Episode Transcript
0:01
Jerusalem, previously referred to as the City of David,
0:04
was in some ways not a city as we would see it today.
0:08
It was more like a fortress in the Judean Hills.
0:12
Jerusalem, with its rises and falls over time,
0:15
presents us with an opportunity to reflect on its story and its history.
0:21
We hope you enjoy The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
0:30
In recent times,
0:32
the Middle East has yet again been much in the news.
0:35
But in a very real sense, the Middle East has been much in the news for thousands of years.
0:40
So, in that sense, what is new?
0:45
And if the Middle East is in the news, so too is Jerusalem, the city.
0:53
So as conflict rages all around it,
0:57
I want to reflect in these podcasts upon Jerusalem.
1:04
Not just the place, but the history, the story.
1:11
As it were, the biography of this extraordinary city,
1:14
I think the most extraordinary city on earth.
1:18
So, the story
1:22
and also what Jerusalem has become over time in theology or thought,
1:28
but also in imagination.
1:31
Because it occupies a unique place
1:34
in the human heart and imagination.
1:38
Which is why it really is the most fateful city on earth.
1:44
The title that I give to these podcasts on Jerusalem is,
1:49
The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
1:59
The Navel of the Earth was originally a title given to the great shrine at Delphi in Greece.
2:08
Long before that title was conferred upon Jerusalem.
2:13
And in a sense, it was conferred upon Jerusalem,
2:17
we think, for the first time in the Book of Jubilees,
2:20
which appears close to the New Testament period, so it's quite late
2:25
in Old Testament terms.
2:29
As a way of saying that Delphi was not the Navel of the Earth, but Jerusalem was.
2:36
So, it was really, as it were,
2:38
plundering the Greek title that had applied to the great shrine to the god Apollo in Delphi.
2:46
So, The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
2:55
So, let's begin with time.
3:01
People say sometimes that it is tragic
3:04
that the city of Jerusalem,
3:07
the name of which is claimed to speak of peace,
3:12
has been a city of such violence.
3:17
But really, when you, whatever about the name referring to peace,
3:22
it's known nothing but violence.
3:24
And it was really violence that brought it onto the stage of world history.
3:30
So, if you go back
3:33
to about the year 1000 BC, BCE.
3:40
You strike the figure of King David.
3:43
And this is where we start to tell the story of Jerusalem.
3:50
Up until David's eye fell upon what was a mountain fortress in the Judean Hills.
3:58
It really was just a small town or village, really, a fortress.
4:05
In the hands of Canaanite people, in other words, native of the land, the land of Canaan.
4:11
Who were known as the Jebusites.
4:14
And this may well be because the town itself, or the village, was known as Jebus.
4:21
Now, David had been in conflict with the first king
4:31
of the united tribes.
4:33
The twelve tribes of Israel
4:36
came together in a new way under a king for the first time,
4:41
because of the threat of the Philistines.
4:44
Having arrived in the Promised Land,
4:46
the twelve tribes of Israel
4:50
found themselves surrounded by a much more sophisticated people.
4:54
Whom we know from the Bible as the Philistines,
4:56
who eventually give their name to the Palestinians.
4:59
Palestine and the Palestinians goes back to the Philistines.
5:06
Now, the Philistines have a bad reputation,
5:08
at least in the language, if I called you a Philistine you would not be flattered.
5:13
And yet they were a sophisticated people who had migrated
5:18
to what we know as the Holy Land, around Gaza in fact, where all the violence is at the moment.
5:24
In about 1200 BC,
5:27
they had come
5:29
from the Mediterranean world, probably from the Mediterranean islands,
5:32
because of some natural cataclysm, we don't even know exactly what it was.
5:36
It might have been earthquakes and tsunamis and so on.
5:39
But whatever the reason,
5:42
these people migrated from the island nations
5:46
of the Mediterranean to that area
5:49
on the coast of the Holy Land around Gaza.
5:53
They settled there, and they brought with them the civilisation of the Mediterranean world.
5:58
And part of that civilisation was technology.
6:01
And part of the technology, certainly from a military point of view,
6:06
was the latest in high tech weaponry, iron weapons.
6:11
So, the tribes of Israel find themselves surrounded by
6:16
this sophisticated people who have iron weapons.
