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Solomon's Temple
Noah's ark as imagined by
the 16th century artist, Juan Gerson
Tiglath-Pileser III.
After David's death in 965, two of his sons, Solomon and Adonijah, vied with each other to succeed him. Solomon emerged as the victor and had Adonijah executed on the pretext that Adonijah had demanded a woman from David's harem. It was a kind of sibling rivalry for power common within authoritarian kingship dynasties.
Like David, Solomon benefited from an era of peace and prosperity. He enjoyed alliances with his Egyptian and Phoenician neighbors. He encouraged trade and built a merchant fleet that he harbored at the Gulf of Aqaba at the northeast end of the Red Sea. He acquired copper mines and built refineries for smelting metals. His ships brought goods from afar, and commerce passed through his kingdom from south, north, east and west.
Solomon thought he should live as splendidly as the great king of Assyria, and to create many luxurious palaces for himself he imported the skilled craftsmen that he could not find among his subjects. According to the Old Testament, Solomon, like his father, had many wives, as many as seven hundred, including princesses from other kingdoms given to Solomon as gifts to promote good relations. And he had four hundred horses.
A priest-king like his father, Solomon, according to the Old Testament, led sacrifices to the god Yahweh. Also according to the Old Testament, Solomon had temples built for his wives who worshiped other gods. As for Yahweh, to give him a home and to put Yahweh worship under his domination, Solomon had the temple constructed that his father had intended to build, a temple to be described in the Old Testament as "the House of the Lord." The temple was built on property on a hill north of Jerusalem that David had purchased, property that the Amorites had used as a huge threshing floor. The temple's design resembled the temples of other religions. It was decorated with sculptures and other works of art, and in the inner sanctum of the temple was the Ark of the Covenant. And to run the temple in his behalf he appointed as high priest the court priest who had performed religious duties for David, a priest named Zadok, who was the first of a hereditary priesthood that would last for centuries to come.
This was an age in which kings acted as a judge for the community, and the Old Testament describes Solomon as a judge who was wise. The First Book of Kings, 4:29, reads:
Now God gave Solomon wisdom and a very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore.
The Old Testament also finds fault with Solomon, fault with his love of luxury, his marrying pagans and his turning to idolatry. These later writings would describe Solomon as having enslaved his subjects. Solomon forced his subjects to work four months of every year on his projects, and, late in his reign, many of his subjects became displeased enough that they rebelled against him, as had the people of Israel against David. And like David, Solomon crushed the uprisings, while two of Solomon's vassal nations - an Aramaean kingdom around Damascus, and Edom - took advantage of the uprisings and broke from Solomon's rule.
Some Hebrews had learned a Phoenician language - which included words of Sumerian origin. The language that the Hebrews adopted was in later times to be called Hebrew. And in taking the language as their own, Hebrew scribes acquired some of its poetry, and they may have borrowed from the Mesopotamian stories written in that language. The cherubim, or angels, mentioned in Genesis, Ezekiel, 2 Samuel and elsewhere in Hebrew sacred writings were known to the Canaanites. Some of what was to find its way into the Book of Proverbs matched Canaanite literature. The obligation of a man to marry the childless widow of a dead brother had been a part of the law of the Hurrians, who had influenced the Canaanites. The story in the Book of Genesis of Rachel stealing the gods of her father is similar to Hurrian custom. The Hebrew version of the story of a great flood had an ark that grounded on Mount Ararat, as did the Hurrian version of that story.
The earliest known works by worshipers of Yahweh are the Book of Jashar and the Song of Deborah - believed to have been written no sooner than the 1100s. Some believe that the Song of Deborah may have been a part of the Book of Jashar. The Book of Jashar vanished but is referred to in the Book of Joshua 10:13. The earliest Hebrew writing that archaeologists can actually date comes after 1000 BCE, around the time that David acquired power. This archaeological find looks like a child's exercise in creating a calendar, the so-called Gezer Calendar, written on stone, an exercise that suggests that by now an elite among the Hebrews had acquired writing and was passing it to their children.
