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    Jerusalem: The Biography
    Jerusalem: The Biography
    Jerusalem: The Biography
    Ebook1,050 pages14 hours

    Jerusalem: The Biography

    By Simon Sebag Montefiore

    4/5

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    FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED FOR 2024

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL BOOK OF THE YEAR

    "Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It’s a treasure. It’s a wonderful book." —Bill Clinton

    "Impossible to put down. . . . Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review

    The history of Jerusalem is the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today’s multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgment Day and the Apocalypse. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new archives and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city and turbulent region through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, amirs, sultans, caliphs, presidents, autocrats, imperialists and warlords, poets, prophets, saints and rabbis who created, destroyed, chronicled, and believed in Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

    A classic of modern literature, this is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, co-existence, power and myth, but also a freshly updated, carefully balanced history of the Middle East, from King David to the new powers of the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is how today’s Middle East was forged, how the Holy Land became sacred and how Jerusalem became Jerusalem—the only city that exists twice—in heaven and on earth.

    “Magnificent. . . . Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character intaking us through the city’s story with compelling, breathless tension.” —The Wall Street Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 25, 2011
    ISBN9780307594488
    Author

    Simon Sebag Montefiore

    Simon Sebag Montefiore's bestselling books are published in more than forty languages. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Sashenka. As a historian, his works include Jerusalem: The Biography; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; and Young Stalin, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Prize (United Kingdom), and Le Grand Prix de Biographie Politique (France). One Night in Winter won the 2014 Political Fiction Book of the Year Prize (United Kingdom) and was long-listed for the Orwell Prize.

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    Reviews for Jerusalem

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    • 5/5
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    • 4/5
      Though this is a very good book, I found I needed to take a break after about 200 pages. The accounts of horrific massacres and gruesome murders were getting to be just too much.

      That said, this is a gripping, fast-moving survey of the history of a city everyone has heard of, for good or ill. The writing is also very good. The footnotes, though, are a mixed bag. Some are very long and not all seem strictly necessary. I did learn a few things from them, however!

      A thoroughly worthwhile read then, if you can take it. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      At times a slog and so much detail that little of the specifics will stick in my brain. I kept wanting to read just a history of the area in 500 year increments. An achievement nontheless, one I'm glad I finally read.
    • 4/5
      Not being religious, Jerusalem is not a place I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the years but Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography brought my Jerusalem-based thoughts into sharp relief. At times Jerusalem almost reads like a Horrible Histories book, as Jerusalem has suffered more catastrophes like almost no other city.

      I note that other reviewers have cited the book’s length and density as drawbacks. I didn’t find this an issue and instead found myself wanting more. Perhaps a sequel, written in twenty or so years, will be produced to satiate my appetite.
    • 2/5
      To try and tackle the history of one of the most famous cities in the world, in one book, is not the easiest of writing challenges, but Montefiore has had a pretty good go at it. He has tried to cover from the very earliest references to relatively recent events, and this has made this a very substantial book indeed.

      I won't try and surmise all 600 plus pages into a couple of paragraphs would be nigh on impossible, but suffice to say Montefiore has filled these pages with immense amounts of detail and history of the lives of the people that have occupied this city. It has played a significant role in many world events and is considered one of the holiest places by the three abrahamic religions. He sets the context for each of the eras and highlight the movers and shakers of that time.

      All good stuff, or so you would think. But this amount of detail makes this so difficult to read at times, along with literally a cast of thousands over the millennia, it did feel like I was wading through it at times. Jerusalem has been the place where much blood has been shed, and there is almost too much detail with regards to this. My other big bugbear with it was footnotes. These should be a small piece of information that adds to the main body of text, but some of these were huge. A foot note that long should be in the main body, but if that were the case then it would have been more unreadable. The author does add in some personal opinions too, not the done this for a history book, which should be impartial and non judgemental.

      That said is a book I'm glad I have now read, and I feel a sense of achievement having done so, but I will be unlikely to pick it up again.
    • 5/5
      Great Read Learned a lot - Reads like a Story from your crazy Aunt Sally what with some many Characters over the course of time but that is to be expected. Only downside - Font size of notes is so small as to require a magnifying glass.
      Well worth reading but a bit daunting given its size.
    • 4/5
      Another reviewer wrote that "this book contains pretty much everything anyone could possibly want to know about Jerusalem". One might well add, and a great deal of things one would prefer not to have known. What a terrible story. With the odd (very odd) and relatively (very relatively) peaceful interlude, SSM's deeply researched story reveals three thousand years of almost continuous violence, with great building upon great building erected then destroyed and one population routinely displaced by another, culminating in today's Jewish state versus Palestinian state (or not yet state?) while the most extremist / fundamentalist elements of the three Abramic religions squabble and fight, squabble and fight, each in direct contravention of their own sacred texts. For today's world both the deep history and the most recent decades explain why the USA (the West's leading home and breeding ground of fundamentalist Christians) is so clearly the worst possible country to lead efforts at bringing (or knocking) heads together and establishing a secure and lasting settlement. I write as a believing but non-fundamentalist Christian, with horror and regret for the roles Christians have often played and now play. And with such deep sadness for this extraordinary place and those of its population who struggle to live a peaceful life.
      While this book is not in any sense pleasant reading, it should be compulsory reading for anyone even remotely engaged in the so-called peace process and / or the middle east more generally.
      As for those who cavil at SSM's supposed credulity regarding some of his sources (Suetonius, Josephus, TE Lawrence are cited), he appears to me to have consulted as widely as possible among the available sources and to present - to the extent there's more than one source - a balanced perspective.
    • 3/5
      Joy's review: This book contains pretty much everything anyone could possibly want to know about Jerusalem. Montefiore has included every fact he found, but he sacrificed readability in the process. I needed a thread or two to weave the book into a real story. As it is, the story goes: new guy comes in massacres lots of people, is oppressive, get replaced by another new guy of a different religion... with the occasional very brief period of peace. I'm glad I read it, but think Montefiore needed a better editor.
    • 3/5
      Interesting read, but SSM might have been a bit less credulous about some of the many lies told by contributors to Jerusalem's history (Suetonius, Josephus, TE Lawrence, etc etc ...)
    • 4/5
      A good history of the eternal city of Jerusalem. Often sad and brutal as Jerusalem seems to bring out the best and worst in people. Covers and enormous time frame from the beginnings to Modern day.
    • 4/5

      At times a surprisingly violent read that I brought on the spur of the moment, mostly on the strength of my love of another of the author's works: Stalin, court of the Red Tsar. Much to my surprise I have to say I don't regret this for one moment.

      I was dimly aware of the importance of the city in world history but only once it was all laid out in this tomb of a book did I realize just how it really has in many ways truly been the centre of the world. Many names from pre history you may have only heard of casually will be happily fleshed out, very often ending with a bloody battle and/or the odd outbreak of compromise and good sense. Sadly not quite enough of the later.

      Fun fact for British readers: A man called 'Thomas Cook' acted as a travel agent in 1869 taking a party pilgrims to the holy land, creating modern tourism and the package holiday.
    • 4/5
      Another impressive work by Mr. Montefiore, detailed the extremely long and vivid history of one of the world's most famous cities into a very readable and flowing history, from King David, to David Ben-Gurion, and beyond.
    • 5/5
      Jerusalem truly is the Rocky of cities. It almost hurts to read about how many times it was conquered and destroyed. Situated at a crossroads between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, it suffered the invasions from both sides and later from invaders from across the sea. Having been at the center of the medieval world, it reverted to a sleepy minor town that lived on more in memory. The Zionist project as well as the importance of the Suez canal revived interest in Jerusalem, a city promised to too many people and filled with stones of too much meaning. The 20th century saw the rise and return of Jerusalem to international prominence which also triggered new waves of destruction and expulsions. Simon Sebag Montefiore's great history of the great city ends much too early. A wonderful if tragic read.
    • 4/5
      This book undertakes an ambitious project: to tell the very complicated history of Jerusalem, which in some ways, is the history of the world. As in biblical times, we still see the interplay of myth and truth in the world today.

