A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Karen Armstrong

¹⁰

      But others clung to their old traditions.

      The Deuteronomists must have felt vindicated by the tragedy of 586: they had been right all along. The old Canaanite mythology that had encouraged Judahites to believe that Zion was impregnable had indeed been a delusion. Instead, they urged their fellow countrymen to concentrate on the Law of Moses and the covenant that Yahweh had made with the people of Israel before they had ever heard of Jerusalem. The Law would prevent the exiles from losing their identity in the melting pot of Babylon. During these years, the exiles codified regulations and practices that marked them out from their pagan neighbors. They circumcised their male children, refrained from work on the Sabbath, and adopted special food laws that distinguished them as the people of the covenant. They were to be a “holy” people, as distinct and separate as their God.

      Others found comfort in the old mythology, however, and felt that the ancient symbols and stories of Zion spoke more eloquently to their condition. The history of religion shows that in times of crisis and upheaval, people turn more readily to myth than to the more rational forms of faith. As a form of psychology, myth can penetrate deeper than cerebral discourse and touch the obscure cause of distress in the farthest reaches of our being. In our own day, we have seen that exile involves far more than a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Having lost their unique place in the world, exiles can feel cast adrift and lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of “home” has gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, people can feel that they are in some sense withering and becoming insubstantial. Thus the French anthropologist R. P. Trilles records that after they had to leave their ancestral land, the Gabon Pygmies felt that the whole cosmos had been disturbed. Their creator was angry with them, the world had become a dark place—“night and again night”—and their exile had also uprooted the spirits of their ancestors, who now wandered lost in distant, inaccessible realms, eternally displaced.

      Are they below, the spirits? Are they there?

      Do they see the offerings set out?

      Tomorrow is naked and empty.

       For the Maker is no longer with us there,

      He is no longer the host seated with us at our fire.¹¹

      The loss of homeland meant that the link with heaven, which alone made life supportable, had been broken. In the sixth century, the Judahite exiles expressed this by saying that their world had come to an end.

      Those who wished to remain loyal to Yahwism and the traditions of their ancestors had a serious problem. When the exiles asked: “How can we sing one of Yahweh’s songs in an alien land?”¹² they were not simply giving voice to their homesickness but facing a theological dilemma. Today religious people believe that they can make contact with their God wherever they are in the world: in a field, supermarket, or church. But in the ancient world, prayer in our sense was far from common. In exile the Judaeans developed the practice of lifting up their hands, turning in the direction of Jerusalem, and speaking words of praise or entreaty to Yahweh precisely as a substitute for sacrifice, which was the normal way to approach the deity.¹³ But this type of prayer was a novel idea and would not have occurred to the first deportees as a matter of course. The exile would teach the Judaeans the more interior spirituality of the Axial Age. When they first arrived in Babylonia in 597 the exiles would probably have felt that they had been taken away from Yahweh’s presence. His home was in Zion, and they could not build a temple to him in Babylon, as we would build a church, synagogue, or mosque, because according to the Deuteronomist ideal there was only one legitimate shrine for Israel and that was in Jerusalem. Like the Gabon Pygmies, the exiles must have wondered whether their Maker was actually with them in this strange city. Hitherto Israelites had gathered for communal worship only in places associated with a revelation of Yahweh or some other type of hierophany. But there was no known instance of a Yahwistic theophany in Babylonia.

      Then, out of the blue, Yahweh made an appearance in Tel Aviv. Among the first batch of deportees to arrive in Babylon in 597 was the priest Ezekiel. For the first five years, he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he was—literally—knocked out by a shattering vision of Yahweh which left him stunned for an entire week. A cloud of light had seemed to approach him from the north in the midst of which he saw a huge chariot drawn by four of the cherubim, strange beasts not unlike the karibu carved on the palace gates of Babylon. When he tried to describe this apparition, Ezekiel was at pains to show that it lay beyond normal words and concepts. What he had seen was “something … shaped like a throne and high upon this throne was a being that looked like a man.” In the dense confusion of storm, fire, and tumultuous noise, Ezekiel knew that he had glimpsed “something that looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”¹⁴ Like Isaiah, Ezekiel had glimpsed the extraordinary Reality that lay behind the symbols of the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant—Yahweh’s earthly throne—was still in the Temple in Jerusalem, but his “glory” had arrived in Babylon. It was indeed a “revelation,” an unveiling: the great curtain separating the Hekhal from the Devir in Solomon’s Temple had represented the farthest limit of human perception. Now that veil had been pulled to one side, though Ezekiel was careful to distinguish between Yahweh himself and his “glory,” a manifestation of his Presence which made the ineffable reality of the sacred apprehensible to human beings. The vision was a startling reformulation of an older theology. In the very earliest days, Israel had experienced God as mobile. He had come to his people from the Sinai to Canaan on the wings of the cherubim. Now the cherubim had conveyed him to his people in exile. He was not confined to either the Temple or the Promised Land, like so many of the pagan gods who were associated indissolubly with a particular territory.

      Furthermore, Yahweh chose to be with the exiles, not with the Judaeans who were still living in Jerusalem. Ezekiel had his vision in about 592, some six years before the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, but in a later vision he realized that Jerusalem was doomed because even though they were on the brink of disaster the Judaeans back home were still worshipping other gods and ignoring the terms of their covenant with Yahweh. One day Ezekiel was sitting in his house in Tel Aviv with the exiled elders of Judah when “the hand of the Lord Yahweh” fell upon him and he was taken in spirit to Jerusalem. There he was led on a conducted tour of the Temple and was horrified to see people bowing before alien gods within the sacred precincts. These “filthy practices,” he was told, had driven Yahweh from his house, and Ezekiel watched the cherubim spread their wings, the wheels of the great chariot-throne begin to move, carrying the “glory of Yahweh” out of the city of Jerusalem and disappearing over the Mount of Olives to the east of the city. He had decided to come to the community of exiles instead, and now that Yahweh was no longer living in Zion, the destruction of Jerusalem was only a matter of time.¹⁵

      But Yahweh also promised the prophet that one day he would return to his city, taking the same route over the Mount of Olives, and reestablish his residence on Mount Zion. There would be a new exodus, as the scattered exiles were brought home, and a new creation in which the land would be transformed from a desolate wasteland to become “like the garden of Eden.” It would be a time of healing and integration: Judah and Israel would be reunited under a Davidic king and, as in Eden, Yahweh would live among his people.¹⁶ It would be the end of separation, alienation, and anomie and a return to that original wholeness for which people longed. Jerusalem was central to this vision. Some fourteen years after the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, either Ezekiel or one of his disciples had a vision of a city “on a very high mountain” whose name was Yahweh Sham: “Yahweh is there.”¹⁷ The city was an earthly paradise, a place of peace and fertility in the old sense. Just as the stream had welled up in