The origin of the city of Jerusalem lies in shadows. The earliest mention of the city is found in the Egyptian Execretion Texts some four thousand years ago, where its name appears in a form which should probably be read Rusalimun. It next appears in the diplomatic dispatches known as the Amarna documents from the 14th Cent BC.
If the city of Salem, whose king Melchizedek blessed Abraham (Gen 14), is indeed ancient Jerusalem, then it represents the earliest mention of the City in the Bible. The next mention of the city is its sacking by Joshua during Israel's conquest of the land. Though allotted to the tribe of Benjamin, the city quickly reverted to Jebusite control and remained so for the next 300 years, during which it became a de facto no-man's land.
David conquered it when he became king of Judah and Israel (2 Sam 5) and made it his own private property, "the City of David." David ruled over a nation barely held together by the glue of his personal charisma (as the split that came so soon after his son's reign demonstrates). The choice of Jerusalem as a capital spared everyone their tribal sensitivities. The city of Jebus, as it was then known, was so well re-settled and fortified after 300 years of Israelite neglect its citizens could afford to taunt David, saying, "You will not get in here; even the blind and the lame can ward you off" (v6). What was the tsinnor ('water shaft') by which David and his men conquered the city remains a debate till today. In time David added the hill to the north with his purchase of Araunah's threshing floor on which to build an altar (2 Sam 24), which became the site of the temple that Solomon built. Under Solomon and subsequent kings the city flourished. The city grew and spread westward, adding the Upper City for the rich while the poorer citizens remained in the Lower City, the original site of Jerusalem.
The split of the kingdom into two after the death of Solomon left the city the capital only of the southern kingdom. Jerusalem survived the onslaught of the Assyrians by the breadth of a cat's whiskers in 701 BC (2 Ki 18; Isa 36) in the 8th Cent BC but not that of the Babylonians, who devastated it in 586 BC and exiled most of its leading citizens. The Persians, who conquered the Babylonians, returned the exiles to the land and Jerusalem was rebuilt under the leadership of men like Ezra and Nehemiah. The Persians gave way to the Greeks; the city surrendered peacefully to Alexander the Great, who march pass it—not deeming it important enough to make a detour to view his loot—on his way to Egypt where he founded Alexandria instead.
After Alexander's death, the city came under the rule, first of the Ptolemy's of Egypt, and then the Seleucids. The Seleucid attempt to impose pagan Hellenistic worship upon the Jews sparked a revolt (the Maccabean Revolt) out of which the Jews founded an independent nation under the rule of the Hasmonean family and flourished for a century, during which they manage to recapture territories as expansive as those of Solomon. The fight for the throne between two Hasmonean brothers brought that independence to an end when both sides appealed to the Romans for help. This brought Pompey Magnus to the city, who then insisted on touring the Holy of Holies to see for himself what the Jews had to hide. As the struggle for power continued power devolved, as they so often do, into the hands a smart outsider, Antipater, the father of Herod the Great, and eventually, Herod himself. When Herod died in 4 BC he had left the city enough to earn such high praise from Pliny the Elder.
In 70 AD, however, disaster struck. The First Jewish Revolt against the Romans, which had begun in 67 AD, was brought to a crushing end with the destruction of Jerusalem, fulfilling Jesus's prediction that "Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down" (Mk 13:2). The Second Revolt which broke out in 163 AD ended with Jews banished from the City. Jerusalem was rebuilt and renamed Aelia Capitolina (after the pagan gods of the principal temple in Rome). ♦
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2014