A month later Nebuchadnezzar ordered his general to obliterate the city. Nebuzaradan “burned the House of the Lord, the king’s palace and all the houses of Jerusalem” and “brake down the walls.” The Temple was destroyed, its gold and silver vessels plundered, and the Ark of the Covenant vanished forever. “They have cast fire into thy Sanctuary,” recounted Psalm 74. The priests were killed before Nebuchadnezzar. As with Titus in AD 70, Temple and palace must have been toppled into the valley beneath: “How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the Sanctuary are poured in the top of every street.”c
The streets were empty: “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people.” The well-off were impoverished: “they that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets.” Foxes loped across the barren mountain of Zion. The Lamentations of the Judaeans mourned their bleeding “Jerusalem … as a menstruous woman”: “She weepeth sore in the night and her tears are on her cheeks: among her lovers, she hath none to comfort her.”
The destruction of the Temple must have seemed to be the death not just of a city but of an entire nation. “The ways of Zion do mourn because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh … And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed. The crown is fallen from our head.” This seemed to be the end of the world, or, as the Book of Daniel explained it, “the abomination that maketh desolate.” The Judaeans would surely vanish like other peoples whose gods had failed them. But the Jews somehow transformed this catastrophe into the formative experience that redoubled the sanctity of Jerusalem and created a prototype for the Day of Judgement. For all three religions, this inferno made Jerusalem the venue of the Last Days and the coming of the divine kingdom. This was the Apocalypse—based on the Greek word for “revelation”—that Jesus would prophesy. For Christians it became a defining and perennial expectation, while Muhammad would see Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction as the withdrawal of divine favour from the Jews, making way for his Islamic revelation.
In Babylonian exile, some of the Judaeans kept their commitment to God and Zion. At the same time as Homer’s poems were becoming the national epic of the Greeks, the Judaeans started to define themselves by their own biblical texts and their faraway city: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.” Yet even the Babylonians, according to Psalm 137, appreciated the Judaean songs: “For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
Yet it was there that the Bible began to take shape. While young Jerusalemites such as Daniel were educated in the royal household and the more worldly exiles became Babylonians, Judaeans developed new laws to emphasize that they were still distinct and special—they respected the Sabbath, circumcised their children, adhered to dietary laws, adopted Jewish names—because the fall of Jerusalem had demonstrated what happened when they did not respect God’s laws. Away from Judah, the Judaeans were becoming Jews.d
The Exiles immortalized Babylon as “the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth,” yet the empire prospered and their nemesis, Nebuchadnezzar, ruled for over forty years. However, Daniel claims the king went insane: he was “driven away from the people and ate grass like cattle, his nails growing like claws of a bird”—a suitable punishment for his crimes (and wonderful inspiration for William Blake’s paintings). If vengeance was not complete, the exiles could at least wonder at the ironies of life in Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar’s son Amel-Marduk was such a disappointment that his father threw him in prison, where he became acquainted with Jehoiachin, King of Judah.
BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST
When Amel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he freed his royal Judaean friend from prison. But in 556 the dynasty was overthrown: the new king, Nabonidus, rejected Bel-Marduk, god of Babylon, in favour of Sin the moon-god and eccentrically left the city to live at Teima, far away in the Arabian desert. Nabonidus was struck by a mysterious disease, and it was surely he (not Nebuchadnezzar, as Daniel claimed) who went mad and “ate grass like cattle.”
In the king’s absence, the regent, his son Belshazzar, according to the Bible, held the depraved feast at which he used the “gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem” and suddenly saw on the wall God’s words: “MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.” Decoded, these were measurements warning that the days of the empire were numbered. Belshazzar trembled. For the Whore of Babylon, “the writing was on the wall.”
