were not peaceful years in Jerusalem. When Queen Athaliah became regent after the death of her son in 841, she tried to wipe out the Davidic dynasty by killing, so she thought, all the legitimate heirs to the throne. Some six years later, the Temple priests and the rural aristocracy organized a coup and crowned Jehoash—Athaliah’s infant grandson, who had managed to escape the carnage—in the Temple. They then executed Athaliah and pulled down her temple to Baal. The city was also threatened by external foes: Jehoash had to make a substantial payment from the Temple treasury to prevent the King of Damascus from attacking Jerusalem, and during the reign of a later king of Judah, Amaziah (796–81), the army of Israel sacked the royal palace and the Temple in Jerusalem, demolishing part of the city wall before returning to Samaria. Yet this did not diminish the people’s faith in Zion’s impregnability. Indeed, under King Uzziah (781–40), 19 the city went from strength to strength despite the fact that the king was smitten with leprosy. The walls damaged in the Israelite attack were repaired, and the old citadel on the Millo was replaced with a new fortress between the city and the Temple, called the Ophel. Jerusalem became an industrial center, and the population increased: it seems that the city had begun to spread beyond the walls down into the Tyropoeon Valley and onto the Western Hill opposite Mount Zion. At this point, Assyria was in a state of temporary eclipse and had been forced to retreat from the region, so the Kingdom of Israel also enjoyed a period of affluence and de facto independence.
Yet this prosperity led to social disorders: the more sensitive people became acutely aware of an unacceptable gulf between rich and poor, and prophets arose in both the northern and the southern kingdoms to fulminate against injustice and oppression. At their coronation, the kings of the Near East vowed to protect the poor and the vulnerable, but people seemed to have lost sight of this ideal. Ever since Abraham had entertained his god at Mamre, Yahwism had indicated that the sacred could be encountered in one’s fellow human beings as well as in temples and holy places. Now the new religions that were beginning to develop all over the civilized world during this period (which historians call the Axial Age) all insisted that true faith had to be characterized by practical compassion. The religion of Yahweh was also beginning to change to meet the new circumstances of the people. The Hebrew prophets began to insist on the prime importance of social justice: it was all too easy for a religious symbol such as the Temple to become a fetish, an end in itself and an object of false security and complacency.
None of the prophets of the Axial Age was as devoted to the Jerusalem Temple as Isaiah, who received his prophetic call in the sanctuary in 740, the year of King Uzziah’s death. Isaiah was a member of the royal family and must also have been a priest, since he was standing in the Hekhal, watching the clouds of incense fill the hall and listening to the great cultic shout, when he suddenly saw through the imagery of the Temple to the fearful reality behind it. He perceived Yahweh seated on his heavenly throne symbolized by the Ark, surrounded by the seraphim. The Temple was a place of vision, and now Isaiah became aware as never before of the sanctity that radiated from the Devir to the rest of the world: “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh Sabaoth,” cried the seraphim, “his glory fills the whole world.”20
The Temple was therefore crucial to Isaiah’s vision. The holy mountain of Zion was the center of the earth, because it was the place where the sacred reality had erupted into the mundane world of men and women to bring them salvation. The Zion cult had celebrated Yahweh’s universal kingship, and now Isaiah looked forward to the day when “all the nations” would stream to “the mountain of the Temple of Yahweh,” urging one another to make the aliyah to Jerusalem: “Come, let us go up to the Temple of the God of Jacob.”21 It would be a universal return to the Garden of Eden, where all creatures would live in harmony, the wolf with the lamb, the panther with the kid, the calf and the lion cub.22 The holy mountain of Jerusalem would see the creation of a new world order and the recovery of that lost wholeness for which humanity yearns. Isaiah’s vision of the New Jerusalem has never been forgotten. His hope for an anointed king, a Messiah, to inaugurate this era of peace laid the foundations of the messianic hope that would inspire monotheists in all three of the religions of Abraham. Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all see Jerusalem as the setting for God’s final intervention in human history. There would be a great judgment, a final battle at the end of time, and a procession of repentant unbelievers making their way to Jerusalem to submit to God’s will. These visions continue to affect the politics of Jerusalem to the present day.
Yet Isaiah’s templocentric prophecy begins with an oracle that seems to condemn the whole Zion cult.
What are your endless sacrifices to me?
says Yahweh.
I am sick of holocausts of rams
and the fat of calves …
who asked you to trample over my courts?23
Elaborate liturgy was pointless unless it was accompanied by a compassion that seeks justice above all and brings help to the oppressed, the orphan, and the widow.24 Scholars believe that this prophecy may not have been the work of Isaiah himself but was included with his oracles by the editors. It reflects a perception shared by other prophets, however. In the northern kingdom, the prophet Amos had also argued that the Temple rituals had formed no part of the original religion of the Exodus. Like Isaiah, Amos had had a vision of Yahweh in the Temple of Bethel, but he had no time for a cult that became an end in itself. He represented God as asking: “Did you bring me sacrifice and oblation in the wilderness for all these forty years?” Yahweh wanted no more chanting or strumming on harps; instead, he wished justice to flow like water and integrity to pour forth in an unending stream.25 Amos imagined God roaring aloud from his sanctuary in Jerusalem because of the injustice that he saw in all the surrounding countries: it made a mockery of his cult.26 As the religion of Yahweh changed during the Axial Age, justice and compassion became essential virtues, and without them, it was said, devotion to sacred space was worthless. The Jerusalem cult also enshrined this value, proclaiming that Yahweh was concerned above all with the poor and the vulnerable. Zion was to be a refuge for the poor, and, as we shall see, Jews who regarded themselves as the true sons of Jerusalem would call themselves the Evionim, the Poor. Yet it seems that in Jerusalem “poverty” did not simply mean material deprivation. The opposite of “poor” was not “rich” but “proud.” In Jerusalem, people were not to rely on human strength, foreign alliances, or military superiority but on Yahweh alone: he alone was the fortress and citadel of Zion, and it was idolatry to depend arrogantly upon mere human armies and fortifications.27
Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion. Isaiah’s long prophetic career shows some of the dangers that could arise from the Jerusalem ideology. During the reign of King Ahaz of Judah (736–16), Assyria reappeared in the Near East and the kings of Damascus and Israel formed a new coalition to prevent the Assyrians, under King Tiglathpileser III, from controlling the region. When King Ahaz refused to join this confederation, Israel and Damascus marched south to besiege Jerusalem. Isaiah tried to persuade Ahaz to stand firm: The son that his queen was about to bear would restore the Kingdom of David; he would be called Emanu-El (“God with us”), because he would usher in the reign of peace when men and women would live in harmony with the divine once more. Before this child reached the age of reason, the kingdoms of Damascus and Israel would be destroyed; there was no reason for panic or for foreign alliances with other princes.28
