by Simon Schama
Both Tel Zayit (where the letters are cut into a limestone boulder) and Kuntillet Ajrud are remarkable for being culturally provincial but nonetheless crossroads of trade, military movements and local cults. So it is entirely possible that the much greater simplicity of the linear alphabet over cuneiform meant that literacy skills – even if often exercised on functional prosaic messages – could have been spread far beyond and below the elite. The bundle of blessings, curses, hymns of praise and – most remarkable of all – stylised drawings (of women playing lyres, a cow feeding a calf and the like) at Kuntillet Ajrud suggest a kind of exuberant hubbub that spills back and forth between the realm of the sacred and the business of everyday life. In the same style, a famous ninth-century BCE farming almanac found at Gezer, in the Shephelah lowlands about twenty miles west of Jerusalem, with its months divided into agricultural routines (‘a month of making hay / a month of harvesting barley / a month of vine-pruning / a month of summer fruit’) also suggests a kind of writing entirely apart from the formal scribal-bureaucratic style that was the monopoly of those who ran the royal state elsewhere in the region. Sanders convincingly characterises the phenomenon as a home-grown craft writing, rather than the product of any ‘Solomonic enlightenment’.
Something profound happened between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, when the Bible was being put together, in the parallel world that surrounded the scribes and Temple priests. As a writing medium, Hebrew evolved from Phoenician-Canaanite into a standard form that was much the same language up and down Palestine (and east over the Jordan): a unified tongue, even though the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were divided (or in Israel’s case, destroyed). It was a language that extended beyond the Yahwist kingdoms, for the ninth-century BCE stone of Mesha, king of the Moabites, celebrating the liberation of his people from Israel, was nonetheless written in vigorous classical Hebrew, the language of his enemy.
Within Judah and Samaria, that same Hebrew connects rather than divides different classes of the population. Those who write petitions and those who entertain them are not cut off from each other by different language worlds. Part of the continuity may be due to the way the scribes who write on behalf of petitioners express themselves, but the same Hebrew undeniably lives in many different places, socially and geographically. It has been found (and the finds keep on coming, in what is unfolding as an exceptionally fruitful generation of excavations) in the storehouses of Arad, another military garrison town in the northern Negev, where the quartermaster, Elyashib ben Eshyahu, facing the Babylonian threat, receives letter after letter requisitioning oil, wine, wheat and flour by the donkey-load.21 Twenty or so years earlier, a farm labourer in a frontier coastal region close to Ashdod, where a Judaean fort was holding out against the Egyptian advance against Josiah, appealed to someone in authority in the garrison for the return of a shirt or coat that had been taken from him as collateral for a loan, notwithstanding the biblical prohibition of such confiscations.22 ‘After I finished my harvesting a few days ago he took your servant’s [the way the petitioner describes himself] garment . . . All my companions who were harvesting with me in the heat of the sun will testify that what I have said is true. I am innocent of any offence . . . If your governor does not consider it his obligation to return your servant’s garment do it from pity. You must not remain silent.’ It’s a sad story but it speaks to us of more than just the desperation of a labourer to get back the shirt that had been, as he saw it, stolen from his back. It also presupposes that the petitioner knew something about the biblical law code, especially the injunctions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy against harsh treatment of the poor. It is as though elements of the ‘social’ commandments enshrined in the Torah had already become internalised, not just as semi-official and legal precepts, but somehow as part of the expectations of the people, protected by the Yahwist king.
Alphabetic writing is shared between God and men. YHWH, who by the sixth century BCE at the latest, is said to be the only real God, may be faceless and formless, but there are occasions when He resolves into one revealed aspect: the writing finger. In one of the accounts of the theophany to Moses, that finger writes the commandment directly onto the stone tablet; in the Book of Daniel it writes the warning on the wall to the feasting King Belshazzar. God is the finger; God is writing; God is, above all else, words. But He doesn’t keep them to Himself. Any attempt by the temple priests to make writing conditional on religious obedience is defeated by the liberated versatility of the form. The genie is out of the bottle. In fact it was at large and circulating before the Bible bottled it in the first place. So that this Hebrew writing, like so much of Jewish life that would follow, is connected, but not slavishly tied, to observance. It is off and having its own stupendous, argumentative, undisciplined, garrulous life.