In 539 BC, the Persians marched on Babylon. Jewish history is filled with miraculous deliverances. This was one of the most dramatic. After forty-seven years “by the rivers of Babylon,” the decision of one man, in its way as seminal as that of David, restored Zion.21
a Josiah’s reforms were a vital step in the development of Judaism. Two tiny silver scrolls were found in a Valley of Hinnom tomb of this period: inside was etched the priestly prayer of Numbers 6.24–6 which remains part of the Jewish service today. “For YHWH is our restorer and rock. May YHWH bless you and keep you and make his face shine.”
a Royal courtiers lived and worked atop the City of David. An archive of forty-five bullae—clay seals hardened by being burned in the destruction of the city—has been found in a house there, which archaeologists call the House of the Bullae. This was obviously a secretariat of the king: one bulla bears the inscription “Gemaraiah son of Shaphan,” the name of the royal scribe of King Jehoiakim in the Book of Jeremiah. Some time during the crisis, the king died, to be succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin.
b Shattered sherds bearing messages—known as ostraca—have been found by archaeologists buried in layers of ashes at the city gate of the fortress of Lachish: they give a human glimpse of the unstoppable Babylonian advance. Lachish and another fortress, Azekah, held out the longest, communicating with each other and Jerusalem by fire-signals. At Lachish, the beleaguered Judaean commander Yaush received reports from his outposts as they were gradually destroyed. His officer Hoshayahu soon noted that the fire-signals no longer came from Azekah. Then Lachish too was destroyed in heavy fighting.
c Nothing has been found of the Temple—except the tiny ivory head of a sceptre or staff used in processions, carved into the shape of a pomegranate, dating from the eighth century and inscribed: “Belonging to the house of holiness” (though some claim this fragment is not authentic). But Jeremiah was surprisingly accurate: Nebuchadnezzar’s henchmen set up headquarters at the city’s Middle Gate to organize Judah, and their names in the Book of Jeremiah are confirmed by a text found in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar appointed a royal minister, Gedaliah, as puppet ruler over Judah, but as Jerusalem was in ruins he ruled from Mizpah to the north, advised by Jeremiah. Judaeans rebelled and murdered Gedaliah, and Jeremiah had to flee to Egypt, where he vanishes from the story.
d Between 586 and 400 BC, the mysterious writers of the Bible, scribes and priests living in Babylon, refined and collated the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah in Hebrew, combining the different traditions of God, Yahweh and El. The so-called Deuteronomists retold the history and recast the law to show the fecklessness of kings and the supremacy of God. And they incorporated stories inspired by Babylon such as the Flood, so similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of Abraham in nearby Ur and of course the Tower of Babel. The Book of Daniel was written over a long period: some parts were definitely written in the early Exile, other parts later. We do not know if there was an individual named Daniel or whether he is a composite. But the book is also full of historical confusions that archaeologists have clarified with the help of the evidence found in Babylon during nineteenth-century excavations.
CHAPTER 6
The Persians
539–336 BC
CYRUS THE GREAT
Astyges, King of Media in western Persia, drea
med that his daughter was urinating a golden stream which squirted out the whole of his kingdom. His magi, the Persian priests, interpreted this to mean that his grandsons would threaten his rule. Astyges married his daughter to a weak, unthreatening neighbour to the east, the King of Anshan. This marriage spawned an heir, Kourosh, who became Cyrus the Great. Astyges dreamed again that a vine was growing from between his daughter’s fecund thighs until it overshadowed him—a sexual-political version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Astyges ordered his commander Harpagus to murder little Cyrus, but the boy was hidden with a shepherd. When Astyges discovered that Cyrus was not dead, he butchered and cooked Harpagus’ son and served him to his father as a stew. It was not a meal that Harpagus would easily forget or forgive.