      The author has done a great deal of research. The book is full of entertaining anecdotes that spice it up (if anyone was having kinky or extramarital sex, it is duly noted). In spite of that, I found it somewhat tedious: this happened, and then this happened and then this....without much context.

      At my university courses in political economy, we were shown that the root cause of most (if not all) wars could be traced to ecnomic interests. In the case of Jerusalem, I can't make that link. Instead, I see the darker side of religion. As Mr. Montefiore notes, "not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword."

      The author has said that he hopes that telling the history of Jerusalem with increase inter-faith tolerance. But as I read this book, I felt a sense of sadness -- his hope is, unfortunately, not supported by his text. There is nothing in this book that makes me think things in Jerusalem will ever change.
    • 5/5
      A very clear retelling of some very complicated history.
    • 4/5
      Several years ago I took a course at the Open University on Jerusalem through the ages. The course covered Jerusalem from the perspective of the three monotheistic religions, from biblical times to present-day Israel. It was a most interesting course that understandably required a lot of reading. “Jerusalem: The Biography”, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is basically a summary of that course. I could have saved so much time...

      Montefiore traces the history of the holy city through 3,000 years: from King David (about 1000 BCE) all the way to the Six Day War (1967 CE). The book covers Judaism, Paganism, Christianity, Islam, The Crusades, Mamluk and Ottoman rule, European rule and Zionism. That is no mean task given that it’s not that big of a book, only a few hundred pages long.

      I found the book to be interesting not because of the historical chronicle. Sebag’s work is at it’s best when demystifying some of the common misperceptions about Jerusalem. These can be geographical – the “Tower of David” has nothing to do with the Israelite king, or cultural – the “Holy Fire” hoax of the Easter celebration in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or even biographical – what was Lawrence of Arabia really doing in Palestine during the English invasion. The book is full of entertaining anecdotes that spice up this historical biography.

      I found the last part of the book, dealing with 19th and 20th century events, to be too detailed. It may be inevitable that writing on current events is easier due to the availability of sources (there are no newspapers from King David’s day), but it leaves a somewhat unbalanced feeling about the narrative. Many of the details could have been left out without impacting too much the overall picture of how the city’s history evolved over the ages.

      Jerusalem is unique. It’s history is even more unique. Sadly, most of that history has been written in blood and reading about so much pain and misery in one condensed volume is not very pleasant. One needs to visit modern-day Jerusalem to soak up its history and its significance directly from the stones and ruins and feel for oneself what this city has to offer. Just don’t go there in July and August when it’s too hot to soak up anything but your own sweat…
    • 5/5
      Excellent history of the most famous City on this planet, if not the Universe.
      A must read for the religious and irreligious alike.
    • 5/5
      Anyone with an interest in the Middle East, its history, politics and religion, should read this book about this divided city - it may be physically united, although the walls that separate the communities is a better representation of the religious, emotional and psychological issues that divide its communities - as it really puts into context the problems faced by this city and parts of the wider Middle East.

      Montefiore's narrative - he starts at the beginning and chronologically narrates the history city to the present day - is packed with historical detail and is pretty even handed, not an easy thing to do considering its tumultuous history, as Montefiore notes 'not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword.' Jerusalem, the centre of three of the world's main religions, is, without doubt the most blood soaked space on earth and is the place where 'one can easily image the unthinkable' might occur.

      But there is a sadness at the heart of the narrative, as Montefiore points at that at key points throughout there have always been choices to be made, and it seems that the majority of times the wrong choice was made, a the hatred and intolerance was intensified and solidified.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about endurance and tolerance as demonstrated by Jerusalem's turbulent history. Montefiore begins begins at the beginning and continues right up to 2000 and beyond. The book is well structured chronologically with no particular bias being given to one historical period over another. Each period is well illuminated by Montefiore's ability with story, character and details. The book as a whole is compelling and absorbing. There is a lot to be learned but nothing is opaque. Given the subject matter, there is always going to be criticism about the perspective (rational, religious, etc...) but Montefiore navigates the issue with great skill.
    • 4/5
      Got this out of the library and feel I must buy it in my next book-buying frenzy. I need more time with it than I got. Fascinating and quick flowing. Want to know more.
    • 4/5
      Montefiore’s Jerusalem is 20 % religion, 20 % violence, 20 % sex, 20 % politics. Very lively, with an abundance of colorful characters.

      The history of Jerusalem is the story of cyclical destruction and renewal. Kings, prophets, emperors, pashas, governors, colonists and crusaders have conquered the city, destroyed parts of it and build others. Every inch was fought over and is soaked in blood. Holiness went hand in hand with violence, intrigue, treason, vice and greed.
      In Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Jerusalem is made out of equal measures of religion, politics, sex and violence. It is filled to the brim with plots, sieges, power games, and attacks.
      Montefiore does not offer much guidance or analysis. Only in the epilogue he summarizes, by stating that Jerusalem was Jewish during a thousand years, christian during four hundred years and Islamic during thirteen hundred years.
      Montefiore recounts stories and does so admirably. He knows how to breath live into his characters, even when they only appear in a few paragraphs.
      There are so many anecdotes on every page of this book that it makes the readers’ heads spin. One beheading is followed another conspiracy, and the next plot is already in the making.
      His story is that of the powerful man and women who ruled the city or at least tried to. He has an open eye for women, especially the concubines, courtesans, prostitutes, adulterous wives and nymphomaniacs.
      The borders of the area of which Jerusalem was the capital were rather fluid. That remains so, of course, till the present day. Jerusalem is never a quiet corner of the world.
      Montefiore’s story is not original, which is not to be expected. The Bible is a major source and for the later stages he seems to lean heavily on well known works. His description of part of the crusades is remarkably close to the classic work of Sir Steven Runciman.
      During those crusades we encounter Sigurd, king of Norway, the first European royal to visit the newly conquered Jerusalem. Sigurd is the name the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik adopted, when he joined the reconstituted order of the Knights Templar. It isanother reminder that this history still has an effect in the present.
      Jerusalem was often on the frontier of empires and and a playground in their struggles. That was still the case in the First World War, when the British sponsored Zionism out of political reasons. They were hoping to keep or gain the support of Russia and America. Later, the British came to regret that move and were more pro-Arabic and often outright anti-Semitic.
      If there is a connecting question in this book, it is how Jewish Jerusalem was. In his thoughtful epilogue Montefiore does not say who the city belongs to. Jews and Arabs both have their rights.
      The situation is made even more complicated by the role that Jerusalem plays in the apocalyptic visions of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.
      Montefiore says the Old City should be transformed into a ‘demilitarized Vatican’. If that will ever be the final chapter of another biography of this city remains an open question.
    • 3/5
      Good history of Jerusalem, which must have the most complex and horrific history of any City in the world. Found the last half better than the first. It's a very large volume, but still moves through early historic events with considerable speed. Ideal for dipping in and out of.
    • 5/5
      I personally found the book incredible. I can understand a few of the sentiments contained within the.ken.petersen review, but I think he is being more than a little harsh on the book and the author. History books don’t by their nature have to provide a Hollywood happy ending, and I think Sebag Montefiore does a fantastic job in adding colour, passion, intrigue, and depth to the descriptions of the families and individuals who have left their mark on Jerusalem over the last few millennia. He fashions all these interlocking events, plots, people and relationships together into a fascinating and entertaining story that would not seem out of place in a novel. This is all woven together with incredible detail and research typical of the author. The fact that so many historical ‘household named’ figures, walk upon the stage of the story told only helps to heighten the level of engagement: King David, Goliath, Jesus, Solomon, Caesar, Nero, Cleopatra, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Disraeli, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia, and Churchill.

