CITY OF JUDAH
REHOBOAM INHERITED an impoverished and alienated kingdom. His rule was accepted in Judah, but the northern Kingdom of Israel had been drained dry by Solomon’s ambitious building program, which had yielded little income and had required a conscription that deprived large areas of the country of productive labor. When Rehoboam went to meet the elders of Israel at Shechem to have his rule ratified there, they told him that they would accept him as king only if he reduced the burden of taxation and conscription. It was a difficult decision: if Rehoboam granted this request, he would have to renounce the imperial dream of his grandfather David forever and accept a lower standard of living for his court. Few rulers would have made this choice, and it is not surprising that Rehoboam rejected the advice of his older and more experienced counselors in favor of the hard-line policy of his younger henchmen, who could see that reduced taxation in Israel would mean a drastic decline in their own lifestyle. Rehoboam returned to the elders of Israel with a contemptuous answer: “My father beat you with whips; I am going to beat you with loaded scourges.”1 Immediately the elders seceded from the United Kingdom, the master of the corvée was stoned to death, and Rehoboam was forced to hurry back to safety in Jerusalem.
Henceforth the kingdoms of Israel and Judah went their separate ways. Jeroboam became King of Israel, establishing a capital at Tirza and making the old shrines of Bethel and Dan royal temples. Later King Omri of Israel (885–74) built a new capital at Samaria, which became the most elegant and luxurious city in the region. The Kingdom of Israel was far larger and wealthier than Judah: it was close to the major roads and included most of the territory owned by the most prosperous of the old city-states. By contrast, the Kingdom of Judah was isolated and lacking in resources, consisting almost entirely of steppe and mountainous land that was difficult to farm. Naturally the kings of Judah bitterly regretted the loss of Israel and accused the northern kingdom of apostasy, though all that had happened was the restoration of the status quo ante, before the union under David. For some fifty years after the collapse of the United Kingdom, Israel and Judah were at war, and as the weaker state, Judah was particularly vulnerable. Rehoboam was able to secure Jerusalem from an attack by Pharaoh Shishak, who had tried to establish a presence in Canaan, only by making him a substantial payment from the Temple treasury. During the reign of King Asa of Judah (911–870), the armies of Israel actually reached Ramah, five miles north of Jerusalem. This time the king saved the city by appealing to the Aramaean Kingdom of Damascus, which attacked Israel from the rear. Henceforth Israel was embroiled in a series of bloody territorial wars with Damascus and left Judah alone.
Beset on all sides by powerful enemies who sought to overthrow their kingdom, the people of Judah increasingly turned for help to Yahweh of Zion. We know that, in common with other people in the ancient Near East, they tended to identify their enemies—Israel, Egypt, or, later, Damascus—with the primal forces of chaos. Like the sea or the desert, these earthly enemies could easily overturn the fragile security of their state and reduce the little world that had been created in Judah to the kind of desolate waste that was thought to have prevailed before the gods had established the habitable earth. This may seem a fanciful idea, but we still talk in similar terms today when we speak of our enemies as occupying an “evil empire” which could reduce “our world” to chaos. We still tend to perceive life as a struggle between the forces of light and darkness, fearing a return to the “barbarism” that could overthrow everything that “we” have created. We have our own rituals—memorial services, wreath-laying, processions—which are designed to evoke an emotional response and make past battles present to us. We vividly recall the time when “we” seemed to stand alone against a hostile world. We feel hope, pride, and renewed commitment to continue the struggle. The people of ancient Jerusalem had similar stratagems, based on the old Canaanite mythology which they had made their own.
Instead of looking back to their own battles, they commemorated Yahweh’s struggle against the forces of chaos at the beginning of time. In their temples throughout the Near East, the battles of such gods as Marduk and Baal were commemorated annually in elaborate ceremonies, which were at one and the same time an exultant celebration of the divine victory and an attempt to make this power available in the present, since only a heavenly warrior, it was thought, could establish the peace and security on which their city depended. The rituals of the ancient world were not simply acts of remembrance: they reproduced the mythical stories in such a way that they were felt to occur again, so that people experienced the eternal, unseen struggle at the heart of existence and participated in the primordial divine conquest of the chaos-monsters. Again, as in the building of a temple, likeness was experienced as identity. Imitating these divine battles in symbolic dramas brought this action into the present or, more properly, projected the worshippers into the timeless world of myth. The rituals revealed the harsh reality of existence, which seemed always to depend upon pain and death, but also made it clear that this struggle would always have a creative outcome. After emerging victoriously from his mortal encounters with Yam and Mot, Baal had been enthroned on Mount Zaphon, which had become his home forever. From Zaphon, Baal had established the peace, fertility, and order which his enemies had sought to overcome. When this victory was commemorated in Ugarit, the king took Baal’s place, anointed like his heavenly prototype for the task of establishing peace, fruitfulness, and justice in his realm. Each autumn, Baal’s enthronement was celebrated in the month of Ethanim, and this festival made the divine energies which had been unleashed in those primal struggles at the dawn of time available in Ugarit for another year.
Before Solomon’s Temple was built in Jerusalem, there was, as far as we know, little or no interest in Yahweh as a creator-god. The myths of the Exodus showed him creating a people, not the cosmos. But once he had been ritually enthroned in the Devir on Mount Zion, his cult took on many of the aspects of the worship of Baal El Elyon which had preceded it. Possibly under the influence of Zadok, Jebusite ideas fused with the old Israelite mythology. Like Baal, Yahweh was now said to have battled with the sea monster Lotan, who became “Leviathan” in Hebrew.2 He had tamed the primal waters of chaos, which would otherwise have flooded the earth, and had “marked the bounds it was not to cross and made it fast with a bolted gate.”3 Like Marduk, he had split another sea monster—this one called Rahab—in two when he laid the foundations of the world.4 Later these myths of a violent creation were replaced by P’s calm and peaceful account of the establishment of primal order in the first chapter of Genesis. But the Bible shows that the people of Judah also had stories that conformed more closely to the spirituality of their neighbors and that in times of crisis they turned readily to this “pagan” mythology. The combat myth was consoling because it proclaimed that however powerful the forces of destruction, order would always prevail. It would not do so automatically, however. Priests and kings had a responsibility to renew this primal victory annually in their Temple in order to bring the embattled city of Jerusalem an infusion of divine power. Their task was to put their people in touch with the great mystery that sustained the world, face up to the unavoidable terror of existence, and learn to see that what appeared to be frightening and deadly had a positive aspect. Life and order would triumph over violence and death; fertility would follow a period of drought and sterility, and the threat of extinction would be averted because of the divine power in their midst.
The early psalms show how thoroughly the people of Judah had absorbed this spirituality. Sometimes they are simply a restatement of the old myths of Ugarit:
Yahweh is great and supremely to be praised:
in the city of our God
is his holy mountain, its peak as it rises
is the joy of the whole world.
Mount Zion
