city of the Great King,
here among her palaces
God proved to be her fortress.5
Yahweh would fight for Jerusalem, just as Baal had fought for his heritage at Ugarit: his presence made the city an inviolable enclave against the enemies that lurked without. Jerusalemites were told to admire the fortifications of Zion—“counting her towers, admiring her walls, reviewing her palaces”—as the people of Uruk had admired the bastions built by Gilgamesh. After their tour of inspection, they would conclude that “God is here!”6 At the beginning of time, Yahweh had set up boundaries to keep everything in its proper place: walls and security arrangements had a similar religious value in keeping the threat of extinction and chaos at bay. The city could never fall: Yahweh was the citadel of his people and would break the bow and snap the spear of their foes.7 They would not even have to fear if the whole cosmic order crashed around them: God was their shelter and strength. The people of Judah need not worry if the mountains tumbled into the sea and the waters roared and heaved.8 Within their city, Yahweh had established a haven of shalom: wholeness, harmony and security. In the Jerusalem liturgy, the people saw the old Exodus myths in the context of Yahweh’s creation of the world. He had made himself the king of the whole earth when he had defeated Leviathan and Rahab, and he sustained it in being. Liberating the people from Egypt revealed his plans for the whole of humanity.9
Critics have attempted to reconstruct the liturgy from the psalms, but their more detailed claims are probably extravagant. We know very little about the Jerusalem cult in this early period. Yet there does seem to have been a focus on Yahweh’s kingship on Mount Zion. It is likely that the feast of Sukkoth was a celebration of his enthronement on the sacred mountain during the dedication of the Temple by King Solomon. Just as Baal’s return to his palace on Mount Zaphon after the defeat of Mot had restored fertility to the land, Yahweh ensured the fertility of Zion and its environs, and this too was celebrated in this ancient agricultural festival. With music, applause, and acclamation, Yahweh was felt to rise up to his throne in the Devir, accompanied by the blast of trumpets.10 Perhaps the braying instruments, the cultic shout, and the clouds of incense filling the Temple reproduced the theophany on Mount Sinai, when Yahweh appeared to his people in the midst of a volcanic eruption.11 Perhaps there was a procession from the Gihon to the Temple, which retraced Yahweh’s first journey up Mount Zion. He was experienced in this liturgy as so great a force that he was not only King of Zion but “the Great King of the whole world.”12 He was acquiring preeminence over other deities:
For you are Yahweh
Elyon over the world
far transcending all the other gods.13
Long before the Israelites developed the formal doctrine of monotheism, the rituals and ceremonies on Mount Zion had begun to teach the people of Judah at an emotional if not a notional level that Yahweh was the only god who counted.
But the Zion cult was not just a noisy celebration. The early pilgrimage psalms show that it was capable of creating an intensely personal spirituality. A visit to the Temple was experienced as an ascent (aliyah). As they climbed from the Valley of Hinnom, making their way up the steep hills of Jerusalem toward the peak of Zion, they prepared themselves for a vision of Yahweh.14 It was not just a physical ascent but an “ascent inward” to the place where the inner world met the outer world. There was a sense of homecoming:
The sparrow has found its home at last,
the swallow a nest for its young—
your altars, Yahweh Sabaoth.15
The imagery of rest and of the establishment of a permanent abode had been present in the discourse about the Temple ever since David had first suggested the idea of a house for Yahweh in Jerusalem.16 The cult of the Temple had helped the people of Judah to attach themselves to the world. The creation myths insisted that everything in the universe had its appointed place. The seas had been bounded by Yahweh to prevent them from overwhelming the dry land. Now Yahweh was in his special place on Zion, and that had made it a secure home for the Judahites. They too, as a holy people, were in their specially appointed place. Outside the walls of the city were destructive enemies who could reduce their world to formless chaos, but within this enclave the people could create their own world. The sense of joy and belonging that the Zion temple evoked expressed their satisfaction at being, emotionally and physically, in the right place. Attendance at the Temple was not a dreary duty. The psalmist “yearns and pines” for Yahweh’s courts; his whole being sings for joy there.17 Pilgrims felt empowered by having found an orientation; they felt liberated from the endless flux of relativity and meaninglessness. Their mythology spoke of the long years of wandering in the wilderness, where human beings could not hope to live. Now in the Temple, the still point of the turning world, pilgrims could feel fully alive, experiencing existence at its most intense: a single day in the courts of the Temple was worth a thousand elsewhere.18
Still, this did not mean that Yahweh was the only god who was worshipped in Jerusalem. The Deuteronomist historian judges the kings of Israel and Judah according to a single criterion: good kings are those who promote the worship of Yahweh alone and suppress the shrines, cult places (bamoth), and matzevot (standing stones) of rival deities; bad kings are those who encourage these foreign cults. The result is that, despite D’s long narrative, we know very little about events in Jerusalem during this period, since we hear almost nothing about the kings’ other activities. And even in telling us of the kings who were true to Yahweh alone, D cannot conceal the fact that under these rulers as well other cults continued to flourish in the city. Thus King Jehoshaphat (870–848) is praised for his fidelity to Yahweh alone, yet D is forced to admit that the bamoth of other gods still functioned. Furthermore, Jehoshaphat had no problem about marrying his son Jehoram to Princess Athaliah, daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of Israel, who was a devout worshipper of Baal. She brought his Phoenician cult with her to Jerusalem and built a temple for him in the city, which was served by the Sidonian priest Mattan.
The marriage of Jehoram and Athaliah may have sealed a treaty whereby the Kingdom of Judah became the vassal of Israel: henceforth both Jehoshaphat and Jehoram fought on Israel’s side in its campaigns against Damascus. The ninth and eighth centuries saw a new prosperity in the Near East. Even Judah’s fortunes improved, since Jehoshaphat won striking victories against Moab, Ammon, and Seir. But a fresh danger was arising. From their capital in Nineveh, the kings of Assyria, in what is now Iraq, were building an empire of unprecedented power and strength. Their chief ambition was to expand westward towards the Mediterranean coast and, in an attempt to prevent this Assyrian advance, Israel and Damascus stopped fighting each other and united in a coalition with other small states of Anatolia and the steppes. But this coalition was defeated in 863 at the battle of Qarqar on the River Orontes. Both Israel and Damascus were forced to become vassals of Assyria. The Kingdom of Judah, however, was too insignificant to interest the Assyrians and maintained its independence.