      Yes, at times it is a bleak story: death, torture, obliteration of people, the frequent destruction of the city itself, most of which is the result of the pursuit of power, but this is not unique to Jerusalem. The unsavoury behaviour throughout is fairly consistent with most of human history, however shameful and depressing that may seem today. It is hard not to feel a modicum of despair, and equally hard not to join the dots in your mind and attribute all the nastiness to what seems like a futile, never-ending war over supernatural artefacts, gods that can’t be seen, and sacred places and spaces.

      The book itself is indeed a ‘tome’, coming in at about 500 pages (in the hardback), but there is a lot of history to cover: the birth of Jerusalem, the origins of Judaism, King David, Jesus and Herod. Imperial Rome, the rise of Islam, the Arab Conquest and the Crusades, not to mention more recently the Great War, and so, so much more. It stops ominously (probably for the best) in 1967- the legality of the expansion not elaborated upon.

      This book would appeal to a range of readers. If anyone wants to understand the background, motivation, or supposed justification of/for the current Middle East crisis, this book is a perfect starting point, and is almost politically neutral. If you are a history enthusiast, or just have a thirst for knowledge, get it on your bookshelf. If you like exciting, enthralling stories again, it is certainly that. And finally, even if you’ve always wanted to read the bible, but aren’t sure about all the mumbo jumbo or ‘advice’, the first part reproduces the history, development and evolution of the three Abrahamic religions, with a more pragmatic, evidence-based commentary rather than a focus on the mythical.
    • 3/5
      The story of Jerusalem is one that should embarrass every religious man, woman and child. It is the story of hate, of some fatuous belief that my religion out ranks yours. Christian,Jew and Muslim should hang their heads in shame.

      This book starts with hundreds of pages of silly wars, wars of pretence - such as the Crusades - and just when one is at the very point of hurling it through the nearest window, we hit more modern times. Britain's unfortunate role is followed by France and then the USA; each certain of their own righteousness and pre-ordained right to treat Jerusalem and its inhabitants as they wish.

      The author does not offer any solutions to the problem: who could? My own offering is to remove all the peoples, of whatever faith, and then to drop enough nuclear bombs to keep the area highly radioactive for the foreseeable future. Whatever faith, so much killing over such a long period is beyond reason. As you might be able to tell, this is not a story with an ounce of human kindness. It is a tale of total despair. The only thing as unreasonable as the Israeli point of view is that of the Arab and the bleatings of the West, in the name of a peace, that they never truly tried to deliver, ring with the hollow blast of hypocrisy.

      It was incredibly difficult to issue a star rating to this work. I suspect that the author has done a pretty fair and reasoned job and, as such, deserves more praise than is given by three stars; but the story is so bleak, and ultimately pointless, that the temptation was to hand it a nil rating. In the end, I took the easy route of awarding a middle three.

    Book preview

    Jerusalem - Simon Sebag Montefiore

    PROLOGUE

    On 8th of the Jewish month of Ab, in late July AD 70, Titus, the Roman Emperor Vespasian’s son who was in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn. The next day happened to be the very day on which Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem over 500 years before. Now, Titus commanded an army of four legions – a total of 60,000 Roman legionaries and local auxiliaries who were eager to deliver the final blow to the defiant but broken city. Within the walls, perhaps half a million starving Jews survived in diabolical conditions: some were fanatical religious zealots, some were freebooting bandits, but most were innocent families with no escape from this magnificent death-trap. There were many Jews living outside Judaea – they were to be found throughout the Mediterranean and Near East – and this final desperate struggle would decide not only the fate of the city and her inhabitants, but also the future of Judaism and the small Jewish cult of Christianity – and even, looking forward across six centuries, the shape of Islam.

    The Romans had built ramps up against the walls of the Temple. But their assaults had failed. Earlier that day, Titus told his generals that his efforts to preserve this ‘foreign temple’ were costing him too many soldiers and he ordered the Temple gates set alight. The silver of the gates melted and spread the fire to the wooden doorways and windows, thence to the wooden fittings in the passageways of the Temple itself. Titus ordered the fire to be quenched. The Romans, he declared, should ‘not avenge themselves on inanimate objects instead of men’. Then he retired for the night into his headquarters in the half-ruined Tower of Antonia overlooking the resplendent Temple complex.

    Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled hell on earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them. Titus’ soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged ‘puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy’, but if they ate they ‘burst asunder’. As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus’ Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games. The cruelties inflicted by the Romans and the rebels within the walls compare with some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.

    The war had begun when the ineptitude and greed of the Roman governors had driven even the Judaean aristocracy, Rome’s own Jewish allies, to make common cause with a popular religious revolt. The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the decline of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.

    Three Roman emperors followed Nero in rapid and chaotic succession. By the time Vespasian emerged as emperor and despatched Titus to take Jerusalem, the city was divided between three warlords at war with each other. The Jewish warlords had first fought pitched battles in the Temple courts, which ran with blood, and then plundered the city. Their fighters worked their way through the richer neighbourhoods, ransacking the houses, killing the men and abusing the women – ‘it was sport to them’. Crazed by their power and the thrill of the hunt, probably intoxicated with looted wine, they ‘indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, decked their hair and put on women’s garments and besmeared themselves with ointments and had paints under their eyes’. These provincial cut-throats, swaggering in ‘finely dyed cloaks’, killed anyone in their path. In their ingenious depravity, they ‘invented unlawful pleasures’. Jerusalem, given over to ‘intolerable uncleanness’, became ‘a brothel’ and torture-chamber – and yet remained a shrine.

    Somehow the Temple continued to function. Back in April, pilgrims had arrived for Passover just before the Romans closed in on the city. The population was usually in the high tens of thousands, but the Romans had now trapped the pilgrims and many refugees from the war, so there were hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Only as Titus encircled the walls did the rebel chieftains halt their in-fighting to unite their 21,000 warriors and face the Romans together.

    The city that Titus saw for the first time from Mount Scopus, named after the Greek skopeo meaning ‘look at’, was, in Pliny’s words, ‘by far the most celebrated city of the East’, an opulent, thriving metropolis built around one of the greatest temples of the ancient world, itself an exquisite work of art on an immense scale. Jerusalem had already existed for thousands of years but this many-walled and towered city, astride two mountains amid the barren crags of Judaea, had never been as populous or as awesome as it was in the first century AD: indeed Jerusalem would not be so great again until the twentieth century. This was the achievement of Herod the Great, the brilliant, psychotic Judaean king whose palaces and fortresses were built on so monumental a scale and were so luxurious in their decoration that the Jewish historian Josephus says that they ‘exceed all my ability to describe them’. The Temple itself overshadowed all else in its numinous glory. ‘At the first rising of the sun’, its gleaming courts and gilded gates ‘reflected back a very fiery splendour and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away’. When strangers – such as Titus and his legionaries – saw this Temple for the first time, it appeared ‘like a mountain covered with snow’. Pious Jews knew that at the centre of the courts of this city-within-a-city atop Mount Moriah was a tiny room of superlative holiness that contained virtually nothing at all. This space was the focus of Jewish sanctity: the Holy of Holies, the dwelling-place of God Himself.

    Herod’s Temple was a shrine but it was also a near-impregnable fortress within the walled city. The Jews, encouraged by Roman weakness in the Year of the Four Emperors and aided by Jerusalem’s precipitous heights, her fortifications and the labyrinthine Temple itself, had confronted Titus with overweening confidence. After all, they had defied Rome for almost five years. However, Titus possessed the authority, the ambition, the resources and the talent necessary for the task. He set about reducing Jerusalem with systematic efficiency and overwhelming force. Ballistae stones, probably fired by Titus, have been found in the tunnels beside the Temple’s western wall, testament to the intensity of Roman bombardment. The Jews fought for every inch with almost suicidal abandon. Yet Titus, commanding the full arsenal of siege engines, catapults and the ingenuity of Roman engineering, overcame the first wall within fifteen days. He led a thousand legionaries into the maze of Jerusalem’s markets and stormed the second wall. But the Jews sortied out and retook it. The wall had to be stormed all over again. Titus next tried to overawe the city with a parade of his army – cuirasses, helmets, blades flashing, flags fluttering, eagles glinting, ‘horses richly caparisoned’. Thousands of Jerusalemites gathered on the battlements to gawp at this show, admiring ‘the beauty of their armour and admirable order of the men’. The Jews remained defiant, or too afraid of their warlords to disobey their orders: no surrender.