6:20
And there's this sense that God has led them
6:23
not to the Promised Land, but into a trap.
6:27
So, to meet a new kind of threat, they need a new kind of organisation.
6:31
And they say, what we need is a new kind of unity, both political and military.
6:36
And therefore, we need a new kind of political structure to give us that unity.
6:41
In other words, we need a king.
6:44
Now at first
6:46
Samuel, who is the leader, he's a kind of a crossover between a judge and a prophet Samuel.
6:53
Samuel says to the people, no, you can't have a king
6:55
because your king is God.
6:58
In other words, he stands up for a theocracy,
7:01
a scoiety in which God is the king.
7:04
But eventually there is a compromise reached.
7:08
That they can have a king, yes, but this king is going to be a king
7:12
with a difference.
7:13
He's not going to be divine.
7:16
He's not going to be the source of the law.
7:19
He will be just one of his brothers and sisters, a slave set free.
7:24
So, he's one of the mob,
7:27
and he is as much subject to God's law as anyone else.
7:32
Now, in all the other nations and societies of the Middle East at that time,
7:36
the ancient near East, as they call it,
7:39
the king was the source of the law.
7:42
But in this community, ancient Israel,
7:46
the king was not the source of the law, God was, and it came through Moses.
7:50
So, the king didn't even mediate God's law, that was referred to Moses.
7:56
So, the king was subject to the law
7:59
as much as anyone else.
8:02
So, Saul becomes the first king,
8:04
and the Bible tells this story.
8:09
Saul in time
8:11
develops a kind of paranoia about David.
8:16
David, who is a servant of Saul.
8:19
But what Saul recognises in David is a kind of competitor.
8:28
And as the paranoia of Saul grows worse,
8:32
he starts to cast murderous eyes upon his competitor.
8:38
The thing is too David, as he grows older,
8:41
shows himself to be a mighty man on the battlefield.
8:46
And this was always the basis of David's power and prestige.
8:51
He could win battles and win wars.
8:55
And he was never happier than riding into battle.
8:59
So, he was a warrior king.
9:04
Eventually,
9:06
Saul is killed in battle.
9:10
And at that point David, who has become a kind of an outlaw,
9:14
a kind of a Robin Hood figure
9:16
because of the persecution by King Saul.
9:20
David reappears onto the scene no longer as an outlaw,
9:24
but as a leader,
9:28
a new kind of leader.
9:31
And David,
9:33
who has
9:38
assumed the leadership of the tribe of Judah.
9:43
In that sense, he was the king of Judah down to the southern tribe.
9:48
With the death of Solomon, and then eventually Solomon's son Ishbosheth.
9:54
The tribes of the north, there were ten tribes of the north and two in the south,
9:58
and they were much smaller, Judah and Benjamin.
10:02
So, the ten tribes of the north were much bigger,
10:05
more powerful, wealthier, and more cosmopolitan.
10:10
The leaders of the ten tribes of the north recognise in David, the kind of leader they now need
10:16
to meet the kind of threat that the Philistines presented.
10:20
So, they come to David,
10:23
and they put to him that David assume
10:27
control, rule, of the twelve tribes.
10:32
He's the man to lead them.
10:34
That's what they recognise.
10:36
And David, not surprisingly, accepts.
10:40
Now some would claim that David had always had that ambition
10:45
to replace Saul and to rule over the twelve tribes.
10:50
Now, finally, that's what happens.
10:53
Apart from being a very successful military leader, David was also a very shrewd politician.
10:59
And one of the things he recognised was that he needed a neutral capital
11:06
to embody that new kind of unity.
11:08
It was not unlike the decision they made in Australia in the early years of this century.
11:13
That the first Parliament met in Melbourne.
11:17
But then you had the old
11:20
sense of competition between Sydney and Melbourne.
11:23
So, what did they decide to do?
11:25
They decided to establish a capital
11:28
in neutral territory, and that's why we've got Canberra.
11:33
Again, for political purposes and to avoid the kind of,
11:37
the local rivalries that can plague a nation.
11:42
So, David looks around and his eye falls somewhat mysteriously
11:48
upon this mountain fortress
11:51
in the hands of the Jebusites.
