North of the Temple Mount, Hezekiah dammed a valley to create one of the Bethesda Pools to deliver more water into the city, and he seems to have distributed food—oil, wine, grain—to his forces, ready for siege and war. Jar handles have been found at sites across Judah marked lmlk—“for the king”—stamped with his emblem, the four-winged scarab.
“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,” wrote Byron. Sennacherib and his vast armies were now very close to Jerusalem. The Great King would have travelled, like most Assyrian kings, in a hulking three-horse chariot, shaded under the royal parasol, horses splendidly caparisoned with shimmering headcrests while he himself would have worn a long embroidered robe, a flat hat with a pointed peak, a square-cut, long, braided beard and rosette bracelets, and often carried a bow in his hands and a sword at his belt in a scabbard decorated with lions. He saw himself more as a lion than a biblical vulture or Byronic wolf—Assyrian kings wore lionskins to celebrate their victories in the Temple of Ishtar, decorated their palaces with lion sphinxes and avidly hunted lions as the sport of great kings.
He bypassed Jerusalem to besiege Hezekiah’s second city, fortified Lachish, to the south. We know from the bas-reliefs at his Nineveh palace what his troops (and the Judaeans) looked like: the Assyrians, a polyglot imperial army, wore their hair braided, and dressed in tunics and chainmail, with plumed and pointed helmets, arrayed in contingents of charioteers, spearmen, archers and slingers. They built siege-ramps; sappers undermined the walls, a fearsomely spiked siege-engine shattered the fortifications. Archers and slingers laid down withering fire as Sennacherib’s infantry stormed up scaling ladders to take the city. Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave of 1,500 men, women and children, some impaled or skinned, just as the bas-relief shows; throngs of refugees fled the mayhem. Jerusalem knew what to expect.17
Sennacherib swiftly defeated an Egyptian army that had come to aid Hezekiah, ravaged Judah and then closed on Jerusalem, camping to the north, the same place chosen by Titus over five hundred years later.
Hezekiah poisoned any wells outside Jerusalem. His troops, manning his new walls, wore turbans fastened with headbands and long earflaps, short kilts, leg armour and boots. As the siege set in, there must have been panic in the city. Sennacherib sent his generals to parley—resistance was hopeless. The prophet Micah foresaw the destruction of Zion. However, old Isaiah counselled patience: Yahweh would provide.
Hezekiah prayed in the Temple. Sennacherib bragged that he had surrounded Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.” But Isaiah was right: God intervened.
MANASSEH: CHILD SACRIFICE IN THE VALLEY OF HELL
“The angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians … and when they arose in the morning, they were all dead corpses.” The Assyrians suddenly packed up their camp, probably to suppress a rebellion in the east. “So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed.” Yahweh told Sennacherib that “The daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.” This was the Jerusalem version, but Sennacherib’s annals describe Hezekiah’s crushing tribute, including 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver: he seems to have paid them to leave. Sennacherib reduced Judah to a rump not much larger than the district of Jerusalem and boasted that he had deported 200,150 people.18
When Hezekiah died soon after the siege, his son Manasseh became a loyal Syrian vassal. He brutally crushed any opposition in Jerusalem, married an Arabian princess, overturned his father’s reforms and installed ritual male prostitutes and the idols Baal and Asherah in the Temple. Most dreadful of all, he encouraged the sacrifice of children at the roaster—the tophet—in the Valley of Hinnom,e south of the city. Indeed “he made his own son pass through the fire …” Children were said to be taken there as priests beat drums to hide the shrieks of the victims from their parents.
Thanks to Manasseh, the Valley of Hinnom became not just the place of death, but Gehenna, “hell” in Jewish and later Christian and Islamic mythology. If the Temple Mount was Jerusalem’s own heaven, Gehenna was her own Hades.
Then in 626, Nabopolassar, a Chaldean general, seized control of Babylon and started to destroy the Assyrian empire, recording his exploits in the Babylonian Chronicles. In 612, Nineveh fell to an alliance of Babylonians and Medes. In 609, the succession of Manasseh’s eight-year-old grandson, Josiah, seemed to herald a golden age ruled by a Messiah.19
a The Kings of Israel and Judah marched together against Mesha, the rebellious Moabite king who, in a stele, declared that he sacrificed his own son and successfully repelled the invaders. Almost 3,000 years later, in 1868, some Bedouin showed a German missionary a black basalt stone which unleashed an archaeological race between Prussia, France and England, whose agents intrigued to win this prestigious imperial prize. One tribe of Bedouin tried to destroy the stone, but finally the French won. It was worth the struggle. Sometimes contradicting, sometimes confirming the Bible, Mesha admits that Israel had conquered Moab but states that he rebelled against King Ahab and then defeated Israel and Judah—which (according to the latest translation) he calls “House of David,” again confirming David’s existence. He then boasts that he took from a captured Israelite town “the vessels of Yahweh,” the first mention of the Israelite God outside the Bible.