In work that remains controversial, scholars have separated writing in the Old Testament according to style, modes of thinking, and use of names, suggesting that more than one writer contributed to Genesis and other books of the Old Testament. [note] Four writing styles have been named: Elohist, Deuteronomist, Yahwist and Priestly. Regarding different modes of thought, one contributor to the Old Testament described the Israelites as calling their god Yahweh from the time of Noah; another contributor described Yahweh as becoming known to the Hebrews when he revealed himself to Moses.
The Creation described in the Book of Genesis is similar to the Creation described in the Enuma Elish: the world as a watery chaos, light coming before there were bodies that gave off light, and the heavens and earth becoming separated. The Book of Genesis describes Yahweh as having created man (Adam) "in His own image" and Yahweh as having planted "a garden paradise eastward in Eden," a place including the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Man was to be free to choose, but his choices were described in a way that explained death. A translation of Genesis 2:16,17 reads:
And the Lord God commanded the man saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
Genesis attempted to explain the creation of females as Yahweh taking one of the man's ribs and fashioning from it a woman - Eve. Genesis describes a serpent tempting Eve to eat of the forbidden "fruit."
Yahweh responded to the disobedience of Adam and Eve with vengeance. Women thereafter were to give birth in pain. Women were to be ruled over by their husbands. Humans would need to work to eat, and humans were to be denied the everlasting life that Yahweh enjoyed. "For you are dust," he told the man and woman, "and to dust you shall return."
According to Genesis, Yahweh saw Adam and Eve's descendants as willfully wicked, and He decided to "blot out man" from the face of the earth. Then He found a righteous man called Noah and chose to save Noah and his family and to use Noah to save other creatures that he had caused to dwell upon the earth. Like Utnapishtim, Noah obeyed his god and built a boat. In that boat, Noah, his family and other creatures, survived a great flood. And like the gods who were attracted to Utnapishtim's boat, Yahweh smelled a soothing aroma – the aroma of Noah's "burnt offerings."
After the flood, Yahweh made his covenant with Noah, Noah's descendants multiplied, and all humanity spoke the same language. Then, as if the flood and Noah's righteousness were in vain, evil again appeared among humankind. According to Genesis, one of Yahweh's early disappointments was the descendants of Noah attempting to build a city in Mesopotamia with a tower that would reach to heaven – the Tower of Babel. [note]
Yahweh disapproved of this project and brought the project to an end by causing them to speak different languages, making it impossible for them to understand each other. And he scattered humankind "over the face of the whole earth."
Around 922 BCE, Solomon died of old age, and with his death his son and successor, Rehoboam, confronted the people of Israel. According to the Old Testament, the people said to Rehoboam: "Lighten the heavy burden which your father put upon us and we will serve you." Rehoboam responded by asking the crowd to return in three days. And when the crowd did so, Rehoboam said to them:
My little finger is thicker than my father's loins. Whereas my father loaded you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. (1 Kings 12:11)
Rehoboam's subjects to the north of Jerusalem rebelled, and the rebellion turned into a bloody civil war. The leader of the revolt was a man called Jeroboam. Under his leadership, the north became an independent state, maintaining the name Israel. The state to the south, which included Jerusalem, was smaller and less commercially advanced, and it became known as Judah.
Jeroboam was no revolutionary. He ruled Israel as a divine king and represented his rule as a return to the House of David. Under Jeroboam, Israel's economy grew. So too did its bureaucracy, the debt of peasants and herdsmen, and the number of people losing their land and selling themselves into slavery.
Jeroboam was a conventional monarch, and like Solomon and other Hebrews of his time he found no fault in worshiping a variety of gods. Believing that gods dwelled in places, Jeroboam saw Yahweh as representing not Israel but the kingdom of Judah. Feeling threatened by the rule of Rehoboam from Jerusalem, he saw loyalty to the priests and god of the temple in Jerusalem as a threat to his rule, and Jeroboam set up shrines for worshiping gods other than Yahweh.