11:55
So, David storms the fortress
12:00
and makes it his new capital.
12:01
Because, you see, this town
12:05
was in neutral territory.
12:07
It didn't belong to any of the tribes, and therefore was likely to be acceptable to all the tribes.
12:13
And to make a statement about who David was,
12:16
he didn't belong to any of the tribes.
12:18
He belonged to all the tribes.
12:21
So, you see what I mean when I say that Jerusalem enters the scene of history
12:26
by dint of violence.
12:28
David,
12:30
storms the fortress, takes it, and gets rid of the locals
12:36
and makes it his capital.
12:39
Now, really it was just a kind of a ridge.
12:43
It was called the City of David, but it was no city such as we might think of a city.
12:50
It was more like a fortress
12:52
on a kind of a triangular ridge
12:56
falling away at two sides.
12:59
It was only on the third side up to the north, that there was flat ground.
13:03
And that will become important in the later history of Jerusalem.
13:08
David also knows that, again, this is the shrewd politician.
13:14
That he needs God's blessing for this new capital.
13:20
So, what does he do?
13:22
He brings the Ark of the Covenant
13:25
from where it was into the City of David.
13:31
Let's call it now Jerusalem.
13:33
Which is the new name that it acquires.
13:38
In Hebrew, Yerushalayim.
13:42
So, by bringing the Ark
13:47
into the new capital, David is saying,
13:51
this isn't just my decision, it's God's decision, it has God's blessing.
13:56
So, he claims the sanction of God not only for his capital,
14:00
but also for his reign.
14:05
Upon him as king, The Anointed One.
14:13
It was only, however, under David's son
14:17
that the temple is built.
14:19
So, David rules for about forty years, it’s a long reign.
14:23
Whatever a year meant in the Bible, we don't know.
14:26
But he reigns for a long time,
14:29
and Jerusalem remains basically a fortress, a royal fortress,
14:35
rather than a city throughout that time.
14:38
In part because David was too busy fighting battles.
14:46
He was lucky in the sense that
14:50
it was an unusual time in that part of the world,
14:53
the biblical world, because normally either Egypt
14:57
or one of the Mesopotamian empires
15:00
was strong and the other was weak.
15:03
But through the long reign of David,
15:07
both Egypt and the empires of Mesopotamia to the east,
15:13
were weak.
15:15
So, David again saw his opportunity and created a mini empire.
15:20
Because the great imperial powers surrounding him
15:25
were comparatively weak.
15:28
So, he was the warrior king.
15:30
He was the politician king.
15:33
And the city remained basically a fortress, a royal fortress.
15:39
Things change, however, when in 960 or thereabouts,
15:44
David is succeeded by his youngest son Solomon.
15:49
Now, this is not the time to explore in any detail the story of how Solomon,
15:52
as the youngest son, came to assume the throne.
15:58
It should have been one of his older brothers,
16:01
Adonijah, Absalom, and so on.
16:05
But it is Solomon.
16:08
Enough to say here that Solomon ascends the throne
16:13
up to his knees in blood.
16:16
So that again you see that Jerusalem, which is supposed to be the city of peace,
16:21
is also the city of blood.
16:23
Solomon's name in Hebrew, ‘Shlomo’,
16:26
does in fact refer obviously
16:28
to the word ‘Shalom’, man of peace.
16:32
But that was not the story of how Solomon came
16:35
to ascend the throne over his brothers.
16:38
Not without the connivance of his mother, Bathsheba.
16:43
But again, the recognition seemed to be that Solomon,
16:46
not only by Bathsheba, but also by some of the royal advisors
16:51
and David's priest Zadok.
16:54
They clearly made the judgment that Solomon was the best equipped
16:58
to be king in succession to his father.
17:01
But it was a bloody accession to the throne.
17:05
Now, Solomon is a very different character from his father.
17:08
He too reigns a very long time in Jerusalem.
17:11
But he begins to turn Jerusalem into something like a serious city,
17:16
in the terms of the ancient world.
17:19
One of the things he does,
17:22
and this is fateful, is he builds the temple.
17:28
He builds a palace,
17:30
and he builds a temple.
