Jerusalem. The Biography

here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.

     

     

     

     
Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.

† The Israelite invasion of Canaan is a battlefield of complex, usually unprovable theories. But it seems that the storming of Jericho, whose walls were crumbled by Joshua’s trumpets, is mythical: Jericho was more ancient than Jerusalem. (In 2010, the Palestinian Authority celebrated its 10,000th anniversary – though the date is random.) However, Jericho was temporarily uninhabited and there is no evidence of collapsed walls. The Conquest Hypothesis is hard to take literally since the fighting (as recounted in the Book of Joshua) usually takes place in such a small area. Indeed Bethel near Jerusalem is one of the few conquered towns in the Book of Judges that
was
actually destroyed in the thirteenth century. The Israelites may have been far more peaceful and tolerant than they claimed.

* In 1880, Jacob Eliahu, aged sixteen, son of Jewish converts to Protestantism, invited a school friend to dive the length of the Siloam Tunnel. They were both fascinated by the biblical story of 2 Kings 20.20: ‘And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?’ Jacob started from one end and his friend from the other, feeling the workers’ ancient chisel-marks with their fingers. When the marks changed direction Jacob realized he was at the place where the two teams had met and there he found the inscription. He emerged at the other end to find that his friend had long since given up; and he terrified the local Arabs who believed the Tunnel contained a djinn or dragon. When he told his headmaster, word spread and a Greek trader crept into the Tunnel and roughly cut out the inscription, breaking it. But the Ottoman police caught him; and the inscription is now in Istanbul. Jacob Eliahu then joined the evangelical American Colonists and was adopted by the Colony’s founding family, the Spaffords. Jacob Spafford became a teacher at their school, instructing his pupils about the Tunnel, never mentioning that
he
was the boy who had found the inscription.

* There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a
tophet
, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in
molok
, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: ‘It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!’ These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible.
Molok
(offering) was distorted into the biblical ‘moloch’, the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses.

* Royal courtiers lived and worked atopthe City of David. An archive of forty-five
bullae
– clay seals hardened by being burned in the destruction of the city – has been found in a house there, which archaeologists call the House of the Bullae. This was obviously a secretariat of the king: one
bulla
bears the inscription ‘Gemaraiah son of Shaphan’, the name of the royal scribe of King Jehoiakim in the Book of Jeremiah. Some time during the crisis, the king died, to be succeeded by his son, Jehoiachin.

* Shattered sherds bearing messages – known as
ostraca –
have been found by archaeologists buried in layers of ashes at