    Finally, Titus decided to encircle and seal the entire city by building a wall of circumvallation. In late June, the Romans stormed the hulking Antonia Fortress that commanded the Temple itself and then razed it, except for one tower where Titus set up his command-post.

    By mid-summer, as the blistered and jagged hills sprouted forests of fly-blown crucified cadavers, the city within was tormented by a sense of impending doom, intransigent fanaticism, whimsical sadism, and searing hunger. Armed gangs prowled for food. Children grabbed the morsels from their fathers’ hands; mothers stole the tidbits of their own babies. Locked doors suggested hidden provisions and the warriors broke in, driving stakes up their victims’ rectums to force them to reveal their caches of grain. If they found nothing, they were even more ‘barbarously cruel’ as if they had been ‘defrauded’. Even though the fighters themselves still had food, they killed and tortured out of habit ‘to keep their madness in exercise’. Jerusalem was riven by witch-hunts as people denounced each other as hoarders and traitors. No other city, reflected the eyewitness Josephus, ‘did ever allow such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, since the beginning of the world’.

    The young wandered the streets ‘like shadows, all swollen with famine, and fell down dead, wherever their misery seized them’. People died trying to bury their families while others were buried carelessly, still breathing. Famine devoured whole families in their homes. Jerusalemites saw their loved ones die ‘with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence and a kind of deadly night seized the city’ – yet those who perished did so ‘with their eyes fixed on the Temple’. The streets were heaped with dead bodies. Soon, despite Jewish law, no one buried the dead any more in this grandiose charnelhouse. Perhaps Jesus Christ had foreseen this when he predicted the coming Apocalypse, saying ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Sometimes the rebels just heaved bodies over the walls. The Romans left them to rot in putrescent piles. Yet the rebels were still fighting.

    Titus himself, an unsqueamish Roman soldier, who had killed twelve Jews with his own crossbow in his first skirmish, was horrified and amazed: he could only groan to the gods that this was not his doing. ‘The darling and delight of the human race’, he was known for his generosity. ‘Friends, I’ve lost a day,’ he would say when he had not found time to give presents to his comrades. Sturdy and bluff with a cleft chin, generous mouth and round face, Titus was proving to be a gifted commander and a popular son of the new emperor Vespasian: their unproven dynasty depended on Titus’ victory over the Jewish rebels.

    Titus’ entourage was filled with Jewish renegades including three Jerusalemites – a historian, a king and (it seems) a doublequeen who was sharing the Caesar’s bed. The historian was Titus’ adviser Josephus, a rebel Jewish commander who had defected to the Romans and who is the sole source for this account. The king was Herod Agrippa II, a very Roman Jew, brought up at the court of the Emperor Claudius; he had been the supervisor of the Jewish Temple, built by his great-grandfather Herod the Great, and often resided in his Jerusalem palace, even though he ruled disparate territories across the north of modern Israel, Syria and Lebanon.

    The king was almost certainly accompanied by his sister, Berenice, daughter of a Jewish monarch, and twice a queen by marriage, who had recently become Titus’ mistress. Her Roman enemies later denounced her as ‘the Jewish Cleopatra’. She was around forty but ‘she was in her best years and at the height of her beauty’, noted Josephus. At the start of the rebellion, she and her brother, who lived together (incestuously, claimed their enemies), had attempted to face down the rebels in a last appeal to reason. Now these three Jews helplessly watched the ‘death-agony of a famous city’ – Berenice did so from the bed of its destroyer.

    Prisoners and defectors brought news from within the city that especially upset Josephus, whose own parents were trapped inside. Even the fighters started to run out of food, so they too probed and dissected the quick and the dead, for gold, for crumbs, for mere seeds, ‘stumbling and staggering like mad dogs’. They ate cow dung, leather, girdles, shoes and old hay. A rich woman named Mary, having lost all her money and food, became so demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, ‘went out trembling’.

    Spymania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy – as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was, Josephus observed, ‘like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh’.

    —

    That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized ‘with a divine fury’, grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of ‘a golden window’, which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, ‘made a great clamour and ran to prevent it’. But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.

    Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and ‘ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire’. His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers – all ‘in great astonishment’. The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.

    They pretended not to hear Titus and even shouted ahead to their comrades to toss in more firebrands. The legionaries were so impetuous that many were crushed or burned to death in the stampede of their bloodlust and hunger for gold, plundering so much that the price would soon drop across the East. Titus, unable to stop the fire and surely relieved at the prospect of final victory, proceeded through the burning Temple until he came to the Holy of Holies. Even the high priest was allowed to enter there only once a year. No foreigner had tainted its purity since the Roman soldier-statesman Pompey in 63 BC. But Titus looked inside ‘and saw it and its contents which he found to be far superior’, wrote Josephus, indeed ‘not inferior to what we ourselves boasted of it’. Now he ordered the centurions to beat the soldiers spreading the fire, but ‘their passions were too strong.’ As the inferno rose around the Holy of Holies, Titus was pulled to safety by his aides – ‘and no one forbade them to set fire to it’ any more.

    The fighting raged among the flames: dazed, starving Jerusalemites wandered lost and distressed through the burning portals. Thousands of civilians and rebels mustered on the steps of the altar, waiting to fight to the last or just die hopelessly. All had their throats cut by the exhilarated Romans as though it were a mass human sacrifice, until ‘around the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another’ with the blood running down the steps. Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.

    The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder. Josephus watched the death of the Temple:

    The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims and owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought the whole city was ablaze. And then the din – nothing more deafening or appalling could be conceived than that. There were the war cries of the Roman legions sweeping onward, the howls of the rebels encircled by fire and swords, the rush of the people who, cut off above, fled panic-stricken only to fall into the arms of the foe, and their shrieks as they met their fate, blended with lamentations and wailing [of those in the city]. Transjordan and the surrounding mountains contributed their echoes, deepening the din. You would have thought the Temple hill was boiling over from its base, being everywhere one mass of flame.

    Mount Moriah, one of the two mountains of Jerusalem, where King David had placed the Ark of the Covenant and where his son Solomon had built the first Temple, was ‘seething hot full of fire on every part of it’, while inside, dead bodies covered the floors. But the soldiers trampled on the corpses in their triumph. The priests fought back and some threw themselves into the blaze. Now the rampaging Romans, seeing that the inner Temple was destroyed, grabbed the gold and furniture, carrying out their swag, before they set fire to the rest of the complex.

    As the Inner Courtyard burned, and the next day dawned, the surviving rebels broke out through the Roman lines into the labyrinthine Outer Courtyards, some escaping into the city. The Romans counter-attacked with cavalry, clearing the insurgents and then burning the Temple’s treasury chambers, which were filled with riches drawn from the Temple tax paid by all Jews, from Alexandria to Babylon. They found there 6,000 women and children huddled together in apocalyptic expectation. A ‘false prophet’ had earlier proclaimed that they could anticipate the ‘miraculous signs of their deliverance’ in the Temple. The legionaries simply set the passageways alight, burning all these people alive.

    The Romans carried their eagles on to the Holy Mountain, sacrificed to their gods, and hailed Titus as their imperator – commander-in-chief. Priests were still hiding out around the Holy of Holies. Two plunged into the flames, and one succeeded in bringing out the treasures of the Temple – the robes of the high priest, the two golden candelabra and heaps of cinnamon and cassia, spices that were burned every day in the Sanctuary. When the rest surrendered, Titus executed them as ‘it was fitting for priests to perish with their Temple’.