Following Jeroboam's death in 901, Israel suffered from drought and an economic depression. With these came bitterness, intensified social unrest, a search for scapegoats and the rise to prominence of a man called Elijah. Elijah was a new kind of Hebrew prophet. Earlier prophets had been advisors to, or supporters of, Israel's monarchy. Elijah was hostile to that monarchy.
Described in the First Book of Kings, Elijah was from a rural, cattle-raising region in Gilead, east of the Jordan River. The agricultural ways of the Canaanites were foreign to him. He preferred the rustic simplicity of Gilead to the cosmopolitanism that he found in Israel's cities. And, according to the Old Testament, he disliked injustice. Elijah was outspoken and acquired a following among Israel's rural people. He protested against land tenure and the enslavement of the poor by the rich. He called for worship of Yahweh and opposed worship of Ba'al.
Ba'al was worshiped by Israel's new king, Ahab and his wife Jezebel, and Ba'al worship was extensive among the wealthy and cosmopolitan of Israel. According to 1 Kings 18:1, Yahweh told Elijah that if he, Elijah, confronted king Ahab, he, Yahweh, would bring relief from the drought by making rain. When Elijah presented himself before Ahab, Ahab recognized him as the "troubler of Israel." Elijah replied that it was not he who troubled Israel but Ahab, because Ahab had "forsaken the commandments of the Lord" and had "followed the Ba'als." Elijah challenged Ahab to arrange a gathering on Mount Carmel, and Ahab, according to the Old Testament, did so.
Mount Carmel was where Ba'al ritual dances were staged, and there Elijah is reported to have spoken to the people of Israel and to have challenged them to make a choice between the supremacy of Yahweh and the gods of the Canaanites. The drought had reflected badly on Ba'al, a god of fertility. The miracles performed by Elijah were impressive. Elijah convinced the crowd, and excited by the new support he had gained, Elijah called upon the crowd to "seize the prophets of Ba'al," and he and those who followed him went on a murderous rampage. According to 1 Kings 18:40, they took the priests of Ba'al "down to the brook of Kishon and slew them there." Then Elijah fled into the wilderness to escape from the agents of Queen Jezebel, who was angry over the murders of the Ba'al priests.
Assyria was re-establishing control in places in Mesopotamia, and Assyria's king and his warrior nobles yearned to win for themselves glory, gold, silver, copper, iron and whatever else they could plunder. They made raids westward, and they conquered Aramaean kingdoms in northern Syria. They headed south toward the Aramaic city of Damascus. King Ahab of Israel allied his nation with the Phoenicians and with Damascus against the Assyrians. This alliance is described as having put 10,000 infantrymen and 2,000 horse drawn chariots into the field against the Assyrians. And, in 853, in a great battle at QarQar in Syria, this force defeated and stopped the Assyrians.
But after their victory, the allies quarreled, and Israel and Damascus fought another of their wars against each other. Israel allied itself on this occasion with Judah. King Ahab died in battle against Damascus. And, with its former enemies divided, Assyria began making new threats in the direction of Israel.
After Ahab died in battle, one of his generals, Jehu, wished to succeed him. In the often bloody business of succession, Jehu enlisted the support of the god Yahweh and Elijah's movement, now led by Elijah's companion, Elisha. According to the Second Book of Kings, Jehu and Elisha murdered more priests of Ba'al. They burned the temple of Ba'al worship and converted it to a latrine. They murdered the remaining members of the Ahab family, including Jezebel, who is said to have been thrown from a window, run over by Jehu's chariot and left to be torn apart by dogs. And Jehu murdered others he saw as possible rivals.
In 842, Jehu became king of Israel, and during his reign economic conditions improved and hatreds subsided. The movement begun by Elijah faded, and Jehu lost interest in Yahweh worship and began worshiping other gods, as expressed in the Second Book of Kings (10:31-32), where it was written that Jehu "...did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam."
