of state, occupied by Seraiah under David, appears to be held jointly by his two sons (I Kings 4. 1-6). Solomon’s list is longer than that of David’s reign, reflecting the more complicated organisation of Solomon’s state. Azariah, son of Nathan, is said to have control of ‘the officials’, probably the twelve appointed by Solomon over all Israel, each of whom was responsible for the provisioning of the royal household for one month of the year.

The degree of centralised control which was exercised by Solomon brought into being a cadre of officials who had close associations with Jerusalem and the court and to whom administration and diplomacy were trusted. They were a class specially educated from an early age for the responsibility of high office, and it may be that a school for ‘scribes’ was founded by Solomon in Jerusalem in order to meet the demand for high service in his state. These ‘statesmen’ were at the centre of government and foreign affairs in Israel and Judah from the time of David to the end of the monarchy. They had all the prestige and reputation as weighty counsellors to the king. Diplomacy and administration became a profession in Judah and were in the hands of a class of men who understood the internationally accepted protocol and had their own standards of efficiency, conscientiousness and integrity.

These administrative developments had far-reaching consequences. In particular, they facilitated greater social distinctions than Israelite society had ever known before. The Canaanite cities were already accustomed to a highly stratified social structure, but this was the first time that the freeborn Israelites had experienced rule by a wealthy, urban ruling class whose interests were far from identical from their own. In the reigns of David and Solomon, Jerusalem became a wealthy, cosmopolitan city in which this ruling class enjoyed a standard of living beyond anything which could have been dreamed of by the Hebrew peasantry and craftworkers. Apart from the fact that they were now free from foreign oppression and slavery, the ordinary Israelite population still consisted mainly of farmers who hardly felt the benefits of Israel’s new ‘imperial’ status.

Supreme above the new upper class stood the king. Whatever the divine sanctions by which he claimed to rule, and however much he might rely on the loyalty of the ordinary Israelite, one of the main sources of his power was his professional army, which owed him a purely personal loyalty. It was this army which had first enabled David to capture Jerusalem, but many of its members were foreigners who had no reason for loyalty to Israel or its deity (II Sam. 8. 18; 11; 15. 18-22; 20. 7, 23). It was these ‘servants of David’ who, during Absalom’s rebellion, defeated the rebels, known as ‘the men of Israel’ and restored David to the throne (II Sam. 18. 7). Having secured his position through this mercenary army, David was able to play the part of an oriental monarch, gathering around him a court which imitated the splendour of foreign courts and tending to become more isolated from the common people (II Sam. 15. 3 f.) He was too shrewd, however, to allow this tendency to go too far. He knew that ultimately he could not retain his throne without the loyalty and affection of his people, and also that too great a departure from social and religious traditions of the Israel of old would put his throne in danger. It is unlikely that this Israelite monarchy, at this or any other time during its short existence, succumbed to the temptation of claiming for itself that semi-divine character which was characteristic of other monarchies of the time. We have to distinguish between some of the high-flown language in the Psalms and the Second Book of Samuel and the actual political realities faced by David. He was certainly regarded, like Saul, as ‘the Lord’s anointed’, the man who had brought salvation to his people, but there were too many men at his court who knew the facts of his rise to power for any further extravagant notions about his office to gain wide credence.

David did, however, firmly adopt one aspect of the monarchical concept which hardly accorded with the Israelite ideas of charismatic leaders, chosen personally by God: the principle of a hereditary monarchy. Saul had also intended that his son Jonathan should succeed him, but under David, the principle seems to have been taken for granted, and it was given a religious sanction in the divine promise given to him in II Sam. 7.  However, neither David’s own position nor the future of his family was really secure. The power and prosperity of the Israelite state made it vulnerable to usurpers, and such men found no lack of grievances which could be turned to their advantage. There were many who had remained loyal to Saul and his family and continued to regard David as a traitor and a murderer, and there were others who had come to disapprove of his arrogant and sinful actions such as his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah. In the north, there were those who resented being ruled by a Judaean, and there were still others who felt that the old religious and social traditions were being overthrown. Following the rebellion led by his own son, Absalom, a man called Sheba, of Saul’s tribe of Benjamin, also rose in rebellion (II Sam. 15-20). Although that rebellion was similarly crushed, the feelings of discontent remained.