    —

    Jerusalem was – and still is – a city of tunnels. Now the rebels disappeared underground while retaining control of the Citadel and the Upper City to the west. It took Titus another month to conquer the rest of Jerusalem. When it fell, the Romans and their Syrian and Greek auxiliaries ‘poured into the alleys. Sword in hand; they massacred indiscriminately all whom they met and burned the houses with all who had taken refuge within.’ At night when the killing stopped, ‘the fire gained mastery of the streets’. Titus parleyed with the two Jewish warlords across the bridge that spanned the valley between the Temple and the city, offering them their lives in return for surrender. But still they refused. He ordered the plundering and burning of the Lower City, in which virtually every house was filled with dead bodies. When the Jerusalemite warlords retreated to Herod’s Palace and Citadel, Titus built ramparts to undermine them and on 7th of Elul, in mid-August, the Romans stormed the fortifications. The insurgents fought on in the tunnels until one of their leaders John of Gishala surrendered (he was spared, though he faced lifelong imprisonment). The other chieftain Simon ben Giora emerged in a white robe out of a tunnel under the Temple, and was assigned a starring role in Titus’ Triumph, the celebration of the victory in Rome.

    In the mayhem and the methodical destruction afterwards, a world vanished, leaving a few moments frozen in time. The Romans butchered the old and the infirm: the skeletal hand of a woman found on the doorstep of her burnt house reveals the panic and terror; the ashes of the mansions in the Jewish Quarter tell of the inferno. Two hundred bronze coins have been found in a shop on the street that ran under the monumental staircase into the Temple, a secret stash probably hidden in the last hours of the fall of the city. Soon even the Romans wearied of slaughter. The Jerusalemites were herded into concentration camps set up in the Women’s Court of the Temple itself where they were filtered: fighters were killed; the strong were sent to work in the Egyptian mines; the young and handsome were sold as slaves, chosen to be killed fighting lions in the circus or to be displayed in the Triumph.

    Josephus searched through the pitiful prisoners in the Temple courtyards, finding his brother and fifty friends whom Titus allowed him to liberate. His parents had presumably died. But he noticed three of his friends among the crucified. ‘I was cut to the heart and told Titus,’ who ordered them to be taken down and cared for by doctors. Only one survived.

    Titus decided, like Nebuchadnezzar, to eradicate Jerusalem, a decision which Josephus blamed on the rebels: ‘The rebellion destroyed the city and the Romans destroyed the rebellion.’ The toppling of Herod the Great’s most awesome monument, the Temple, must have been an engineering challenge. The giant ashlars of the Royal Portico crashed down on to the new pavements below and there they were found nearly 2,000 years later in a colossal heap, just as they had fallen, concealed beneath centuries of debris. The wreckage was dumped into the valley next to the Temple where it started to fill up the ravine, now almost invisible, between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. But the holding walls of the Temple Mount, including today’s Western Wall, survived. The spolia, the fallen stones, of Herod’s Temple and city are everywhere in Jerusalem, used and reused by all Jerusalem’s conquerors and builders, from the Romans to the Arabs, from the Crusaders to the Ottomans, for over a thousand years afterwards.

    No one knows how many people died in Jerusalem, and ancient historians are always reckless with numbers. Tacitus says there were 600,000 in the besieged city, while Josephus claims over a million. Whatever the true figure, it was vast, and all of these people died of starvation, were killed or were sold into slavery.

    Titus embarked on a macabre victory tour. His mistress Berenice and her brother the king hosted him in their capital Caesarea Philippi, in today’s Golan Heights. There he watched thousands of Jewish prisoners fight each other – and wild animals – to the death. A few days later, he saw another 2,500 killed in the circus at Caesarea Maritima and yet more were playfully slaughtered in Beirut before Titus returned to Rome to celebrate his Triumph.

    The legions ‘entirely demolished the rest of the city, and overthrew its walls’. Titus left only the towers of Herod’s Citadel ‘as a monument of his good fortune’. There the Tenth Legion made its headquarters. ‘This was the end which Jerusalem came to’, wrote Josephus, ‘a city otherwise of great magnificence and of mighty fame among all mankind’.

    —

    Jerusalem had been totally destroyed six centuries earlier by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. Within fifty years of that first destruction, the Temple was rebuilt and the Jews returned. But this time, after AD 70, the Temple was never rebuilt – and, except for a few brief interludes, the Jews would not rule Jerusalem again for nearly 2,000 years. Yet within the ashes of this calamity lay the seeds not only of modern Judaism but also of Jerusalem’s sanctity for Christianity and Islam.

    Early during the siege, according to much later rabbinical legend, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a respected rabbi, had ordered his pupils to carry him out of the doomed city in a coffin, a metaphor for the foundation of a new Judaism no longer based on the sacrificial cult in the Temple.

    The Jews, who continued to live in the countryside of Judaea and Galilee, as well as in large communities across the Roman and Persian empires, mourned the loss of Jerusalem and revered the city ever after. The Bible and the oral traditions replaced the Temple, but it was said that Providence waited for three and a half years on the Mount of Olives to see if the Temple would be restored – before rising to heaven. The destruction was also decisive for the Christians.

    The small Christian community of Jerusalem, led by Simon, Jesus’ cousin, had escaped from the city before the Romans closed in. Even though there were many non-Jewish Christians living around the Roman world, these Jerusalemites remained a Jewish sect praying at the Temple. But now the Temple had been destroyed, the Christians believed that the Jews had lost the favour of God: the followers of Jesus separated for ever from the mother faith, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Jewish heritage. The Christians envisaged a new, celestial Jerusalem, not a shattered Jewish city. The earliest Gospels, probably written just after the destruction, recounted how Jesus had foreseen the siege of the city: ‘ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies’; and the demolition of the Temple: ‘Not one stone shall remain.’ The ruined Sanctuary and the downfall of the Jews were proof of the new revelation. In the 620s, when Muhammad founded his new religion, he first adopted Jewish traditions, praying towards Jerusalem and revering the Jewish prophets, because for him too the destruction of the Temple proved that God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and bestowed it on Islam.

    It is ironic that the decision of Titus to destroy Jerusalem helped make the city the very template of holiness for the other two Peoples of the Book. From the very beginning, Jerusalem’s sanctity did not just evolve but was promoted by the decisions of a handful of men. Around 1000 BC, a thousand years before Titus, the first of these men captured Jerusalem: King David.

    PART ONE

    JUDAISM

    The city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel…Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.

    Isaiah 60.14, 52.1

    My native city is Jerusalem, in which is situated the sacred shrine of the most high God. The holy city is the mother city not of one country, Judaea, but of most of the other neighbouring lands, as well as lands far away, most of Asia, [and] similarly Europe, to say nothing of the countries beyond the Euphrates.

    Herod Agrippa I, King of Judaea, quoted in Philo, De Specialibus Legibus

    He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendour has never seen a desirable city in his life. He who has not seen the Temple in its full construction has never seen a glorious building in his life.

    Babylonian Talmud, Tractate of the Tabernacle

    If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

    Psalm 137.5–6

    Jerusalem is the most famous city of the East.

    Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 5.70

    1

    THE WORLD OF DAVID

    THE FIRST KING: CANAANITES

    When David captured the citadel of Zion, Jerusalem was already ancient. But it was scarcely a city, just a small mountain stronghold in a land that would have many names – Canaan, Judah, Judaea, Israel, Palestine, the Holy Land to Christians, the Promised Land to Jews. This territory, just 100 by 150 miles, lies between the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Its lush coastal plain offered the best path for invaders and traders between Egypt and the empires of the east. Yet the isolated and remote town of Jerusalem, 30 miles from the nearest coast, far from any trade routes, stood high amid the golden-rocked desolation of the cliffs, gorges and scree of the Judaean hills, exposed to freezing, sometimes even snowy, winters and to witheringly hot summers. Nonetheless, there was security atop these forbidding hills; and there was a spring in the valley beneath, just enough to support a town.