17:33
And this was always central to the ideology
17:36
which eventually came to surround the city of Jerusalem.
17:41
The Psalm says,
17:43
Jerusalem is built as a city, strongly compact.
17:48
Now, it's very hard to know what exactly it means to say it’s strongly compact.
17:53
But one suggestion, which I find attractive,
17:56
is that it means Jerusalem is built as a city where palace and temple are one.
18:05
So again, this was
18:06
the place where God had made his house,
18:09
and the place where the king had made his house.
18:12
And this was at least a political, it wasn't just a theological claim,
18:16
it was also a political claim, an attempt to sacralise the monarchy
18:21
with its capital in Jerusalem.
18:25
So, Solomon builds a magnificent temple,
18:29
and he's not a man for the battlefield.
18:33
He, in fact, he begins to look more and more like an Egyptian pharaoh.
18:40
Among his wives, there was even one of the daughters of Pharaoh,
18:43
in the ancient world at this time, because
18:46
royal daughters were a pawn of royal diplomacy.
18:50
It was good to have a few daughters that you could use as
18:53
diplomatic bargaining chips, as it were.
18:56
And the question was always in the ancient world, shall we marry our enemies?
19:02
This was seen as a way of overcoming long standing rivalries.
19:07
So, one of the wives of King Solomon
19:10
was in fact one of the many daughters of the Pharaoh of Egypt.
19:18
Now, Solomon
19:23
dies in about 920, BC again.
19:28
And with his death there comes a time of real crisis,
19:32
certainly for Jerusalem.
19:36
Because the son of Solomon, who is to succeed his father as king
19:41
of the twelve tribes, the united kingdom,
19:45
is a man known as Rehoboam.
19:51
Now, towards the end of his reign, his very long reign.
19:56
The ten tribes of the north had become very discontent
20:00
with the rule of Solomon.
20:04
They felt that they were being treated very unjustly.
20:08
And they came to Rehoboam and they said,
20:11
if you treat us the way your father did in the late years of his reign,
20:17
then we are no longer interested in a united kingdom.
20:21
We will take our leave, and we will go our own way.
20:25
Rehoboam, foolishly perhaps, rashly certainly, said,
20:32
I am the king, you will not tell me what to do.
20:34
I will tell you what to do.
20:36
And here again, he sounds not like one of his brothers, but more like, the Pharaoh of Egypt.
20:42
At that point,
20:43
the tribal leaders of the ten tribes of the north say to Rehoboam,
20:48
well, if that's the case, we're finished with the united kingdom, we're out.
20:52
So, you end up with a split.
20:56
The ten tribes of the north go their own way
20:59
and become what is called the northern kingdom.
21:03
Often, it's called Israel.
21:06
Or sometimes ‘Samaria’, in Hebrew ‘Shomron’.
21:11
So, the ten tribes of the north,
21:13
and you're left with the two tribes
21:16
of the south,
21:18
Judah and Benjamin.
21:20
And Jerusalem becomes now the capital
21:23
only of that small southern kingdom.
21:28
And as it becomes politically less important,
21:31
it becomes religiously more important.
21:35
The capital of the northern kingdom
21:37
was in the city of Samaria, Shomron.
21:43
So, ten tribes to the north,
21:48
Judah and Benjamin alone in Jerusalem and the south.
21:55
Now that arrangement lasts
21:58
for about 200 years.
22:03
Because what happens in 720 is again crisis.
22:11
Just by the way, they say of Jerusalem
22:13
that if you survey its history from day one, as it were, until now, it has been
22:20
seventeen times destroyed and eighteen times rebuilt.
22:25
Now that is important to keep in mind.
22:28
So, when I speak of these crises, certainly from now on,
22:32
we will be talking about destructions of the city.
22:38
So, in 720,
22:42
the Assyrian Empire is on the move, and they have a war machine, and army,
22:47
the like of which, for efficiency and ferocity,
22:50
the ancient world had never seen.
22:53
And as part of their imperial conquests,
22:56
their eye falls upon the northern kingdom.
23:01
Which was always more exposed.
23:04
But it was bigger and wealthier
23:06
and more culturally cosmopolitan.
23:12
The south had become
23:13
a more religious phenomenon.
