Jerusalem. The Biography

repetitive, * 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 the name ‘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. *
    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. † 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.

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