Yam-Nahar, the oxen were common symbols of divinity and fertility, while the pillars Yakhin and Boaz may have been Canaanite standing-stones (matzevot). The biblical authors refer to the Canaanite rather than the Hebrew calendar when they describe the building of the Temple, and its dedication in the month of “Ethanim” (September/October) could have coincided with the autumn festival of Baal, which celebrated his victory over Mot and his enthronement on Mount Zaphon. In the Israelite tradition, this festival would be known as Sukkoth (Tabernacles), and eventually, as we shall see, this agricultural celebration would be reinterpreted and linked to the Exodus.
CONJECTURAL PLAN OF SOLOMON’S TEMPLE
1. Devir (Holy of Holies)
2. Hekhal (the cult hall)
3. Ulam (Vestibule)
4. Chambers
5. Jachin and Boaz pillars
6. Winding staircase
7. The Ark
8. The Cherubim
9. Tables for candlesticks
10. Incense altar
11. Table of shewbread
Yet the Temple, teeming with apparently “pagan” imagery, became the most cherished institution in Israel. Some prophets and reformers would feel unhappy about it and urge the people to return to the purer religion of the Exodus, but when Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, most Israelites felt their world had come to an end. Perhaps we should not be surprised that most of the people found these symbols of Canaanite and Syrian myth compatible with the religion of the Ark and the Exodus. We have seen that the legends of the Exodus had transposed, in another key, the old myths of Baal and Marduk. If we see the Exodus story as merely a historical event which is “true,” then Baal’s battle with Yam is simply a fantasy that is “false.” But if instead we look for the inner meaning of the Exodus events and experience its power as a timeless truth, we can see that the brazen sea in the courtyard of Solomon’s Temple was not entirely out of place. Both speak of that endless battle with the powers of darkness and of a rite of passage. Just as Jews remind themselves that every generation must regard itself as having escaped from slavery in Egypt, the presence of Yam was a reminder that the forces of chaos were never entirely overcome. Placed at the threshold of the Temple, which housed the divine Presence, it was a reminder of the challenge and effort that the creativity inspired by the sacred seems to inspire and require.
We know from the psalms which are connected with the Jerusalem cult of Yahweh that the Temple was imaginatively associated with Mount Zion. Once the Ark was installed there, the site became for the Israelites a “center” that linked heaven and earth and also had its roots in the underworld, represented by the primal sea. Like the Sacred Mountain, the Temple was a symbol of the reality that sustains the life of the cosmos. Like Jacob’s ladder, it represented a bridge to the source of being, without which the fragile mundane world could not subsist. Because it was built in a place where the sacred had revealed itself in the past, worshippers could hope to make contact with that divine power. When they entered the holy precincts, they had stepped into another dimension which, they believed, existed contemporaneously with the mundane world and kept it in being. Mount Zion had become radically different from the surrounding territory, therefore: in Hebrew the word for “holy” (kaddosh) means “other,” “set apart.” The very plan of the building, with its three-tiered gradations of sanctity culminating in the Devir (the Holy of Holies), symbolized the transcendence of the sacred. Entry to the Devir was prohibited to all except the priests; it remained silent, void, and inaccessible. Yet since it enshrined the Ark and the Presence, it tacitly bore witness to the fact that the sacred could enter the world of men and women: it was at once immanent and transcendent.
Built on the summit of the sacred mountain of Zion, the Temple also represented the Garden of Yahweh, as described by J in the second and third chapters of Genesis.27 The great candlesticks resembled branched trees, covered with almonds and flowers; the palm trees and flowers on the doors and walls of the Hekhal also recalled the garden where the cherubim had walked at the beginning of time; there was even a serpent. J may have been writing during the reign of King Solomon, but even if he lived at a later date, he had clearly been influenced by the spirituality of the Temple. When Marduk created the world, he built a temple, but, J tells us, after Yahweh completed the creation, he planted a garden, where he walked in the cool of the evening and conversed familiarly with the first human beings at the dawn of history.
In the Eden story, we can see what the divine meant for the Israelite worshippers in Solomon’s Temple. As in all the myths of the lost paradise, Eden was a place where there had been easy access to the heavenly world. Indeed, Eden was itself an experience of the sacred. It was, J says, the source of the world’s fertility; in its midst was a river that divided into four streams once it had left the garden and fructified the rest of the earth: one of these streams was called the Gihon. In the Temple there were two large candlesticks; in Eden there were two trees, which, with their power to regenerate themselves each year, were common symbols of the divine. Eden was an experience of that primal wholeness which human beings all over the world sought in their holy places. God and humanity were not divided but could live in the same place; the man and woman did not know that they were different from each other; there was no distinction between good and evil. Adam and Eve, therefore, existed on a plane that transcends all opposites and all divisions: it is a unity that is beyond our experience and is quite inconceivable to us in our fragmented existence, except in rare moments of ecstasy or insight. It was a mythical description of that harmony which people in all cultures have felt to have been meant for humanity. Adam and Eve lost it when they “fell” and were ejected from the divine presence and barred from Eden. Yet when the worshippers entered Solomon’s Temple, its imagery and furnishings helped them to make an imaginary return to the Garden of Yahweh and to recover—if only momentarily—a sense of the paradise they had lost. It healed in them that sense of separation which, we have seen, lies at the root of the religious quest. The liturgy and architecture all aided this spiritual journey to that unity which is inseparable from the reality that we call “God” or the “sacred.”
These ideas are also implicit in J’s story of the Tower of Babel, which describes the creation of a perverse holy place. Instead of waiting for the sacred site to be revealed to them, human beings themselves take the initiative. “Come … let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven.” This attempt to scale the heavens is an act of pride and self-aggrandizement: the men concerned want to “build a name for themselves.” The result is not unity but discord and fragmentation. To punish these people for their presumption, God “scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth” and muddled their language so that they could no longer understand one another. Henceforth the place was called Babel, “because God had confused (bll) the language of the whole earth there.”28 J’s story reveals a profound hostility towards Babylon and its imposing ziggurats. Instead of being a “gate of the gods” (bab-ilani), it was the source of the alienation, disharmony, and disunity that characterizes mundane existence at its worst. Quite different was the worshippers’ experience in Zion, the city of peace (shalom) and reconciliation. There the people of Israel could congregate on the holy mountain that God himself had established as his heritage, not on an artificially constructed sacred mountain rooted in human ambition and the lust for power.
The Temple built by Solomon on Mount Zion gave pilgrims and worshippers an experience of God. In the following chapter, we will see that many of them hoped to have a vision of Yahweh there. Instead of being cast adrift in the world, like