23:17
So, Assyria in 720
23:21
destroys the northern kingdom.
23:25
They wage war and they win the war.
23:33
to the Assyrian army.
23:36
What happens then is that
23:37
a whole bunch of refugees
23:41
flee from the north down to the south.
23:46
Now among them were some of the prophets
23:51
and other religious figures who brought with them
23:53
the sacred texts of the north,
23:56
down to the south.
23:57
So, with this flood of refugees from the northern kingdom
24:00
to Jerusalem and the southern kingdom.
24:04
You find this extraordinarily creative amalgam of northern traditions
24:11
which looked to the figure of Moses, preeminently.
24:17
With southern traditions which look preeminently to the figure of Abraham.
24:22
And you can see this going on in the Bible.
24:25
And you find that
24:28
typically northern prophets,
24:31
like Hosea,
24:34
their voice, as it were, comes south.
24:39
Now, even the words that were used for prophet
24:45
were different in the north and the south.
24:47
In the north,
24:49
the word for ‘prophet’,
24:51
‘navi’ means someone who speaks for God,
24:55
a spokesperson.
24:58
The word for ‘prophet’ in the south was ‘hozeh’,
25:02
which means someone who sees, a seer.
25:07
Vision, not audition.
25:10
But then you get this amalgamation, and you can see this in the prophetic texts in the Old Testament.
25:15
Where you get the prophet as speaker and as seer.
25:20
So, there's this great amalgam of northern and southern traditions, Moses and Abraham and so on.
25:28
But it's one of the more creative moments in the formation of the Scripture.
25:36
So that, again, the catastrophe of the fall of the north
25:41
religiously becomes extraordinarily creative.
25:48
Now, at about the same time,
25:50
and again with Assyria on the march.
25:55
They come south.
25:58
And their eye falls upon Jerusalem
26:02
with its great temple, which
26:04
they say on its mountain fastness,
26:09
with the sun upon it looked like a snow capped mountain.
26:13
The Temple of Solomon must have been an extraordinary sight.
26:19
So, Assyria thinks they may as well finish the job.
26:25
They've done with the north,
26:30
let's do with the south.
26:34
This is some years later.
26:36
But these imperial expeditions often went on for years and years and years.
26:42
Now, at this time, and faced with this threat,
26:46
the prophet Isaiah,
26:49
well known to us,
26:51
who was in Jerusalem at this time, he's a southern prophet.
26:55
So, he is based in Jerusalem.
26:58
He speaks about the inviolability of Zion.
27:04
What he means is that God
27:06
has made his home in Jerusalem,
27:09
and therefore the city is inviolable, unconquerable.
27:16
Now, that sense of inviolability
27:21
prevailed, at least in the mind of the people and the rulers.
27:26
They thought they were inviolable.
27:30
But extraordinarily, this doctrine
27:34
was vindicated.
27:38
Because in 701 BC,
27:43
the Assyrian king Sennacherib
27:45
and his army were besieging Jerusalem
27:50
and mysteriously they withdrew.
27:56
Now there are various accounts of what happened.
27:59
One is that there was a massive disease in the Assyrian camp.
28:05
Another was that the king Sennacherib, had to return
28:08
to his capital because of a political crisis there.
28:12
Who knows?
28:13
But whyever it happened,
28:16
we mightn’t know, but we do know
28:19
that the army withdrew and returned to Assyria.
28:23
And the prophet Isaiah, with his doctrine of the inviolability of Zion,
28:29
seems to be vindicated,
28:31
that the city is unconquerable. Why?
28:34
Because God protects the city which He has made His home.
28:39
Now, there is much more to the story to come, and we'll see eventually
28:45
just how shaky this doctrine of the inviolability of Jerusalem becomes.
28:50
So, at this point, Jerusalem is intact.
28:55
So too is the southern kingdom.
28:57
But there's much more of the story to come as we move
29:01
from the eighth century, the seven hundreds BC,
29:04
into the six hundreds, and then the five hundreds.
29:08
That's when we strike true drama.
29:12
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in time, theology and imagination.
29:21
A new episode is released weekly.
29:24
You can find more podcasts from the Archdiocese of Brisbane from most major podcast providers
29:30
or from our website: brisbanecatholic.org.au
