Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the city in the Judean hills that David took from the Jebusites and made his capital, and where Solomon built the house of the LORD (2 Samuel 5:5-7; 2 Chronicles 3:1). Its Old Testament story runs from Melchizedek, king of Salem, to the Babylonian destruction of 586 BC and the return from exile under Cyrus king of Persia (Genesis 14:18; 2 Kings 25:9; Ezra 1:1-3).

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Names

The Encyclopaedia Judaica links the name Jerusalem with Shalim, a West Semitic god, and records another explanation of it as "foundation of peace." Genesis names Melchizedek king of Salem, and Psalm 76 sets Salem beside Zion, marking Salem as Jerusalem (Genesis 14:18; Psalm 76:2). Before David took it, the city was also called Jebus, the city of the Jebusites (Joshua 18:28; Judges 19:10-11; 1 Chronicles 11:4).

Zion was first the name of the Jebusite fortress that David captured, "the fortress of Zion (that is, the City of David)," on the southeastern hill where the earliest city stood (2 Samuel 5:7; 2 Samuel 5:9). The name Zion came to be used for the temple hill and, in poetry, for the whole city and its people (Isaiah 1:8; Psalm 48:2).

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The setting

The city lies on the ridge of the central hill country, where the road along the ridge meets the road from the coast down to the Jordan Valley. It stands about 2,500 feet (760 meters) above sea level, and travelers go "up" to it (Psalm 122:4). Hills surround it: "As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds His people" (Psalm 125:2). Valleys protect it on three sides, the Kidron on the east and the Hinnom on the west and south (2 Samuel 15:23; Joshua 15:8).

The city's water came from the Gihon spring on the eastern slope, its only perennial spring and the reason the first town was built there, and Solomon was anointed king beside it (2 Chronicles 32:30; 1 Kings 1:38-45). East across the Kidron rises the Mount of Olives (Zechariah 14:4).

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Before David

A town grew up beside the Gihon on the southeastern ridge in the Early Bronze Age, around 3000 BC. The city first appears in writing in Egyptian Execration Texts of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC, as a Canaanite city-state. In the Late Bronze Age the city, written Urusalim, appears in the Amarna letters, where its ruler Abdi-Heba writes to the king of Egypt as one of his vassals and begs him to send troops.

Adoni-zedek king of Jerusalem led four other Amorite kings against Gibeon and was defeated there, on the day the sun stood still over Gibeon (Joshua 10:1; Joshua 10:5; Joshua 10:10; Joshua 10:12-14). Later the men of Judah captured and burned Jerusalem, yet the Jebusites lived on there (Judges 1:8; Judges 1:21). A traveler passing "Jebus (that is, Jerusalem)" would not stop in "the city of foreigners" (Judges 19:10-12).

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The City of David

David (1010-970 BC) reigned seven and a half years at Hebron, then took Jerusalem despite the Jebusites' taunt that "the blind and lame can repel you" (2 Samuel 5:5-7). He told his men to "use the water shaft," Joab went up first, and David lived in the fortress, called it the City of David and built "from the supporting terraces inward" (2 Samuel 5:8-9; 1 Chronicles 11:6). In Jerusalem David reigned thirty-three years over all Israel and Judah (2 Samuel 5:5; 1 Kings 2:11).

He brought the ark of God up into the City of David (2 Samuel 6:12-17). God promised David a descendant who would build "a house for My Name," and a throne "established forever" (2 Samuel 7:12-16). Deuteronomy had told Israel to seek "the place the LORD your God will choose," and in Kings God calls Jerusalem "the city where I chose to put My Name" (Deuteronomy 12:5; 1 Kings 11:36). When Absalom rebelled, David fled across the Kidron and up the Mount of Olives (2 Samuel 15:23; 2 Samuel 15:30). David bought the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and built an altar there to halt a plague (2 Samuel 24:18-25).

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Solomon's Jerusalem

In his fourth year, 966 BC, Solomon began to build the house of the LORD on Mount Moriah, on the threshing floor David had prepared (1 Kings 6:1; 2 Chronicles 3:1). The priests brought the ark into the Most Holy Place, and the cloud of the LORD's glory filled the temple (1 Kings 8:6; 1 Kings 8:10-11). Solomon spent thirteen years on his palace and used forced labor to build the temple, the palace, the supporting terraces and the wall of Jerusalem (1 Kings 7:1; 1 Kings 9:15). Pottery of the tenth century BC has been put forward as evidence that the city was extended north to the area of today's Temple Mount. No remains have survived that can be identified as Solomon's temple or palace. The temple site is the hill now called the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif.

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Capital of Judah

When the kingdom divided in 931 BC, Jerusalem remained Judah's capital under Rehoboam, while the northern king set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan (1 Kings 14:21; 1 Kings 12:28-29). In Rehoboam's fifth year, 926 BC, Shishak king of Egypt took the treasures of the temple and the palace, though the city itself was not taken (1 Kings 14:25-26; 2 Chronicles 12:7). Under Ahaz, Rezin king of Aram and Pekah king of Israel besieged Jerusalem but could not take it (2 Kings 16:5; Isaiah 7:1). Isaiah met Ahaz at the upper pool with the sign of Immanuel, but Ahaz sent the temple's silver and gold to Assyria (Isaiah 7:3; Isaiah 7:14; 2 Kings 16:7-8).

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Hezekiah and Sennacherib

Hezekiah (716-687 BC) reopened the temple and called all Israel and Judah to Jerusalem to keep the Passover (2 Chronicles 29:3; 2 Chronicles 30:1). Facing Sennacherib, he stopped the springs outside the city, repaired the broken wall and built an outer wall, and Isaiah tells of houses torn down to strengthen it (2 Chronicles 32:2-5; Isaiah 22:10). Excavations begun in 1969 by the archaeologist Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University uncovered a city wall about 7 to 8 meters thick across the western hill, the Broad Wall.