There is no more dramatic instance of this independent vigour than a Hebrew inscription chiselled into the wall at the southern end of a tunnel dug by King Hezekiah’s military engineers, to take water diverted from the spring of Gihon at Siloam, fed to a capacious cistern-reservoir within the city defences. The creation of the water tunnel was part of Hezekiah’s strategic preparations designed to withstand the siege of Sennacherib’s Assyrian armies at the end of the eighth century BCE once he had decided to trust in YHWH (whose Temple he had cleaned out of pagan rites and images) and defy the Assyrian king’s relentless demands for tribute. But despite being an extraordinary feat – 643 metres long and cut clean through limestone, without the help of any vertical air or light shafts, part of a hydraulic system unknown anywhere else in the ancient world of that time – the new conduit receives only the briefest mention in 2 Kings 20 (‘he made a pool and a conduit and brought water into the city’) and, slightly less perfunctory, in the much later 2 Chronicles 32 (‘this same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David’). But here is another way of describing, or rather dramatising what actually happened at the climax of the work itself. Remarkably, it announces itself as a true-life tale, a miniature history, the first we have of ordinary Jews getting a job done:
and this is the story [dvr] of the tunnel . . . while the men wielded the pickaxes, each man towards his fellow and while there were still three cubits to go there was heard a man’s voice calling to his fellow for there was a fissure in the rock on the right and [on the left]. And on the day it was broken through, the hewers struck [the rock] each man towards his fellow, axe against axe. And the water flowed from the spring towards the pool for one thousand and two hundred cubits. And a hundred cubits was the height of the rock above the heads of the hewers.
The full 180 words constitute the longest, continuous ancient classical Hebrew inscription we know of; and its subject, unlike the stones of Babylon and Assyria, Egypt or even little Moab, is not the deeds and renown of the ruler, nor the invincibility of their gods. It celebrates, rather, the triumph of regular Jews, workmen – pickaxe-swingers. It is not meant for monumental public view, but for those who, some day, might happen upon it, wading through the sloppy watercourse. It is a kind of ante anti-Bible; something left for posterity, but with the casual spontaneity of someone scrawling graffiti, yet unlike graffiti, cut into the rock in perfect, large (three-quarters of an inch) Hebrew letters. All of which certainly makes it a Jewish story, too.
3
Delving, Divining . . .
How could they all have missed the tunnellers’ story from two and a half millennia before? How could the procession of pink-faced Anglos – Bible scholars, missionaries, military engineers, mappers and surveyors, kitted out with their measuring tapes, their candles, notebooks, sketchbooks and pencils, accompanied by their NCOs and fellah-guides, all of them sloshing, wading and then perforce crawling on their hands and knees through the cavernous water-filled tunnel – have failed to notice those six lines of Hebrew cut into the rock wall? Or was it difficult enough making a way through the snaking passage, trying to breathe with water coming up to
your chin, your candle-hand stretched to stop it guttering, without being on the lookout for inscriptions – which you expected to be out in the open air, in the light of day, not glimmering in the subterranean darkness?
None of these complications got past a schoolboy.1 Jacob Eliyahu was sixteen in 1880, born in Ramallah where his mother had gone to escape the cholera in Jerusalem. His parents were Sephardi Jews who had come to Palestine from Turkey but had been converted to Christianity by the London Mission. Multilingual and naturally curious, Jacob had long been intrigued by the stories of the water tunnel said to wind two hundred feet beneath the Temple Mount rock, from the spring called the Virgin’s Fount to the Pool of Siloam. Tall tales that a ghost or a dragon (the same that gave the name to the Dragon’s Well past which Nehemiah rode) lurked within only piqued his curiosity. It was also said that the tunnel might have been built by gangs working from either end and meeting in the middle. So he recruited a friend, Samson, to start at the Virgin’s Fount while he began his exploration from the Pool of Siloam where the entrance was nearly five feet high.
