Temple. As a symbol of the sacred, the Temple was also the source of the world’s fertility and order.29 But, as in the other countries of the Near East, its great sanctity was inseparable from the pursuit of what we would today call “social justice.” This is an important point. Now that they had a monarchy of their own, the people of Israel and Judah naturally adopted the local ideal of sacral kingship. The king was Yahweh’s mashiach, his “anointed one.” On the day of his coronation on Zion, God’s “holy mountain,” God adopted him as his son.30 His palace was next to the Temple, and his throne of judgment was beside Yahweh’s throne in the Devir. His task was to impose the rule of God and to ensure that God’s own justice prevailed in the land. The psalms tell us that the king had to “defend the poorest, save the children of those in need, and crush their oppressors.”31 If this justice prevailed, there would be peace, harmony, and fertility in the kingdom.32 Yahweh would provide them with the security which was so earnestly and continually sought for in the ancient world: because Zion was now Yahweh’s heritage, it was, therefore, “God-protected for ever.”33 But there could be no security and no shalom if there was no justice in Zion.
The ideal is expressed in three words which recur constantly in the Jerusalem psalms: mishpat, tzedek, and shalom.34 The word mishpat is a legal term meaning “judgment” or “verdict,” but it also denotes the harmonious rule of Yahweh on Mount Zion. When the Ark of the Covenant was carried into the Devir, Yahweh was enthroned on his holy mountain and he was henceforth the real King of Jerusalem, the earthly king being merely his human representative. The human king’s task was to impose tzedek. In Canaan, tzedek (justice, righteousness) was an attribute of the sun god, who brought hidden crimes to light, righted the wrongs done to the innocent, and watched over the world as a judge. Once Yahweh had been enthroned on Zion, tzedek became his attribute too: he would see that justice was done in his kingdom, that the poor and vulnerable were protected, and that the strong did not oppress the weak. Only then would Zion become a city of shalom, a word that is usually translated as “peace,” but has as its root meaning “wholeness,” “completeness”—that sense of wholeness and completeness which people sought in their holy places. Hence shalom includes all manner of well-being: fertility, harmony, and success in war. The experience of shalom negated the anomie and alienation that is the cause of so much human distress on earth. It was, as we have seen, also a sense of the peace which is God. But Jerusalem could not be a holy city of shalom if there was no tzedek or “righteousness” in the land. All too often, the people of Israel would forget this. They would concentrate on the holiness and integrity of Jerusalem; they would fight for its purity. But, as the prophets reminded them, if they neglected the pursuit of justice, this would inevitably entail the loss of shalom.
By building his Temple and enthroning Yahweh on Zion, Solomon was in Canaanite terms formally taking possession of the land in the name of the Davidic dynasty. Yahweh was now the ruler of Jerusalem, and because Israel was his people, the land became theirs. Baal’s palace on Mount Zaphon had made the surrounding territory his inalienable heritage; now Zion belonged to Yahweh, as his eternal inheritance. The Temple and Yahweh’s enthronement, therefore, were the basis for Solomon’s claim to Jerusalem as the eternal heritage of the House of David. The construction of the Temple was an act of conquest, a means of occupying the Promised Land with divine backing. The edifice proclaimed that Israel’s days of wandering had come to an end; the people of the United Kingdom had finally come home and established themselves in a place where they could live in close intimacy with the divine.
Yet Solomon was ultimately a disappointment. The Deuteronomist historian, writing in the sixth century BCE, regarded him as an idolater. Solomon built shrines to the gods of all his foreign wives in Jerusalem; he also worshipped the gods of his neighbors: Astarte, goddess of Sidon; Milcom, the god of Ammon; and Chemosh, the god of Moab. There were altars to Milcom and Chemosh in the hills to the east of Jerusalem.35 It was because of this infidelity, D believed, that the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah disintegrated after Solomon’s death. But D was writing from an entirely different perspective. By the sixth century, the Israelites were becoming true monotheists; they were beginning to believe that Yahweh was the only god and that all other deities were false. But Solomon and his subjects did not yet share that belief. Just as nobody found it strange that the Temple was full of pagan imagery, so too the other shrines and temples that Solomon built in Jerusalem would probably have been regarded as a courtesy to his wives. They did not affect Yahweh’s position. He was still the King of Zion and presided over the lesser gods in their smaller establishments, rather as the psalmists depicted him presiding over the other gods in the Divine Council.
If Solomon failed, it was probably because he did not pursue tzedek. The political economy of his kingdom was weak. Empires fall when they have outrun their resources, and despite Solomon’s alleged riches, the nation was stretched beyond its limits. Solomon had bought costly building materials from Hiram, King of Tyre, and could not repay his debt. He was therefore obliged to cede twenty towns to Tyre, probably in western Galilee. Despite his powerful army, Solomon could not hold on to the territory he had inherited from David. First Edom and then Damascus fell away and regained their independence. But even more serious was the dissatisfaction and malaise within the kingdom itself. David had favored his own Kingdom of Judah and had nearly lost the allegiance of the Kingdom of Israel in consequence. Solomon did not learn from this. It seems that he exploited Israel, treating it as conquered territory instead of as an equal partner. He divided the northern part of the country into twelve administrative units, each of which was obliged to provision the court for one month a year and provide men for the corvée. There is no mention of any similar arrangement for the southern Kingdom of Judah.36 Furthermore, people were bitterly resentful of the corvée itself. Forced labor was a fact of life in the ancient world: David had also resorted to conscription, and nobody had objected. Solomon, however, needed a vast amount of manpower for his huge building program. This damaged the economy, since the buildings themselves were not productive and the corvée took the men away from the land and the cities where the wealth of the country was produced. Worse, the conscription represented a glaring injustice. We are told that thirty thousand of the men of Israel were forced into the corvée, but we read of no such conscription in Judah.37 The people of Israel were angry, and some dreamed of breaking away from Jerusalem.
We have seen that the cult of justice in the ancient world was not a pious dream, but rooted in sound political sense. Kingdoms had fallen because of social unrest. We have seen that Ugarit was destroyed in the thirteenth century because its system placed too great a burden on the peasantry. Solomon’s kingdom would also disintegrate because the king had not dealt equitably with his subjects—it was a salutary lesson for his successors. Solomon was aware that his kingdom was in danger. In the last years of his life, we read that Jeroboam, one of the Israelite officers of the corvée, fell afoul of the king. It was said that one of the northern prophets had foretold that Solomon’s kingdom would be split in two and that Jeroboam would rule the ten northern tribes of Israel.38 It seems likely, therefore, that Jeroboam was planning an insurrection. Solomon tried to have him assassinated, but Jeroboam fled to Egypt, taking refuge in the court of Pharaoh Shishak. He did not have to remain long in exile. Shortly afterward, Solomon died, after a long reign of forty years, in about 930 BCE. He was buried with his father in the ’Ir David and was succeeded by his son Rehoboam. Immediately the disaster that Solomon had feared struck the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah.