    The romantic image of David’s city is far more vivid than any facts of verifiable history. In the fog of Jerusalem’s pre-history, fragments of pottery, ghostly rock-cut tombs, sections of wall, inscriptions in the palaces of faraway kings and the holy literature of the Bible can provide only fleeting glints of human life in an invincible gloom, separated by hundreds of years. The sporadic clues that emerge cast a flickering light on some random moment of a vanished civilization, followed by centuries of life of which we know nothing – until the next spark illuminates another image. Only the springs, mountains and valleys remain the same, and even they have been redirected, resculpted, refilled by millennia of weather, debris and human endeavour. This much or little is certain: by the time of King David, holiness, security and nature had combined to make Jerusalem an ancient fastness that was regarded as impregnable.

    People had lived there as early as 5000 BC. In the early Bronze Age, around 3200 BC, when the mother of cities, Uruk, in what became Iraq, was already home to 40,000 citizens, and nearby Jericho was a fortified town, people buried their dead in tombs in Jerusalem’s hills, and started to build small square houses in what was probably a walled village on a hill above a spring. This village was then abandoned for many years. Jerusalem scarcely existed while the Egyptian pharaohs of the Old Kingdom reached the zenith of their pyramid building and completed the Great Sphinx. Then in the 1900s BC, at a time when Minoan civilization flourished in Crete, King Hammurabi was about to compile his legal code in Babylon and Britons worshipped at Stonehenge, some pottery, sherds of which were discovered near Luxor in Egypt, mentions a town named Ursalim, a version of Salem or Shalem, god of the evening star. The name may mean ‘Salem has founded’.*1

    Back in Jerusalem, a settlement had developed around the Gihon Spring: the Canaanite inhabitants cut a channel through the rock leading to a pool within the walls of their citadel. A fortified underground passageway protected their access to the water. The latest archaeological digs on the site reveal that they guarded the spring with a tower and a massive wall, 23 feet thick, using stones weighing 3 tons. The tower could also have served as a temple celebrating the cosmic sanctity of the spring. In other parts of Canaan, priestly kings built fortified tower-temples. Further up the hill, remnants of a city wall have been found, the earliest in Jerusalem. The Canaanites turn out to have been builders on a scale more impressive than anyone in Jerusalem until Herod the Great almost 2,000 years later.

    The Jerusalemites became subjects of Egypt which had conquered Palestine in 1458 BC. Egyptian garrisons guarded nearby Jaffa and Gaza. In 1350 BC, the frightened King of Jerusalem begged his overlord, Akhenaten, the pharaoh of the New Kingdom of Egypt, to send him help – even ‘fifty archers’ – to defend his small kingdom from the aggression of neighbouring kings and bands of marauding outlaws. King Abdi-Hepa called his citadel ‘the capital of the Land of Jerusalem of which the name is Beit Shulmani’, the House of Well-being. Perhaps the word Shulman is the origin of the ‘Shalem’ in the name of the city.

    Abdi-Hepa was a paltry potentate in a world dominated by the Egyptians to the south, by the Hittites to the north (in today’s Turkey) and to the north-west by the Mycenean Greeks who would fight the Trojan War. The king’s first name is west Semitic – the Semites being the many Middle East peoples and languages, supposedly descended from Shem, son of Noah. Therefore Abdi-Hepa could have hailed from anywhere in the north-eastern Mediterranean. His appeals, found in the pharaoh’s archive, are panic-stricken and sycophantic, the first known words of a Jerusalemite:*2

    At the feet of the King I have fallen 7 and 7 times. Here is the deed that Milkily and Shuwardatu have done against the land – they have led the troops of Gezer…against the law of the King…The land of the King has gone over to the Habiru [marauding outlaws]. And now a town belonging to Jerusalem has gone over to the men of Qiltu. May the King listen to Abdi-Hepa your servant and send archers.

    We hear no more, but whatever happened to this beleaguered king, just over a century later the Jerusalemites built steep terraced structures above the Gihon Spring on the Ophel hill that survive today, the foundation of a citadel or temple of Salem. These powerful walls, towers and terraces were part of the Canaanite citadel known as Zion that David would capture. Some time during the thirteenth century BC, a people called the Jebusites occupied Jerusalem. But now the old Mediterranean world was being torn apart by waves of so-called Sea Peoples who came from the Aegean.

    In this storm of raids and migrations, the empires receded. The Hittites fell, Mycenae was mysteriously destroyed, Egypt was shaken – and a people called the Hebrews made their first appearance.

    ABRAHAM IN JERUSALEM: ISRAELITES

    This new ‘Dark Age’, which lasted three centuries, allowed the Hebrews, also known as Israelites, an obscure people who worshipped one God, to settle and build a kingdom in the narrow land of Canaan. Their progress is illuminated by the stories about the creation of the world, their origins and their relationship with their God. They passed down these traditions which were then recorded in sacred Hebrew texts, later collated into the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, the first section of the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh. The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims.

    This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth – the relationship of one people and their God. To the believer, the Bible is simply the fruit of divine revelation. To the historian, this is a contradictory, unreliable, repetitive,*3 yet invaluable source, often the only one available to us – and it is also, effectively, the first and paramount biography of Jerusalem.

    The founding patriarch of the Hebrews was, according to Genesis the first book of the Bible, Abram – who is portrayed as travelling from Ur (in today’s Iraq) to settle in Hebron. This was in Canaan, the land promised to him by God, who renamed him ‘Father of Peoples’ – Abraham. On his travels, Abraham was welcomed by Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem in the name of El-Elyon, the Most High God. This, the city’s first mention in the Bible, suggests that Jerusalem was already a Canaanite shrine ruled by priest-kings. Later God tested Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountain in ‘the land of Moriah’ – identified as Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount of Jerusalem.

    Abraham’s roguish grandson Jacob used trickery to clinch his inheritance, but redeemed himself in a wrestling match with a stranger who turned out to be God, hence his new name, Israel – He who Strives with God. This was the appropriate birth of the Jewish people, whose relationship with God was to be so passionate and tormented. Israel was the father of the founders of the twelve tribes who emigrated to Egypt. There are so many contradictions in the stories of these so-called Patriarchs that they are impossible to date historically.

    After 430 years, the Book of Exodus portrays the Israelites, repressed as slaves building the pharaoh’s cities, miraculously escaping Egypt with God’s help (still celebrated by Jews in the festival of Passover), led by a Hebrew prince named Moses. As they wandered through Sinai, God granted Moses the Ten Commandments. If the Israelites lived and worshipped according to these rules, God promised them the land of Canaan. When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking ‘What is thy name?’, he received the majestically forbidding reply, ‘I AM THAT I AM,’ a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.*4

    Many Semites did settle in Egypt; Ramses II the Great was probably the pharaoh who forced the Hebrews to work on his store-cities; Moses’ name was Egyptian, which suggests at least that he originated there; and there is no reason to doubt that the first charismatic leader of the monotheistic religions – Moses or someone like him – did receive this divine revelation for that is how religions begin. The tradition of a Semitic people who escaped repression is plausible but it defies dating.

    Moses glimpsed the Promised Land from Mount Nebo but died before he could enter it. It was his successor Joshua who led the Israelites into Canaan. The Bible portrays their journey as both a bloody rampage and a gradual settlement. There is no archaeological evidence of a conquest but pastoral settlers did found many unwalled villages in the Judaean highlands.*5 A small group of Israelites, who escaped Egypt, were probably among them. They were united by their worship of their God – Yahweh – whom they revered in a moveable temple, a tabernacle that held the sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant. They perhaps crafted their identity by telling the stories of their founding Patriarchs. Many of these traditions, from Adam and the Garden of Eden to Abraham, would later be revered not just by Jews but by Christians and Muslims too – and would be located in Jerusalem.

    The Israelites were now very close to the city for the first time.