According to the Old Testament, the prophets Elijah and Elisha were followed a century later by the prophet Amos, a sheep farmer and dresser of figs from the rural village of Tekoa, ten miles south of Jerusalem. Amos had gone north into Israel and taken with him his worship of Yahweh. He too disliked the cosmopolitanism and luxury he found in Israel. According to the Old Testament he condemned those "who oppress the poor" and "crush the needy." He spoke against the restoration of Ba'al worship, he called on people to seek salvation in the worship of Yahweh. The Book of Amos 4:2 describes him as warning that days were coming "when they will take you away with meat hooks, and the last of you with fish hooks." Amos complained that evil was not a failure of worshiping the right way but a failure of living correctly, and he quoted Yahweh as saying "I reject your festivals" and "let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream."
Moved by Amos' denunciations against Israel, a priest reported Amos for conspiring against Israel's king, Jeroboam II. Amos tried to defend himself by claiming that he was only a simple herdsman and grower of figs. But many in Israel saw him as a nuisance, and Amos felt compelled to flee back to Judah.
Assyria's trade had expanded, and trade and the spoils of war had brought to Assyria more wealth than any other state. Its cities had become large, metropolitan centers. The Assyrians, however, remained as religious as other people, believing like others that disasters were caused by displeasing the gods. Assyrian women were veiled - except for prostitutes, slave-women and unmarried priestesses, whom the law forbade to wear veils in public. Abortion was considered immoral and a crime against the state. A woman who willfully caused a miscarriage was impaled on a stake and left unburied. "Unnatural" sexual acts were forbidden and severely punished.
Meanwhile, in 746 BCE, Jeroboam II of Israel died. His son and successor, Zechariah ruled Israel for six months. Zechariah was assassinated, and then Israel weakened itself with civil war, and this weakness made expanding southward more attractive for Assyria.
In 745, a military coup in Assyria brought to power a general who made himself king and called himself Tiglath-Pileser III. He decided to expand the realm of Assyria's god, Assur, and to win for himself more wealth. He created a new, permanent army, largely of well-trained and disciplined mercenaries - an army unmatched in West Asia and North Africa. Tiglath-Pileser's army had iron weapons, siege machines that could break down city walls, and they had archers on horseback who could move fast in hilly terrain.
Tiglath-Pileser defeated tribes that had been menacing the Assyrians and other civilized communities. Waging total war, he extended Assyrian rule across Syria, expelling the Urartians and conquering Syria's Aramaean city-states, including King Ahab's old ally, Damascus. He destroyed cities, robbed and often deported whole populations, resettling them elsewhere in order to disunite them and put an end to their consciousness as a nation.
Remoteness from others was a blessing that had been denied the Israelites. In 733, Tiglath-Pileser's army conquered Gilead and Galilee. Bending to the realities of power, Israel recognized Assyria's domination and paid Assyria tribute. Assyria replaced the king of Israel with someone of their choosing: Hoshea. Then, Hoshea rebelled against paying tribute to Assyria. Hoshea sent messengers to Egypt, hoping to win an alliance with Egypt. The worried kings of Tyre and Sidon also sought an alliance with Egypt. But before Hoshea could create any meaningful alliance, Assyria attacked.
Some Israelites fled before the invaders. For three years the Assyrians besieged Israel's capital, Samaria. In 721, Assyria - under a new king - conquered Samaria. Then Assyria conquered the whole of Israel. To keep the conquered from regaining power, and, as the Assyrians had done with other nations they had conquered, they deported and dispersed large numbers of people. The Assyrians took 27,000 Israelis away as slaves. Israel as a nation vanished.
