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 Ahaz should rely on Yahweh alone.
To Isaiah’s disgust, Ahaz was unwilling to take the risk of following his counsel; the king chose instead to submit to Tiglathpileser and become a vassal of Assyria, which promptly invaded the territories of Damascus and Israel and deported large numbers of their inhabitants. By 733, Israel had been reduced to a small city-state based on Samaria, with a puppet king on the throne. It was not the policy of Assyria to impose its religion upon its vassals, but Ahaz seems to have wanted to make some kind of cultic gesture to his new overlord. An Assyrian-style altar replaced the old altar of sacrifice in the Temple courtyard, and henceforth there would be a new enthusiasm in Judah for cults involving the sun, moon, and constellations, which were appearing at this time in other parts of the Near East.
Isaiah had little time for Ahaz, but the king had at least saved his country. The same cannot be said for the child whom Isaiah had hailed as Emanu-El: Hezekiah succeeded his father in about 716, and, D tells us approvingly, he devoted himself to Yahweh alone. He closed down all the bamoth dedicated to other gods, tore down the matzevot, and smashed the bronze serpent in the Hekhal of the Jerusalem Temple. The Chronicler tells us that the priests took a leading role in this reform movement and threw out the paraphernalia of the foreign cults that had crept into the Temple. He also says that Hezekiah ordered all the people of Israel and Judah to assemble in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, a feast that had hitherto been held in the home.29 This is unlikely, since the Passover was not celebrated in the Temple until the late sixth century; the Chronicler was probably projecting the religious practices of his own day back onto Hezekiah, about whom he is most enthusiastic. In fact, we do not know exactly what Hezekiah intended by this reform: it seems to have had no lasting effect. He may have been trying to dissociate himself from the syncretizing policies of his father and to take the first steps toward throwing off Assyrian hegemony. The story of his summoning the people of Israel to Jerusalem could indicate that he had dreams of reviving the United Kingdom, as Isaiah had foretold. Israel was no longer a threat, and there must have been a certain schadenfreude in Judah about the demise of this former enemy. For the first time since the split, Judah was in the stronger position, and by summoning the remaining Israelites to the city of David, Hezekiah may have been nurturing Isaiah’s messianic vision.
If there were such hopes, however, they were definitively crushed in 722 when, after a futile revolt against Assyria, Samaria was defeated and destroyed by Shalmaneser V. The Kingdom of Israel was reduced to an Assyrian province called Samerina. Over 27,000 Israelites were deported to Assyria and were never heard of again. They were replaced by people from Babylon, Cuthnah, Arad, Hamah, and Sephoraim, who worshipped Yahweh, the god of their new country, alongside their own gods. Henceforth the name “Israel” could no longer be used to describe a geographical region, and it survived as a purely cultic term in Judah. But not all the Israelites had been deported. Some stayed behind in their old towns and villages and tried, with the help of the new colonists, to rebuild their devastated country. Others probably came to Judah as refugees and settled in and around Jerusalem. They brought with them ideas that may have been current in the north for some time and that would have a significant effect on the ideology of Jerusalem.
Perhaps because of such an influx from the former Israel, Jerusalem seems to have expanded to three or four times its former size by the end of the eighth century. Two new suburbs were built: one on the Western Hill opposite the Temple, which became known as the Mishneh—the Second City. The other developed in the Tyropoeon Valley and was called the Makhtesh—the Hollow. The new Assyrian king Sargon II adopted more liberal policies toward his vassals, which gave Jerusalem special privileges and economic advantages. But instead of learning from the fate of the northern kingdom, Hezekiah seems to have let his prosperity go to his head. When Sargon died in 705, Jerusalem was at the center of a new coalition of discontented vassals who hoped to throw off the Assyrian yoke: he was joined by the kings of Tyre and Ashkelon, and Egypt’s pharaoh gave promises of help. Another rebellious coalition had sprung up in Mesopotamia, led by Merodach-baladan, King of Babylon, who sent envoys to Jerusalem to inspect its storehouses and fortifications. Hezekiah made elaborate preparations for war. He improved the water supply by digging a new tunnel, seventeen hundred feet long, through the bedrock from the Gihon to the Pool of Siloam and had built a new city wall to protect this pool and, perhaps, the Mishneh. He was clearly proud of his military capability in a way that was far removed from the spirit of the Jerusalem “Poor.”
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