    Skip Notes

    *1The Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to rule Canaan at this time but it is not clear whether they actually did. They may have used these pottery symbols to curse the defiant rulers of their enemies or to express their aspirations. The theories about these fragments have changed several times, showing how archaeology is as much interpretative as scientific. It was long believed that the Egyptians smashed these vases or figures to curse or execrate the places named on them – hence they are known as the Execration texts.

    *2These are some of the 380 letters, written in Babylonian on baked clay tablets, by local chieftains to the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1352–1336), who instituted the worship of the sun, instead of the traditional pantheon of numerous Egyptian gods: he changed his name to Akhenaten. The royal archive of his foreign ministry, the House of Correspondence of Pharaoh, was discovered in 1887 at his new capital Akhetaten, now El-Amarna, south of Cairo. One theory suggests that the Habiru were the early Hebrews/Israelites, yet the word actually appears all over the Middle East at this time to describe these marauders – the word simply means ‘vagrant’ in Babylonian. It is possible that the Hebrews descended from a small group of Habiru.

    *3The Creation appears twice in Genesis 1.1–2.3 and 2.4–25. There are two genealogies of Adam, two flood stories, two captures of Jerusalem, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. There are many anachronisms – for example, the presence of Philistines and Arameans in Genesis when they had not yet arrived in Canaan. Camels as beasts of burden appear too early. Scholars believe the early Biblical books were written by separate groups of writers, one who emphasized El, the Canaanite god, and another who stressed Yahweh, the Israelite one God.

    *4When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, only the high priest, once a year, could utter the tetragram YHWH, and Jews, even today, are forbidden to say it, preferring to use Adonai (Lord), or just HaShem (the unspeakable Name).

    *5The Israelite invasion of Canaan is a battlefield of complex, usually unprovable theories. But it seems that the storming of Jericho, whose walls were crumbled by Joshua’s trumpets, is mythical: Jericho was more ancient than Jerusalem. (In 2010, the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 10,000th anniversary – though the date is random.) However, Jericho was temporarily uninhabited and there is no evidence of collapsed walls. The Conquest Hypothesis is hard to take literally since the fighting (as recounted in the Book of Joshua) usually takes place in such a small area. Indeed Bethel near Jerusalem is one of the few conquered towns in the Book of Judges that was actually destroyed in the thirteenth century. The Israelites may have been far more peaceful and tolerant than they claimed.

    2

    THE RISE OF DAVID

    YOUNG DAVID

    Joshua set up his headquarters north of Jerusalem, at Shechem, where he built a shrine to Yahweh. Jerusalem was the home of the Jebusites, ruled by King Adonizedek, a name that suggests a priest-king. Adonizedek resisted Joshua but was defeated. Yet ‘the sons of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites’, who ‘lived in Jerusalem side by side with the sons of Judah as they do today’. Around 1200 BC, Merneptah, the son of Ramses the Great and perhaps the pharaoh who was forced to release Moses’ Israelites, faced attacks from the Sea Peoples – throwing the old empires of the Near East into flux. The pharaoh raided Canaan to restore order. When he returned home, he inscribed his triumph on the walls of his Theban temple, declaring that he had defeated the Sea Peoples, recaptured Ashkelon – and massacred a people who now appear in history for the first time: ‘Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.’

    Israel was not yet a kingdom; rather, the Book of Judges recounts, it was a confederation of tribes ruled by elders who were now challenged by a new enemy: the Philistines, part of the Sea Peoples, who originated in the Aegean. They conquered the coast of Canaan, building five rich cities where they wove clothes, crafted red and black pottery, and worshipped their many gods. The Israelites, hill shepherds from little villages, were no match for these sophisticated Philistines whose infantry wore Greek-style breastplates, greaves (leg armour) and helmets, and deployed close-combat weapons that challenged the cumbersome chariotry of the Egyptians. The Israelites elected charismatic warlords – the Judges – to fight Philistines and Canaanites. At one point, a much neglected verse of the Book of Judges claims the Israelites took and burned Jerusalem; if so, they did not manage to keep the stronghold.

    At the Battle of Ebenezer in about 1050 BC, the Philistines crushed the Israelites, destroyed their shrine at Shiloh, captured the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred symbol of Yahweh, and advanced into the hill country around Jerusalem. Faced with annihilation and wishing to be ‘like other nations’, the Israelites decided to elect a king, chosen by God. They turned to their ageing prophet, Samuel. Prophets were not predictors of the future but analysts of the present – propheteia in Greek means the interpreting of the will of the gods. The Israelites needed a military commander: Samuel chose a young warrior, Saul, whom he anointed with holy oil. Ruling from a hilltop citadel at Gibeon (Tell al-Ful), just three miles north of Jerusalem, this ‘captain over my people Israel’ justified his selection by defeating the Moabites, Edomites and Philistines. But Saul was not suited to the throne: ‘an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.’

    Samuel, faced with a mentally unstable king, secretly looked elsewhere. He sensed the blessing of genius among the eight sons of Jesse of Bethlehem: David, the youngest, ‘was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the Lord said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he.’ David was also ‘cunning in playing, a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters’. He grew up to be the most remarkable yet rounded character in the Old Testament. The creator of sacred Jerusalem was a poet, conqueror, murderer, adulterer, the essence of the holy king and the flawed adventurer.

    Samuel brought young David to court where King Saul appointed him as one of his armour-bearers. When the king was haunted by madness, David showed his first god-given gift: he played the harp ‘so Saul was refreshed’. David’s musical talents are an important part of his charisma: some of the Psalms ascribed to him may even be his.

    The Philistines advanced to the valley of Elah. Saul and his army faced them. The Philistines produced a brobdingnagian champion, Goliath from Gath,*1 whose full armour contrasted with the flimsy gear of the Israelites. Saul feared a pitched battle so he must have been relieved, if sceptical, when David demanded a shot at beating Goliath. David chose ‘five smooth stones out of the brook’ and, wielding his sling, he ‘slang it and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead’.*2 He beheaded the fallen champion and the Israelites pursued the Philistines all the way to their city of Ekron. Whatever its truth, the story signifies that as a boy David made his name as a warrior.*3

    Saul promoted David but the women in the streets sang ‘Saul hath slain his thousands; David, his ten thousands.’ Saul’s son Jonathan befriended David and his daughter Michal loved him. Saul allowed them to marry but was tormented by jealousy: he twice tried to kill his son-in-law with a javelin. Princess Michal saved David’s life by letting him down from a palace window, and he was later granted asylum by the priests of Nob. The king pursued him, killing all the priests except one, but David escaped again, living on the run as the leader of 600 brigands. Twice he crept up on the sleeping king but spared his life, leading Saul to weep: ‘Thou art more righteous than I.’

    Finally David defected to the Philistine King of Gath who granted him his own city domain, Ziklag. The Philistines again invaded Judah and defeated Saul on Mount Gilboa. His son Jonathan was killed and the king himself fell on his sword.

    Skip Notes

    *1Just as the word ‘Philistine’ has, thanks to the Bible, entered the language to describe a lack of culture (despite their cultural sophistication), so the people of Gath, known at ‘Gits’, also entered the vernacular. But the Philistines gave their name to the land which became the Roman Palestina, hence Palestine.

    *2The sling was not then a child’s toy but a powerful weapon: slingers are shown in inscriptions in Beni Hasan in Egypt standing beside the archers in battle. Royal inscriptions in Egypt and Assyria show contingents of slingers were regular units of the imperial armies of the ancient world. It is believed skilled slingers could project specially smoothed stones the size of tennis balls at 100–150mph.

    *3Was ‘David’ a nom de guerre or regal name? The Bible tells the Goliath story twice, and in the second version it names the Israelite boy-hero as Elhanan: was this David’s real name?

    3

    THE KINGDOM AND THE TEMPLE

    DAVID: THE ROYAL CITY

    A young man appeared at David’s camp claiming to have killed Saul: ‘I have slain the Lord’s anointed.’ David killed the messenger and then lamented Saul and Jonathan in timeless poetry:

    The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel…Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions…How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!

