Read Online Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore - Free Book Online
Authors: Simon Sebag Montefiore
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end’.
There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah – one of them wrote over 200 years later – but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted upand his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.’
Isaiah loved the ‘holy mountain’, which he saw as a beautiful woman, ‘the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem’, sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and ‘Jerusalem is ruined’, there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone ‘upon every dwelling-place’, preaching loving-kindness: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.’ Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’
This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings – from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog – derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history. * The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah. 16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill. * The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the Iliad , would become the Bible.
When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his
There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah – one of them wrote over 200 years later – but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted upand his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.’
Isaiah loved the ‘holy mountain’, which he saw as a beautiful woman, ‘the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem’, sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and ‘Jerusalem is ruined’, there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone ‘upon every dwelling-place’, preaching loving-kindness: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.’ Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: ‘the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the topof the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it’. The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: ‘And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.’ Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king – the Messiah – would come: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war any more.’ The dead would rise again. ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’
This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings – from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog – derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history. * The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah. 16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill. * The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the Iliad , would become the Bible.
When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his
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