Jerusalem. The Biography

established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’
    This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings – from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog – derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
    King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history. * The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah. 16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
    SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
     
    Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill. * The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the
Iliad
, would become the Bible.
    When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his moment had come: he joined a new coalition against Assyria and prepared for war. But, unfortunately for the Judaeans, the new Great King of Assyria was a warlord of apparently endless confidence and energy: his name was Sennacherib.
    He called himself ‘King of the World, King of Assyria’ at a time when the titles were synonymous. Assyria ruled from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus. Its landlocked heartland in today’s Iraq was defended by mountains to the north and the Euphrates in the west but was vulnerable to attack from south and east. The empire resembled a shark that could survive only by constant consumption. For the Assyrians, conquest was a religious duty. Each new king swore at his accession to expand what they called ‘the land of God Ashur’ – the country was named after its patron god. The kings were both high priests and commanders who led their 200,000-strong armies in person, and like the tyrants of modern times, they cowed their subjects using not just terror but vast deportations of peoples from one end of the empire to another.
    The body of Sennacherib’s father was never recovered from the battlefield, a terrible sign of divine displeasure, and the empire started to breakup. But Sennacherib smashed all the rebellions and when he recaptured Babylon, he destroyed the entire city. But once order was restored, he tried to consolidate, extravagantly rebuilding his capital Nineveh, city of Ishtar, goddess of war and passion, with canals irrigating its gardens and his massive Palace Without Rival. The Assyrian kings were