b The Bible portrays King Jehu of Israel as the restorer of Yahweh and smasher of the idols of Baal. But the Bible is more interested in his relations with God than in the power politics now revealed by archaeology: Jehu probably had help from Damascus because its king Hazael left the stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel boasting that he had defeated previous kings of the House of Israel and the House of the David, the archaeological proof that King David existed. But Jehu also had to become a vassal of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. On the Black Obelisk, found at Nimrud, now in the British Museum, Jehu makes his low obeisance to Shalmaneser who sits, with his braided beard, diadem, embroidered robes and sword, before the winged symbol of Assyrian power, sheltered by a parasol held by a courtier. “I received,” says Shalmaneser, “silver, gold, a gold bowl, a gold vase, gold buckets, tin, a staff, hunting spears.” This kneeling Jehu is the first historical image of an Israelite.
c The ancient Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq claim descent from the Ten Tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians as well as from those deported later by the Babylonians. The latest genetic research proves that these Jews were indeed separated from other Jewish communities around 2,500 years ago. Yet the quest for these vanished Israelites has spawned a thousand fantasies and theories: the Ten Tribes have been “discovered” in various unlikely places—from the Native Americans of North America to the English.
d Two new suburbs developed outside the walled City of David and the Temple Mount: the Makhtesh in the Tyropaean Valley that ran between Mount Moriah and the western hill, and another, the Mishneh, on the western hill itself, today’s Jewish Quarter. High officials were buried in the tombs around the city: “This is [the tomb] of [ … ]yahu, the Royal Steward,” reads a tomb in Silwan village. “There is no gold or silver here, only his bones and the bones of his slavewife—cursed be anyone who opens this tomb.” The curse did not work: the tomb was plundered and is today a chicken coop. But this royal steward may actually have been Hezekiah’s courtier criticized by Isaiah for building a grandiose tomb: the name could read “Shebnayahu.”
e In 1880, Jacob Eliahu, aged sixteen, son of Jewish converts to Protestantism, invited a school friend to dive the length of the Siloam Tunnel. They were both fascinated by the biblical story of 2 Kings 20.20: “And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?” Jacob started from one end and his friend from the other, feeling the workers’ ancient chisel-marks with their fingers. When the marks changed direction Jacob realized he was at the place where the two teams had met and there he found the inscription. He emerged at the other end to find that his friend had long
since given up; and he terrified the local Arabs who believed the Tunnel contained a djinn or dragon. When he told his headmaster, word spread and a Greek trader crept into the Tunnel and roughly cut out the inscription, breaking it. But the Ottoman police caught him; and the inscription is now in Istanbul. Jacob Eliahu then joined the evangelical American Colonists and was adopted by the Colony’s founding family, the Spaffords. Jacob Spafford became a teacher at their school, instructing his pupils about the Tunnel, never mentioning that he was the boy who had found the inscription.
e There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses.
CHAPTER 5
The Whore of Babylon
586–539 BC
JOSIAH: THE REVOLUTIONARY SAVIOUR
It was a miracle: the evil empire of Assyria had fallen apart and the kingdom of Judah was free. King Josiah may have extended his kingdom northwards into the former lands of Israel, southwards towards the Red Sea and eastwards towards the Mediterranean, and then, in the eighteenth year of his reign, Hilkiah the chief priest found a forgotten scroll stored in the chambers of the Temple.
Josiah recognized the power of this document, an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy (“Second Law” in Greek), probably one of the scrolls brought southwards from Israel after its fall and hidden in the Temple during Manasseh’s persecutions. Having assembled the Judaeans in the Temple, Josiah stood by that totemic symbol, the royal pillar, and announced his covenant with the one God to keep the Law. The king set his scholars to retell the ancient history of the Judaeans, linking the mythical Patriarchs, the sacred kings David and Solomon and the story of Jerusalem into a single past, to illuminate the present. This was another step towards the creation of the Bible. Indeed these laws were backdated and attributed to Moses, but the biblical portrait of the Temple of Solomon surely reflected the real but later Jerusalem of Josiah, the new David. Henceforth the holy mountain became nothing less than ha-Makom in Hebrew: the Place.
The king had the idols burned in the Kidron Valley, and expelled the male prostitutes from the Temple; he smashed the child-roasters of the Valley of Hell and killed the idolatrous priests, grinding their bones into their altars.a Josiah’s revolution sounds violent, frenzied and puritanical. He then held a Passover festival to celebrate. “And like unto him was there no king before him.” Yet he was playing a dangerous game. When Necho, the Egyptian pharaoh, marched up the coast, Josiah, fearing he was about to swap Assyrian for Egyptian dominion, rushed to stop him. In 609 BC, the pharaoh crushed the Judaeans and killed Josiah at Megiddo. Josiah had failed, but his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus. The dream of independence, however, ended at Megiddo, which became the very definition of catastrophe: Armageddon.20
The pharaoh advanced on Jerusalem and placed Josiah’s brother Jehoiakim on the throne of Judah. But Egypt failed to stop the rise of a new Near Eastern empire. In 605, the Babylonian king’s son, Nebuchadnezzar, routed the Egyptians at Carchemish. Assyria vanished; Babylon inherited Judah. But in 597, King Jehoiakim saw his chance in the midst of this instability to liberate Judah and called a national fast to win God’s protection. His adviser and prophet Jeremiah warned, in the first jeremiad, that God would destroy Jerusalem. King Jehoiakim publicly burned Jeremiah’s writings.a He allied Judah with Egypt, but no Egyptian help came as a new conqueror descended on Jerusalem.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
“In the seventh month of Kislev,” declared Nebuchadnezzar’s chronicle, preserved on a clay inscription, “the Babylonian king marched to the land of Hatti [Syria], besieged the City of Judah [Jerusalem] and on the second day of the month of Adar [16 March 697] took the city and captured the king.” Nebuchadnezzar plundered the Temple and deported the king and 10,000 nobles, artisans and young men to Babylon. There, Jehoiakim joined his vanquisher’s court.