Looking back on these events, writers of the Old Testament needed an explanation as to why the nation of Israel was destroyed - and why Israel was denied God's "lifting the weak to confound the strong." The Old Testament describes another prophet, Hosea, as having declared Israel's government godless in its putting trust in armies, fortifications and alliances rather than in repentance and in the goodness of Yahweh, and it describes Hosea as declaring the coming of Assyria's army to be Yahweh's punishment. Hosea described Yahweh as saying "Because of the wickedness of their deeds I will drive them out of my house. I will love them no more." And the claim of Yahweh's collective punishment was fitting, for the Assyrians did not discriminate between those Israelis who worshiped Yahweh fervently and those who did not.
According to the Old Testament, another Hebrew prophet who addressed the issue of Assyrian aggression was Isaiah - a nobleman from Jerusalem. Isaiah joined the prophet Hosea in opposing alliances. He saw wisdom in pacifism rather than relying on arms. He believed that what mattered above all else was devotion to Yahweh. Like Hosea, Isaiah saw the Assyrians, in their drive through Israel, as the agents of Yahweh.
But the king of the Assyrians pushed his army beyond Israel and into Judah. The Assyrians laid waste to Judah's countryside and gathered before the walls of Jerusalem. They threatened to destroy Jerusalem unless the city paid a ransom. The city paid, and Jerusalem was spared.
According to Isaiah, the Assyrians as agents of Yahweh had suddenly come to an end. Isaiah quoted Yahweh as saying "I will save Jerusalem for my own sake and for my servant David's sake" (Isaiah 37:35). According to the Second Book of Kings, 19:36, Yahweh intervened against the Assyrians, sending an angel during the night into their camp and slaying 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in their sleep.
The impact of such a loss would have reversed Assyrian gains, but no description of events in Assyrian writings compatible with such an event has been found. And rather than suffering a reversal, the Assyrians were able to continue their rule over Judah. The great Assyrian army continued its victorious march southward. They occupied Egypt in 676, introducing iron to the region, and a few years later they sacked the city of Thebes. A weakened Egypt, meanwhile, had been invaded by Nubia. A Nubian had become pharaoh. The Assyrians defeated the Nubian pharaoh, and the Nubians withdrew to their homeland.
By 640 BCE, Assyria had extended its rule south along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf, and they had extended their empire northeast into mountainous territory and south into Arabia. Assyria had created a great empire: all of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cyprus, Syria, and west of Kanesh in Asia Minor. They believed that they were enjoying the blessings of their great god, Assur. Isaiah, meanwhile, seeing the horror of war, wished to leave his people with hope of better things to come. He spoke of the day when Yahweh would create a new world, a world in which the wolf would lie down with the lamb, when men would beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations would not lift up swords against other nations, and people would learn of war no more.
In the lands that the Assyrians conquered they established the same kind of peace that Hammurabi had created in Mesopotamia and that the pharaoh Menes had created in Egypt. The Assyrians built roads, which helped West Asia become more integrated economically and helped trade and industry to flourish.
In Judah, the Hebrew king from about 692 BCE, Manasseh, ruled as Assyria's puppet. He gave his support to the god Assur, whose image he placed at the entrance to the temple that Solomon had built for Yahweh. He allowed pagan priests in the "House of the Lord" alongside the priests of Yahweh. Scribes whose writing would find their way into the Old Testament described Manasseh as erecting altars for Ba'al worship, practicing witchcraft, using divination and mediums. They claimed that Manasseh had "seduced" the people of Judah "to do evil more than the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the sons of Israel."
Some in Judah were dismayed at Yahweh's toleration of the success of the wicked and the subjugation of the righteous. Many in Judah saw Yahweh as having abandoned them, or they lost faith in Yahweh's ability to do anything for their benefit. Merchants in Judah abandoned their identities as Hebrews and adopted foreign dress. Manasseh enjoyed more than fifty years of rule, while Judah benefited from peace and from the rise in commerce that had come with Assyrian domination.
Recommended Books
Biblical Literature and its Critical Interpretation, Encylopedia Britannica (Macropaedia)
Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, by Edward Shanks, 1999
The Oxford History of the Biblical World, 1998 Chapters 1 through 6.
Adam, Eve and the Serpant by Elaine Pagels, 1988
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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch04b.htm