Jerusalem. The Biography

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 themselvesby 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. *
    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 Sinthe 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

539–336 BC
     
    CYRUS THE GREAT
     
    Astyges, King of Media in western Persia, dreamed 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