Knowing it would quickly shrink to a dark, confined space, Jacob went well prepared, taking candles mounted on wooden floats and a supply of matches that he strung around his neck. But as he waded deeper the matches got soggy, the floating candles were a lost cause and Jacob inched forward, feeling his way with his fingers along the wall, the scummy wash rising up his legs. No one knew why the tunnellers had made the passage serpentine, though there was speculation that they could have been avoiding the tombs of the Judaean kings hidden somewhere beneath the Temple.
About thirty metres from the Siloam entrance, Jacob sensed an abrupt change on the face of the rock, smoothing out into what felt like a carved panel an inch or so deeper than the surface. Within this space were letters, many lines of them. The lines continued all the way down to the rising water level, perhaps even below its surface, and still he could feel little prick-points hammered in, separating the groups of letters that formed words.
Sixteen-year-olds are habitually on the lookout for secret messages. Who knew who had written this one in its mysterious hand, or when. A spy? A prisoner? A soldier? Bursting with his find, Jacob splashed excitedly to the Virgin’s Fount to tell his school friend Samson the news. But Samson, a less daring boy, had long since exited back into the open. With his eyes not yet adjusted to the light, he pounced happily on the boy-shaped form he assumed was his friend. It was when the Arab woman screamed at the sodden water-spirit emerging from the tunnel that Jacob realised his mistake, not quickly enough to fend off the other women washing their clothes in the Virgin’s Fount from attacking him. Once extricated from their screams and blows, Jacob lost no time in giving the news to his teacher at the Industry School of the Boys Mission, Herr Conrad Schick.
Though he had a strong hunch about its importance, Schick could not immediately decipher the palaeo-Hebrew lettering. That would have to wait for the inspection of the learned Professor Archibald Sayce, the Oxford Assyriologist who came to Jerusalem from Cyprus and squatted in the water scrutinising the letters low down on the wall, and complaining about the discomfort, while his patient helper John Slater held the candle and was eaten alive by mosquitoes. Despite the difficulty of reading, for the incised letters had been obscured by lime silicate that had washed over them with the tunnel water, Sayce knew from characteristics like the ‘conversive vav’ – the letter ‘v’ made from three strokes with a short line through the long vertical shaft – and the long horizontal line at the base of the ‘bet’ that were unique to Hebrew of the ninth to sixth centuries BCE, that this was Judahite writing from before the fall of the kingdom. Schick, with whom Sayce collaborated in publishing the find, had no doubt this must have been made by Hezekiah’s tunnellers. They had found the lost voice of eighth-century BCE Judah.
Like everyone else interested in Jerusalem’s history, Schick had read the Biblical Researches of the dean of modern Bible exploration, the Connecticut Yankee Dr Edward Robinson, who had plumbed the depths of the tunnel in 1838 with his learned companion the Reverend Eli Smith. It was Robinson who had first concluded that it would have needed two gangs working from either end to cut their way through 1,700 feet of rock. It had taken them two expeditions into the tunnel, ‘stripping off our shoes and stockings and rolling our garments above our knees’, proceeding the first eight hundred feet until the rock ceiling descended and the waters rose so alarmingly that even when crawling on all fours, progress became impossible without better preparation. So Robinson and Smith ‘traced with candle smoke the initials of our names’, retreated, and returned three days later to go the full distance. Though Robinson was exhaustively observant he missed the inscription, but he had seen enough to be persuaded that Hezekiah’s tunnel is evidence that the Bible, or at least Kings and Chronicles where the tunnel was mentioned, was not just sacred scripture but actual, empirically verifiable history. By such discoveries, Robinson wrote, ‘we are thus enabled to rescue another ancient historical fact from the long oblivion or rather discredit into which it had fallen for so many centuries’.2
Making the Bible fact as well as faith was Conrad Schick’s obsession too. As a young, rather lonely Württemberger ‘Pilgrim-Brother’ in Jerusalem in 1846, he had taken solitary walks around the walls plotting the route Nehemiah had taken on his night ride in the mid-fifth century BCE. He knew every inch of walls and gates, and no one, not even the British military engineers who had made the Ordnance Survey map between 1867 and 1870, had Schick’s mole’s-eye familiarity with the warren of tunnels and passages beneath the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. Between 1873 and 1875, whenever he could escape his instructional duties at the carpenter’s bench in the Industry School he would study the tunnels and conduits, miles of them, as well as the tanks, cisterns and reservoir pools holding millions of gallons, that wound beneath the mosques of the Haram.
