Jerusalem: The Biography

* The ancient Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq claim descent from the Ten Tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians as well as from those deported later by the Babylonians. The latest genetic research proves that these Jews were indeed separated from other Jewish communities around 2,500 years ago. Yet the quest for these vanished Israelites has spawned a thousand fantasies and theories: the Ten Tribes have been ‘discovered’ in various unlikely places – from the Native Americans of North America to the English.

* Two new suburbs developed outside the walled City of David and the Temple Mount: the Makhtesh in the Tyropaean Valley that ran between Mount Moriah and the western hill, and another, the Mishneh, on the western hill itself, today’s Jewish Quarter. High officials were buried in the tombs around the city: ‘This is [the tomb] of [ … ]yahu, the Royal Steward,’ reads a tomb in Silwan village. ‘There is no gold or silver here, only his bones and the bones of his slavewife – cursed be anyone who opens this tomb.’ The curse did not work: the tomb was plundered and is today a chicken coop. But this royal steward may actually have been Hezekiah’s courtier criticized by Isaiah for building a grandiose tomb: the name could, read ‘Shebnayahu’.

* 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.

* Josiah’s reforms were a vital stepin the development of Judaism. Two tiny silver scrolls were found in a Valley of Hinnom tomb of this period: inside was etched the priestly prayer of Numbers 6.24–6 which remains part of the Jewish service today. ‘For YHWH is our restorer and rock. May YHWH bless you and keepyou and make his face shine.’

* 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.