Nebuchadnezzar was the son of a usurper but he was a dynamic empire-builder, who regarded himself as the viceroy on earth of Babylon’s patron god Bel-Marduk. Inheriting the Assyrian style of ferocious imperial repression, he promoted himself as a paragon of piety and virtue. At home “the strong used to plunder the weak,” but Nebuchadnezzar “did not rest night or day but with counsel and deliberation he persisted” in giving justice. His Judaean victims might not have recognized the soi-disant “King of Justice.”
The exiles from Judah found themselves in a city that made Zion look like a village. While a few thousand lived in Jerusalem, Babylon boasted a quarter of a million in a metropolis so majestic and hedonistic that the goddess of love and war Ishtar was said to tiptoe through the streets, kissing her favourites in the inns and alleyways.
Nebuchadnezzar stamped Babylon with his own aesthetic flair: grandiose gigantism tinted in his favourite colour, divine sky-blue, reflected in the canals of the mighty Euphrates. The four towers of the Ishtar Gate were faced with blue-glazed bricks, illustrated with bulls and dragons in yellow and ochre, leading into the city’s triumphal boulevard, the Processional Way. His palace, in his words an “edifice to be admired, a gleaming sanctuary, my royal abode,” was decorated with towering lions. Hanging Gardens embellished his summer palace. Honouring Babylon’s patron god Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar raised a ziggurat, an immense seven-storey, stepped tower with a flat top: his Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth was the real Tower of Babel, its many languages reflecting the cosmopolitan capital of the entire Near East.
In Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar placed the exiled king’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. In 594, Zedekiah visited Babylon to make obeisance to Nebuchadnezzar, but on his return he launched a rebellion, haunted by the prophet Jeremiah, who warned that the Babylonians would destroy the city. Nebuchadnezzar marched southwards. Zedekiah appealed to the Egyptians, who sent meagre forces that were soon defeated. Inside Jerusalem, Jeremiah, observing the panic and paranoia, tried to escape but was arrested at the gates. The king, torn between asking his advice and executing him for treason, imprisoned him in the dungeons under the royal palace. For eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar ravaged Judah,b leaving Jerusalem until last.
In 587, Nebuchadnezzar encircled Jerusalem with forts and a siege wall. “The famine,” wrote Jeremiah, “was sore in the city.” Young children “faint for hunger at the top of every street,” and there were hints of cannibalism: “the daughter of my people is become cruel … The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction.” Even the rich were soon desperate, wrote the author of Lamentations: “they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills,” searching for food. People wandered the streets, dazed, “like blind men.” Archaeologists have found a sewer pipe that dated from the siege: the Judaeans usually lived on lentils, wheat and barley, but the pipe’s contents showed that people were living on plants and herbs, diseased with whipworm and tapeworm.
On the 9th of the Jewish month of Ab, August 586, after eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar broke into the city, which wa
s set on fire, probably with flamed torches and burning arrows (arrowheads were discovered in today’s Jewish Quarter in a layer of soot, ashes and charred wood). Yet the fire that consumed the houses also baked the clay bullae, the seals of the bureaucracy, so hard that they have survived to this day among the burned houses. Jerusalem suffered the infernal depredations of fallen cities. Those that were killed were luckier than those who starved: “Our skin was black like the oven because of the famine. They ravished the women in Zion; princes were hanged up by their hand.” Edomites from the south poured into the city to loot, party and gloat in the wreckage: “Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom … thou shalt be drunken and shalt make thyself naked.” The Edomites, according to Psalm 137, encouraged the Babylonians to “rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof … Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” The Babylonians ravaged Jerusalem while, beneath the royal palace, Jeremiah survived in his dungeon.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR: THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION
Zedekiah broke out through the gate close to the Siloam Pool, heading for Jericho, but the Babylonians captured the king and brought him before Nebuchadnezzar “where sentence was pronounced on him. They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.” The Babylonians must have found Jeremiah in the king’s prison for they brought him to Nebuchadnezzar, who apparently interviewed him and gave him to the commander of the imperial guard, Nebuzaradan, who was in charge of Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar deported 20,000 Judaeans to Babylon, though Jeremiah says he left many of the poor behind.
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