The situation in the latter part of the reign was complicated by uncertainty about the succession to the throne. David had a number of wives, several of whom had borne him sons. In the hereditary monarchies of the ancient Near East, there was no rule of ‘primogeniture’, that the eldest son must succeed. The king had the right to choose his own heir, and it was obviously desirable that this should be done in good time. After the death of Absalom, there remained Adonijah and Solomon, half-brothers, as obvious candidates. The rivalry between the brothers led to a dangerous feud among the leading men of the state. But Adonijah made a false move, and paid for it with his life, dragging down with him some of the most important personalities of the reign which was now ending. Solomon was king, but he began his reign with a bloodbath (I Kings 2). In spite of splendid outward appearances, not least the construction of the Temple, the reign (961-922 B.C.) was a period of stagnation and the beginnings of Israel’s decline. This came as no surprise to contemporaries for whom even the reign of another David (which Solomon was not) could probably not have held together the heterogeneous empire for a second generation.

In economic terms, matters continued to progress relatively well. Although the agricultural resources and reserves of Israel were by no means great, it was well placed in other respects. The overlordship of the Canaanite plain had given David control of the only land route linking Egypt in the south with Mesopotamia in the east and Asia Minor in the north. Solomon ensured his control over it by extensive fortifications of the key cities  (I Kings 4. 26; 9. 15-19; 10. 26), deriving considerable wealth from it through tolls, taxes and external trade. He also established, through the alliance with Tyre, a lucrative maritime trade, building his own sea-port on the Red Sea. He also mined copper in Edom and refined it for export. Besides the trade with Egypt and Tyre, trade was also established with South Arabia (I Kings 10. 2,13). These activities brought considerable profit to Israel, but Solomon succumbed to a fatal folie de grandeur by attempting to imitate the splendours of Egypt and Mesopotamia, erecting buildings of great magnificence. Since Israel itself possessed neither the materials nor the skilled labour, he had to import these from Tyre, and as a consequence found himself in financial difficulties (I Kings 9. 10-14). At the same time, he alienated popular support not only by over-burdening his people with an extravagant court (I Kings 4. 7-19, 22f.) but also by extending the forced labour scheme which David had begun to such an extent that it seriously impaired agricultural efficiency (I Kings 5. 13-18).

The Israelite empire began to break up. Judah remained loyal to the king, and the Canaanite cities gave no trouble; but Edom and Damascus revolted, re-establishing their independence and becoming dangerous enemies (I Kings 11. 14-25); and the northern tribes of Israel produced their own leader, Jeroboam, who, when his first uprising failed, retired to Egypt where he was given protection and bided his time (I Kings 11. 26-40).

Solomon’s most enduring achievement was the building of the temple at Jerusalem, but he could not have realised at the time the significance this would have in later times. The building was merely the corollary of David’s bringing of the ark to Jerusalem. Solomon provided a magnificent shrine for it, but in doing so he employed Phoenician architects and craftsmen to design and build it, thereby ensuring an increase in the Canaanite element of Israel’s worship. Solomon is praised in several biblical passages for his wisdom, but only one of these refers to his statesmanship in doing so. He may have been wise in other respects, but statesmanship was not one of these. Therefore, the early promise of political greatness for Israel went unfulfilled. It had undertaken fundamental changes during the reigns of David and Solomon, changes which would not be reversed. The Hebrews had been brought into the world of international politics and culture. The striking literary examples of this are to be found in the ‘succession narratives’ in which the characters and events at David’s court are described in vivid detail (II Sam. 9-20; I Kings 1; 2) Much of the advances in literary craftsmanship are due to the influence of Egypt and the Canaanite cities, but it is no mere imitation; its authors applied the newly-acquired techniques and insights to their own historical traditions, in which the new confident, national spirit inspired by the heroic achievements of David had given them a new sense of pride.

We not only have the narrative texts of the Books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and the interpretative sources of the prophets on which to base our knowledge of the rise and fall of the Israelite empire, but a vast quantity of written sources dealing with the international setting of the history of Israel has been discovered. Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian records provide a very full account of the histories of those empires, including their relationships with the Israelite kingdoms. In a few instances, they contain independent accounts of events described in the biblical narrative. From Palestine itself we also have two texts, written in Hebrew; the Siloam Inscription, written by Hezekiah’s engineers inside a water tunnel (cf. II Kings 20. 20) and the Lachish Letters, a correspondence between Judaean army officers during the campaign which ended with the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. The excavation of Samaria, the Israelite capital built by Omri, also brought to light the Samaria Ivories, part of the decoration of Ahab’s palace (I Kings 22. 39).