Hezekiah also channeled the Gihon's water through a tunnel into the city, generally identified as the Siloam Tunnel, about 535 meters long, which has carried it to the Pool of Siloam ever since (2 Chronicles 32:30; 2 Kings 20:20). The Siloam Inscription, found on the tunnel wall near its southern end and now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, tells how the quarrymen cut "each man towards his fellow, axe against axe," and that the water ran "for 1,200 cubits."

In 701 BC Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BC), captured the fortified cities of Judah in Hezekiah's fourteenth year and laid siege to Jerusalem, but could not take it (2 Kings 18:13). Hezekiah paid tribute, and after he prayed in the temple, the angel of the LORD struck down 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp (2 Kings 18:14; 2 Kings 19:14-20; 2 Kings 19:35). Sennacherib's own annals, on a six-sided clay prism now in the British Museum, say that he shut Hezekiah up "in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage." They list a tribute of 30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver (Kings gives three hundred talents of silver), and they mention no other action against the city.

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The last kings and the fall

Manasseh built altars to the host of heaven in the temple courts and filled Jerusalem with innocent blood (2 Kings 21:5; 2 Kings 21:16). In Josiah's eighteenth year the high priest Hilkiah found the Book of the Law in the temple, and in that same year Josiah kept a Passover unlike any since the judges (2 Kings 22:3-8; 2 Kings 23:21-23). At the temple gate Jeremiah warned against trusting in "the temple of the LORD," asked whether it had become "a den of robbers" and said God would do to it as he had done to Shiloh (Jeremiah 7:1-15).

When Jehoiachin was king, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon besieged the city, took the king captive, carried off the temple treasures and ten thousand captives, and made Zedekiah king (2 Kings 24:10-17). The Babylonian Chronicle records that Nebuchadnezzar seized "the city of Judah" on the second of Addaru, captured its king and appointed "a king of his own choice," a date in February or March of 597 BC.

In Zedekiah's eleventh year, 586 BC (some date it to 587 BC), after a siege begun in his ninth year, the wall was breached, and Nebuzaradan burned the house of the LORD, the palace and the houses of Jerusalem (2 Kings 25:1-9). Ezekiel saw the glory of the LORD leave the temple and stand "over the mountain east of the city," and later return (Ezekiel 10:18-19; Ezekiel 11:23; Ezekiel 43:1-5). Lamentations mourns the lonely city, and Psalm 137 vows never to forget Jerusalem (Lamentations 1:1; Psalm 137:5).

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Return and rebuilding

In his first year Cyrus king of Persia let God's people go up to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem; the edict is dated to 538 BC (Ezra 1:1-3). After the prophets Haggai and Zechariah spoke to Zerubbabel, the temple was finished on the third day of Adar in Darius's sixth year, in March 515 BC (Haggai 1:1; Zechariah 4:9; Ezra 6:15). Ezra the scribe came in the seventh year of Artaxerxes, 458 BC, to teach the Law (Ezra 7:7-10). Nehemiah came in Artaxerxes' twentieth year, 445 BC, and the wall was completed in fifty-two days (Nehemiah 2:1; Nehemiah 6:15).

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Zion in the Psalms and the Prophets

Israel's men were to appear before the LORD three times a year at the place He would choose, and Psalm 122, a song of ascents, urges, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem" (Deuteronomy 16:16; Psalm 122:1; Psalm 122:6). The psalms praise Zion as God's chosen home, and the prophets, while announcing judgment, foresee the nations streaming to the LORD's mountain and the LORD becoming "King over all the earth" (Psalm 132:13-14; Micah 3:12; Isaiah 2:2-3; Zechariah 14:9).

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Archaeology

Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967, showed that the Canaanite city lay only on the southeastern hill, about 15 acres, and found terraces built to widen the narrow hilltop. The Stepped Stone Structure on that slope has been proposed as the Millo, the "supporting terraces" David and Solomon built (2 Samuel 5:9; 1 Kings 9:15). Excavations led by Professor Yigal Shiloh in the City of David from 1978 to 1985, with Avigad's on the western hill, found clear signs of the Babylonian conquest.

The excavator Eilat Mazar identified a Large Stone Structure she dated to about 1000 BC as King David's palace (2 Samuel 5:11), but a 2007 study in the journal Tel Aviv by Israel Finkelstein, Lily Singer-Avitz, Ze'ev Herzog (then director of Tel Aviv University's Institute of Archaeology) and David Ussishkin (professor emeritus of archaeology there) argued that its walls do not belong to a single building. Her excavations on the Ophel also found an impression of the royal seal of King Hezekiah, made public in 2015 (2 Kings 18:1). In 1979 excavations supervised by Gabriel Barkay at Ketef Hinnom found scrolls carrying a form of the priestly blessing, "May the LORD bless you and keep you," dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BC (Numbers 6:24-26).

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Later history

In 167 BC Antiochus IV outlawed the Jewish religion and the temple was desecrated; in December 164 BC, after the Maccabean victories under Judah Maccabee, it was cleansed and rededicated, which Jews remember at Hanukkah. Herod (37-4 BC) rebuilt the temple on an enlarged platform, and part of his western retaining wall survives as the Western Wall. In AD 70, after a revolt that began in AD 66, a Roman army under Titus stormed the city, burned the temple and destroyed Jerusalem. Jerusalem is held sacred by Jews, Christians and Muslims.