On the death of his father in about 559 BC, Cyrus returned and seized his kingdom. Astyges’ pungent dreams, as recounted by the Greek historian Herodotus, who liked to believe all Persian business was decided with the help of sexual or urinary auguries, came true: Cyrus, backed by Harpagus, defeated his grandfather, uniting the Medes and Persians. Leaving Belshazzar’s Babylon to the south, Cyrus confronted another potentate, Croesus, wealthy King of Lydia in western Turkey. Cyrus force-marched his cameleer army to surprise Croesus in his capital. The Lydian horses bolted when they detected the smell of charging camels. Then Cyrus turned on Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar’s blue-glazed metropolis opened its gates to Cyrus, who shrewdly paid homage to Bel-Marduk, the neglected Babylonian god. The fall of Babylon elated the Jewish exiles: “For the Lord hath done it; shout … break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein; for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel.” Cyrus inherited the Babylonian empire, including Jerusalem: “every king on earth,” he said, “brought me heavy tribute and kissed my feet when I sat in Babylon.”
Cyrus had a fresh vision of empire. While the Assyrians and Babylonians built empires on slaughter and deportation, Cyrus offered religious tolerance in return for political dominance to “unite peoples into one empire.”a
Soon after, the King of Persia issued a decree that must have astonished the Jews: “The Lord God hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem. Who is there among you of all his people? Let him go up to Jerusalem and build the house of the Lord God of Israel.”
Not only was he sending the Judaean exiles home, and guaranteeing their rights and laws—the first ruler ever to do so—but he returned Jerusalem to them and offered to rebuild the Temple. Cyrus appointed Sheshbazzar, son of the last king, to govern Jerusalem, returning to him the Temple vessels. No wonder a Judaean prophet hailed Cyrus as the Messiah. “He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.”
Sheshbazzar led 42,360 exiles back to Jerusalem in the province of Yehud—Judah.b The city was a wasteland after the magnificence of Babylon, but “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion,” wrote Isaiah, “put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city … Shake thyself from the dust … O captive daughter of Zion.” However, the plans of Cyrus and the returning exiles were obstructed by the locals who had remained in Judaea and particularly Samaria.
Just nine years after the return from exile, Cyrus, still in his prime, was killed in battle in Central Asia. It was said that his victorious enemy dropped his head into a blood-filled wineskin to satiate his greedy thirst for the lands of others. His heir redeemed his body and buried him in a golden sarcophagus at Pasargadae (in southern Iran) where his tomb still stands. “He eclipsed all other monarchs, before him and since,” wrote the Greek soldier Xenophon. Jerusalem had lost her protector.22
DARIUS AND ZERUBBABEL: THE NEW TEMPLE
The fate of Cyrus’ empire, already larger than anything that had gone before, was decided close to Jerusalem. Cyrus’ son Cambyses II—Kambujiya—succeeded to the throne and in 525 marched through Gaza and across Sinai to conquer Egypt. Far away in Persia, his brother rebelled. On his way home to save his throne, Cambyses died mysteriously near Gaza; there, seven noble conspirators met on horseback to plan the seizure of the empire. They had not decided who would be their candidate, so they agreed that “the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne.” The horse of Darius, a young scion of one of the noble clans and Cambyses’ lance-bearer, was the first to neigh. Herodotus claimed that Darius cheated by ordering his groom to dip his fingers into a mare’s vulva: he then gave Darius’ horse a thrilling whiff at the vital moment. Thus Herodotus gleefully attributed the rise of an Eastern despot to a venereal sleight of hand.
Aided by his six co-conspirators, Darius galloped eastwards, and succeeded in reconquering the entire Persian empire, suppressing rebellions in virtually every province. But the civil war “ceased the work of the house of God in Jerusalem unto the second year of the reign of Darius.” In about 520, Prince Zerubbabel, grandson of the last king of Judah, and his priest, Joshua, son of the last priest of the old Temple, set off from Babylonia to rescue Jerusalem.
Zerubbabel rededicated the altar on the Temple Mount, hiring artisans and buying Phoenician cedarwood to rebuild the Temple. Excited by the rising edifice, encouraged by the disorder in the empire, the Jews could not help but entertain messianic dreams of a new kingdom. “In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, I will take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant … and make thee as a signet,” wrote the prophet Haggai, citing the Davidic signet-ring lost by Zerubbabel’s grandfather. Jewish leaders arrived from Babylon with gold and silver, hailing Zerubbabel (which means “Seed of Babylon”) as the “Shoot” that “shall assume majesty and rule upon his throne.”
