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

Now, thanks to Cyrus, this was about to become a demonstrable reality. The other gods were cowering in terror: Bel and Nebo—important Babylonian deities—were cringing; their effigies were being carted off ignominiously on the backs of common beasts of burden.³² Those foreign gods who had seemed to lord it over Yahweh had been made redundant. Henceforth all the nations of the world—Egypt, Cush, Sheba—would be forced to submit to Israel, dragged to Jerusalem in chains and forced to admit:

       With you alone is God, and he has no rival:

      there is no other god.³³

      The Zion liturgy had always asserted that Yahweh was the only god who counted; with Second Isaiah that insight had developed into an unequivocal monotheism. As the setting for this world triumph, Jerusalem would be more glorious than ever before. It would glitter with precious stones: rubies on the battlements, crystal on the gates, and the city walls would be encrusted with jewels—a splendor that amply demonstrated the integrity and sanctity of the city within.³⁴

      These hopes were brought one step nearer to fulfillment in the autumn of 539, when Cyrus’s army defeated the Babylonians at Opis on the River Tigris. A month later, Cyrus entered Babylon and was enthroned as the representative of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila. At once he carried out what he had promised. Between September and August 538, all the effigies of the Assyrian gods which had been captured by the Babylonians were returned to their native cities and their temples were rebuilt. At the same time, Cyrus issued a decree stating that the Temple of Jerusalem should be rebuilt and its vessels and cultic furniture restored. Cyrus’s Persian empire was run along entirely different lines from the empires of Assyria and Babylon. He gave his subjects a certain autonomy because it was cheaper and more efficient: there would be less resentment and rebellion. Rebuilding the temples of the gods was one of the chief duties of any king, and Cyrus probably believed that he would not only earn the gratitude of his subjects but also win divine favor.

      Accordingly, some months after his coronation in Babylon, Cyrus handed over the gold and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had confiscated from the Jerusalem Temple to one Sheshbazzar, a “prince” (nasi) of Judah. He set out with 42,360 Judaeans, together with their servants and two hundred singers, for the Temple.³⁵ If the returning exiles had left Babylon with the prophecies of the Second Isaiah ringing in their ears, they must have come down to earth very quickly when they arrived in Judah. Most of them had been born in exile and had grown up amid the magnificence and sophistication of Babylonia. Judah must have seemed a bleak, alien place. There could be no question of building a new Temple immediately. First the returning exiles had to establish a viable community in the desolation. Few of them actually stayed in Jerusalem, which was still in ruins, and the majority settled in more comfortable parts of Judah and Samerina. Some of those who stayed may have settled in the old city, while others established themselves in the countryside south of Jerusalem, which had remained uninhabited since 586.

      We hear nothing more about the Golah, the community of exiles, until 520, the second year of the reign of Darius, King of Persia. By this time Sheshbazzar was no longer in charge of the Golah in Judah: we have no idea what happened to him. The building work had come to a standstill, but enthusiasm revived when, shortly after Darius’s accession, Zerubbabel, the grandson of King Jehoiachin, arrived in Jerusalem from Babylon with Joshua, the grandson of the last chief priest to officiate in the old Temple. Zerubbabel had been appointed high commissioner (peha) of the province of Judah. He was the representative of the Persian government, but he was also a scion of the House of David, and this put new heart into the Golah. All the immigrants gathered together in Jerusalem to build a new altar on the site of the old, and when it was finished, they began to offer sacrifice and observe the traditional festivals there. But then the building stalled again. Life was still a struggle in Jerusalem: the harvests had been bad, the economy deplorable, and it was difficult to be enthusiastic about a Temple when there was not enough to eat. But in August 520 the prophet Haggai told the immigrants that their priorities were all wrong. The harvests could not improve until the Temple had been built: the House of Yahweh had always been the source of the fertility of the Promised Land. What did they mean by building houses for themselves and leaving Yahweh’s dwelling place in ruins?³⁶ Duly chastened, the Golah went back to work.

      The foundations of the Second Temple were finally laid by the autumn of 520. On the feast of Sukkoth, they were rededicated in a special ceremony. The priests processed into the sacred area, followed by the Levites, who were singing psalms and clashing cymbals. But some of them were old enough to remember the magnificent Temple of Solomon, and when they saw the modest site of its successor they burst into tears.³⁷ From the very start, the Second Temple was a disappointment and an anticlimax for many of the people. Haggai tried to boost morale: he assured them that the Second Temple would be greater than the old. Soon Yahweh would rule the world, as Second Isaiah had foretold. Zerubbabel would be the Messiah, ruling all the Goyim on Yahweh’s behalf.³⁸ Haggai’s colleague Zechariah agreed. He looked forward to the day when Yahweh would come back to dwell on Zion and establish his reign through the two messiahs: Zerubbabel the king and Joshua the priest. It was important not to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, so that the city would be able to accommodate the vast numbers of people who would shortly flock to live there.³⁹

      But not everybody shared this vision of an open city. As soon as the people of Samerina, in the old northern Kingdom of Israel, found that work on Yahweh’s new Temple was seriously under way, they came to Zerubbabel and offered their services. The Chronicler tells us that they were the descendants of the foreigners who had been settled in the country by the Assyrians in 722. Some would also have been Israelites, members of the ten northern tribes, and others Judaeans, the children of those who had stayed behind in 586. Naturally these Yahwists wished to help with the rebuilding of Zion. Zerubbabel, however, brusquely refused.⁴⁰ The Golah alone constituted the “true” Israel; they alone had been commissioned by Cyrus to rebuild the Temple. Thereafter these other Yahwists were seen not as brothers but as “enemies,” known collectively as the Am Ha-Aretz, the “people of the land.” In Babylon, Ezekiel and P had seen all the twelve tribes as members of Israel and worthy of holiness. Only the Goyim, the gentile nations, were excluded from the sacred area. But the returning exiles had an even narrower perspective. The Am Ha-Aretz were regarded as “strangers,” but the exiles were not prepared to welcome them into their city as the Holiness Code had enjoined. Consequently, instead of bringing peace to the country, the new Jerusalem became a new bone of contention in the Holy Land. The biblical authors tell us that henceforth the Am Ha-Aretz “set out to dishearten and frighten the Judaeans from building any further.”⁴¹ They tried to enlist the support of Persian officials, and on one occasion in about 486 the governor of Samerina wrote to warn King Xerxes that the Judaeans were building the walls of Jerusalem without permission. In the ancient world, this was usually regarded as an act of rebellion against the imperial power, and the work was forcibly stopped until Cyrus’s original decree was discovered in the royal archive at Ecbatana.

      Meanwhile the building of the Second Temple continued slowly. We hear no more of Zerubbabel after his rejection of the Am Ha-Aretz. Perhaps the messianic hopes of Haggai and Zechariah had alarmed the Persian government. He could have been removed from office when King Darius passed through the country in 519. No member of the House of David was appointed peha of the subprovince of Judah again. But despite the failure of this messianic dream, the immigrants did succeed in completing their Temple on 23 Adar (March) 515. It was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, of course, to ensure continuity with its sacred traditions. It also reproduced the old tripartite plan of Ulam, Hekhal,