Schick had been dreaming of this place, sacred and profane, above ground as well as below, ever since he had been a young brother at the Chrischona Mission of Pilgrims at Basel, the seminary founded by the evangelical banker C. F. Spittler, who envisioned his young men manning a chain of missionary hermitages down the great rift from Jerusalem and the Dead Sea all the way to Ethiopia. As a first step, Spittler sent young Conrad to Jerusalem where he lodged grimly with another unhappy young Pilgrim-Brother, Johannes Ferdinand Palmer, took in Arab orphan urchins from the street to spare them a life of begging and, when he could, tended to his lathe and plane, making olive-wood figurines he hoped to sell to monasteries, along with the occasional cuckoo clock.
Biblical carpentry was his true passion. Had not God seen fit to bring the Saviour up in a woodworker’s shop? So Conrad Schick found his true vocation as a biblical modeller. His first piece (which amazingly survives to this day) had been of the Haram al-Sharif, fashioned when he was a young seminarian in Basel; but he went on to make many more. So fine and intricate were these scale models that they drew gasps of admiration from the linen-suited classes in squalid, violent, broken-down Jerusalem, and gave credence to Schick’s other claim that he was a true builder – in fact, a Jerusalem architect. Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense) dwellings for impoverished Jews, without any obligation, though the evangelical side of the money naturally hoped for the admission of Gospel Light along with the natural kind. The district which filled with the Orthodox became known as Mea Shearim which, were it known to be the work of ardently Christian hands, might surprise its present-day residents.
Schick’s models were praised by the British, German and Austrian consuls, and so fulsomely that it occurred to the Turkish governor, Izzet Pasha, that it might be a fine idea were Schick to make another of the Haram that could be displayed at the upcoming International Exposition in Vienna in 1873, advertising in an elegantly indirect manner the scrupulous care the Ottoman government said it lavished on the holy places of the three
monotheisms. Schick duly obliged, and in addition to his fee was given special and extremely unusual access, both to the interior of the Haram courtyards and to the excavations that were taking place during repair works to the foundations of the Dome of the Rock in the 1870s. Down the construction shafts the blinking mole clambered, then straightening out, took the detailed notes he hoped would allow him to construct the model of models, not just of the surface building but also what he called, in his mangled English, ‘the substructions’ below.
The Anglos – especially the engineers sent by the Palestine Exploration Fund to survey Jerusalem, above ground and below – had been there before him, in the substructions, making up in military gumption and engineering exactness what they lacked in Schickian inch-by-inch familiarity. One of them, Captain Charles Warren, rafted along the sewage using a wooden door as a punt. When the water rose so high and the roof descended, sewage punting had to be abandoned for heavy wading, the onrushing foul water lapping about his face. Its unexpected force caused Warren to swallow the pencil held between his teeth, triggering a choking fit that almost did for him. Only the timely help of his trusty Sergeant Birtles saved him – and just as well, for ‘what honour’, Warren wrote in his Underground Jerusalem, ‘would there be dying face down, like a rat in sewage?’
All those stout Victorians who braved the underground effluent remarked that it ought to be possible to separate foul Jerusalem water from fair. To prove his point, Dr Robinson, with Yankee daring, sampled its quality and lived to pronounce it not altogether disagreeable. After all, it came from the natural spring of Gihon in the Kidron Valley. Above ground, though, the water available to Jerusalem’s people was repellently contaminated with animal viscera and offal as well as sewage, a cholera-friendly broth that every few years would take a terrible toll. Rainwater, which by Middle Eastern standards was abundant enough in the Jerusalem winter and spring, simply ran off the stone, for want of systematic conduits and reservoirs to hold it. To those who knew both surface and substructure of the old city, this was another shocking instance of how far Judaea had fallen from its royal antiquity.