The local people, who lived around the city and to the north in Samaria, now wanted to join in with this sacred task and offered Zerubbabel their help, but the returning Exiles practised a new Judaism. They regarded these locals as half-heathens, disdaining them as the Am Ha-Aretz, “the people of the land.” Alarmed by the revival in Jerusalem or bribed by the locals, the Persian governor stopped the building.
Within three years, Darius had defeated all challenges and emerged as one of the most accomplished rulers of the ancient world, establishing a tolerant world empire that stretched from Thrace and Egypt to the Hindu Kush—the first to extend across three continents.c The new Great King turned out to be a rare combination of conqueror and administrator. From his image carved in rock to commemorate his victory, we know that this Darius—Darayavaush—presented himself as a classic Aryan with high brow and straight nose, shown as 5 feet 10 inches tall, wearing a war crown of gold studded with oval jewels, his fringe frizzed, his drooping moustache twirled, his hair tied in a bun and his square beard arranged in four rows of curls alternating with straight strands. In his majesty, he wore a long robe over trousers and shoes, and carried a duck-headed bow.
This was the awesome ruler to whom Zerubbabel appealed, citing the decree of Cyrus. Darius ordered a check of the imperial rolls and found the decree, commanding, “Let the governor of the Jews build this house of God. I, Darius, have a decree. Let it be done with speed.” In 518, he marched westwards to restore order in Egypt, probably passing through Judaea to settle the over-excited Jews of Jerusalem: he may have executed Zerubbabel, who now disappeared without explanation—the last of the Davidians.
In March 515, the Second Temple was dedicated joyfully by the priests with the sacrifice of 100 bullocks, 200 rams, 400 lambs and twelve goats (to expiate the sins of the Twelve Tribes). The Judaeans thus celebrated the first Passover since the Exile. But when the old men who remembered Solomon’s Temple saw this modest building, they burst into tears. The city remained tiny and deserted.23
Over fifty years later, the cup-bearer of Darius’ grandson, King Artaxerxes I, was a Jew named Nehemiah. The Jerusalemites appealed to him for help: “The remnant are in great affliction. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down.” Nehemiah was heartbroken: “I sat down and wept and mou
rned.” When he was next serving at court in Susa, the Persian capital, King Artaxerxes asked, “Why is thy countenance sad?” “Let the king live forever,” replied this Jewish courtier, “why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my father’s sepulchres, lieth waste? … If it please the king … send me unto Judah … that I may build it.” Nehemiah was “sore afraid” as he awaited the answer.
NEHEMIAH: THE DECLINE OF THE PERSIANS
The Great King appointed Nehemiah governor and granted him funds and a military escort. But the Samaritans, north of Jerusalem, were ruled by their own hereditary governor, Sanballat, who distrusted this secretive courtier from faraway Susa and the schemes of the returning Exiles. By night Nehemiah, who feared assassination, inspected Jerusalem’s broken walls and burned gates. His memoir, the only political autobiography in the Bible, tells how Sanballat “laughed us to scorn” when he heard the plans to rebuild the walls until Nehemiah revealed his appointment as governor. Landowners and priests were each given sections of the wall to rebuild. When they were attacked by Sanballat’s ruffians, Nehemiah set guards “so the wall was finished in fifty and two days,” enclosing just the City of David and the Temple Mount, with a small fortress north of the Temple.
Now Jerusalem “was large and great,” Nehemiah said, but “the people were few therein.” Nehemiah persuaded the Jews outside the city to draw lots: one out of every ten would settle in Jerusalem. After twelve years Nehemiah travelled to Persia to report to the king, but when he returned to Jerusalem he found that Sanballat’s cronies were lucratively running the Temple while the Jews were marrying with the locals. Nehemiah expelled these interlopers, discouraged intermarriage and imposed his new pure Judaism.
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