    At this dark hour, the southern tribes of Judah anointed David as king with Hebron as his capital, while Saul’s surviving son, Ishbosheth, succeeded Saul to rule the northern tribes of Israel. After a seven-year war, Ishbosheth was murdered and the northern tribes too anointed David as king. The monarchy was united yet the split between Israel and Judah was a schism healed only by David’s charisma.

    Jerusalem, known as Jebus after its Jebusite inhabitants, stood just south of Saul’s stronghold, Gibeon. David and his army advanced on the citadel of Zion, facing the formidable fortifications which have been recently uncovered around the Gihon Spring.*1 Zion was said to be impregnable and how David captured it is a mystery. The Bible portrays the Jebusites lining the walls with the blind and the lame, a warning to any attacker of what would befall him. But the king somehow penetrated the city – through what the Hebrew Bible calls a zinnor. This may be a water-tunnel, one of the network now being excavated on the Ophel hill, or it may be the name of some magical spell. Either way, ‘David took the stronghold of Zion: the same is the city of David.’

    This capture may just have been a palace coup. David did not slaughter the Jebusites; instead he co-opted them into his cosmopolitan court and army. He renamed Zion the City of David, repaired the walls and summoned the Ark of the Covenant (recaptured in battle) to Jerusalem. Its awesome sanctity killed one of those moving it, so David placed it with a trusted Git until it was safe to bear. ‘David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.’ Donning the sacerdotal loincloth, ‘David danced before the Lord with all his might.’ In return, God promised David, ‘thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever’. After the centuries of struggle, David was declaring that Yahweh had found a permanent home in a holy city.

    Michal, Saul’s daughter, mocked her husband’s half-naked submission to God as a display of vulgar vanity. While the earlier books of the Bible are a mixture of ancient texts and backdated stories written much later, the rounded, unheroic portrait of David, buried within the second Book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings, reads so vividly that it may have been based on the memoir of a courtier.

    David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah. He brought the golden shields of his conquered enemies to Jerusalem, where he built himself a palace, importing cedarwood from his Phoenician allies in Tyre. David is said to have conquered a kingdom that stretched from Lebanon to the borders of Egypt, and eastwards into today’s Jordan and Syria, even placing a garrison in Damascus. Our only source for David is the Bible: between 1200 and 850 BC, the empires of Egypt and Iraq were in eclipse and left meagre royal records, but they also left a power vacuum. David certainly existed: an inscription found in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel dating from the ninth century BC shows that the kings of Judah were known as the House of David, proving that David was the kingdom’s founder.

    Yet David’s Jerusalem was tiny. At this time, the city of Babylon, in today’s Iraq, covered 2,500 acres; even the nearby town of Hazor covered 200. Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just enough to house about 1,200 people around the citadel. But the recent discoveries of fortifications above the Gihon Spring prove that David’s Zion was much more substantial than previously thought, even if it was very far from an imperial capital.*2 David’s kingdom, conquered with his Cretan, Philistine and Hittite mercenaries, is plausible too, however exaggerated by the Bible, and was only a tribal federation held together by his personality. The Maccabees would, much later, show how dynamic warlords could quickly conquer a Jewish empire during an imperial power vacuum.

    One evening, David was relaxing on the roof of his palace: ‘he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is this not Bathsheba?’ The woman was married to one of his non-Israelite mercenary captains, Uriah the Hittite. David summoned her and ‘she came in unto him and he lay with her’, making her pregnant. The king ordered his commander Joab to send him her husband back from the wars in present-day Jordan. When Uriah arrived, David ordered him to go home to ‘wash thy feet’ though he really intended that Uriah should sleep with Bathsheba to cover up her pregnancy. But Uriah refused so David ordered him to take this letter back to Joab: ‘Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle…that he may be smitten.’ Uriah was killed.

    Bathsheba became David’s favourite wife, but the prophet Nathan told the king the story of a rich man who had everything but still stole a poor man’s only lamb. David was appalled by the injustice: ‘the man that hath done this thing shall surely die!’ ‘Thou art that man,’ replied Nathan. The king realized that he had committed a terrible crime. He and Bathsheba lost their first child born of this sin – but their second son, Solomon, survived.

    Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show: his sons struggled for the succession. His eldest, Amnon, may have expected to succeed David but the king’s favourite was Amnon’s half-brother, the spoiled and ambitious Absalom, with his lustrous head of hair and a physique without blemish: ‘in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty’.

    ABSALOM: RISE AND FALL OF A PRINCE

    After Amnon lured Absalom’s sister Tamar to his house and raped her, Absalom had Amnon murdered outside Jerusalem. As David mourned, Absalom fled the capital and returned only after three years. The king and his favourite were reconciled: Absalom bowed to the ground before the throne and David kissed him. But Prince Absalom could not rein in his ambition. He paraded through Jerusalem in his chariot and horses with fifty men running before him. He undermined his father’s government – ‘Absalom stole the heart of Israel’ – and set up his own rebel court at Hebron.

    The people flocked to the rising sun, Absalom. But now David regained some of his old spirit: he seized the Ark of the Covenant, the emblem of God’s favour, and then abandoned Jerusalem. While Absalom established himself in Jerusalem, the old king rallied his forces. ‘Deal gently for my sake with the young man,’ David told his general, Joab. When David’s forces massacred the rebels in the forest of Ephraim, Absalom fled on a mule. His gorgeous hair was his undoing: ‘and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.’ When the dangling Absalom was spotted, Joab killed him and buried the body in a pit instead of beneath the pillar the rebel prince had built for himself.*3 ‘Is the young man Absalom safe?’ the king asked pathetically. When David heard that the prince was dead, he lamented: ‘Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’ As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an altar there. There may already have been a shrine in Jerusalem whose rulers are described as priest-kings. One of the original inhabitants of the city, Araunah the Jebusite, owned land on Moriah which suggests that the city had expanded from the Ophel onto the neighbouring mountain. ‘So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ David planned a temple there and ordered cedarwood from Abibaal, the Phoenician King of Tyre. It was the crowning moment in his career, the bringing together of God and his people, the union of Israel and Judah, and the anointment of Jerusalem herself as the holy capital. But it was not to be. God told David: ‘Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war and hast shed blood.’

    Now that David was ‘old and stricken’, his courtiers and sons intrigued for the succession. Another son Adonijah made a bid for the throne, while a lissom virgin, Abishag, was brought in to distract David. But the plotters underestimated Bathsheba.

    SOLOMON: THE TEMPLE

    Bathsheba claimed the throne for her son Solomon. David called in Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, who escorted Solomon on the king’s own mule down to the sacred Gihon Spring. There he was anointed king. The trumpet was blown and the people celebrated. Adonijah, hearing the celebrations, sought refuge in the sanctuary of the altar, and Solomon guaranteed his life.

    After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites and cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was the authors of the Bible, writing four centuries afterwards to instruct their own times, who made the imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king. He was buried in the City of David.*4 His son was very different. Solomon would finish that sacred mission – but he started his reign, in about 970 BC, with a bloody settling of scores.

    Bathsheba, the queen mother, asked Solomon to allow his elder half-brother, Adonijah, to marry King David’s last concubine, Abishag. ‘Ask for him the kingdom too?’ replied Solomon sarcastically, ordering the murder of Adonijah and a purge of his father’s old guard. This story is the last from the court historian of David but it is also really the first and only glimpse of Solomon as a man, for he becomes the inscrutably wise and splendid stereotype of a fabulous emperor. Everything Solomon had was bigger and better than any ordinary king: his wisdom generated 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs, his harem contained 700 wives and 300 concubines, and his army boasted 12,000 cavalry and 1,400 chariots. Those expensive showpieces of military technology were housed in his fortified towns, Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, while his fleet was anchored at Ezion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba.

    Solomon traded with Egypt and Cilicia in spices and gold, chariots and horses. He shared trading expeditions to Sudan and Somalia with his Phoenician ally

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