Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, the perspective on Pompey’s conquests was – unsurprisingly – rather different. When Jews sought to make sense of their city’s fall, they did not look to philosophy. Instead, in pain and bewilderment, they turned to their god.
When the sinner became proud he struck down the fortified walls
with a battering ram,
and You did not restrain him.
Foreign nations went up to Your altar,
in pride they trampled it with their sandals.6
This howl of anguish, addressed to the god who had permitted his house to be stormed and his innermost sanctuary intruded upon, was not one that Pompey could ever realistically have hoped to calm. The respect that he believed himself to have shown the Jewish deity cut little ice with most Jews. The very idea of equating the Temple with the shrines of foreign gods was unspeakably offensive to them. Perhaps, had the man installed by Pompey as high priest met with his patron as an equal, he might have sought to explain why. That there was only the one God; and that the Temple stood as a replica of the universe that he alone had brought into being. In the robes worn by the high priest were to be seen mirrors held up to the cosmos; in the rituals he performed an echo of the divine labour of creation at the beginning of time; on the golden plate he wore on his forehead an awesome inscription, that of the name of God himself, which sacred custom ordained should only ever be uttered by the high priest – and even then only once a year, when he went into the Holy of Holies. To desecrate the Temple was to desecrate the universe itself. The Jews, no less than Posidonius, recognised in the expansion of Roman power an event that reverberated to the heavens.
‘To the victor is granted the right to lay down laws.’7 Such was the maxim that Pompey, as he deposed kings and redrew boundaries, took for granted. The Jews, though, in defiance of earthly power, claimed a status for themselves that no empire, not even one as mighty as Rome, could ever hope to emulate. Once, many generations back, when Troy was yet to be founded, and Babylon was still young, a man named Abram had lived in Mesopotamia. There, it was taught by Jewish scholars, he had come by a profound insight: that idols were mere painted stone or wood, and that there existed, unique, intangible and omnipotent, just the single deity. Rather than stay in a city polluted by idolatry, Abram had chosen instead to leave his home, travelling with his wife and household to the land that would one day be called Judaea, but was then known as Canaan. All was part of the divine plan. God, appearing to Abram, had told him that, despite the great age of his childless wife, she would bear him a son, and that his descendants would one day inherit Canaan: a ‘Promised Land’. As token of this, Abram was given a new name, ‘Abraham’; and it was commanded by God that he and his male heirs, all of them, down countless generations, be circumcised. Abraham, obedient to every divine instruction, did as he was told; and when, sure enough, he was rewarded with a child, and God told him to take this child, Isaac, to a high place, and there to sacrifice the boy, ‘your son, your only son, whom you love’,8 he showed himself willing to do it. Yet at the very last moment, even as Abraham was reaching for the cleaver, an angel spoke from the heavens, telling him to hold his hand; and Abraham, looking to where a ram had been caught in the thickets, had taken the animal and slain it on the altar. And God, because Abraham had been willing to offer in sacrifice the most precious thing that he had, confirmed the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. ‘And through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.’9
Where had this fateful episode taken place? Many generations later, when Abraham’s descendants had come to settle the Promised Land and to name it Israel, an angel had materialised for a second time over the site where Isaac had almost perished – and this site, so it was recorded by Jewish scholars, had been none other than Mount Moria. Past and future, earth and heaven, mortal endeavour and divine presence: all had stood revealed as conjoined. Jerusalem itself, at the time of the angel’s appearance, had only recently come under Israelite control. The man who had captured the city, a one-time shepherd boy and harpist by the name of David, from a small town called Bethlehem, had risen to become king over the whole of Israel; and now, at the very moment when he had established it as his capital, an angel had been sent to its heights, there to ‘show him the spot where the Temple was to be built’.10 David himself had been forbidden by God from embarking on the project; but under his son Solomon – a king of such wealth and wisdom that his name would ever after serve the Jews as a byword for splendour – Mount Moria had become ‘the mountain of the house of the Lord’.11 It was Solomon, after the completion of the Temple, who had placed in the Holy of Holies the greatest treasure that the Israelites possessed: a gilded chest, or ark, made to precise specifications laid down by God himself, and in which his presence was manifest on earth. This, then, was the glory of Israeclass="underline" that its Temple was truly the house of the Lord God.
But such a glory was not merely given; it had to be earned. The charge laid upon his people by God, to worship him as was his due, came hedged about with warnings. ‘See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse – the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse, if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God.’12 Over the centuries that followed Solomon’s building of the Temple, the people had repeatedly strayed – and sure enough, after four hundred years of disobedience, they had reaped a bitter harvest. First, the Assyrians conquered the north of the Promised Land: ten of the twelve tribes who traced their lineage back to Israel had been taken into captivity, and vanished into the maw of Mesopotamia. Not even the fall of Assyria to Babylon in 612 BC had seen them return. Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel, and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. ‘And he burnt the house of the Lord and the house of the king and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great house he burnt in fire.’13 Nothing of the Temple built by Solomon, not its fittings of cypress wood, nor its gilded gates, nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates, had been spared. Only ruins and weeds remained. And when in her turn Babylon had fallen, and the Persians had wrested from her the mantle of empire, and Cyrus had given permission for the Temple to be rebuilt, the complex that arose on Mount Moria was merely a shadow of what had stood before. ‘Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing?’14 Starkest of all the reminders of vanished glories was the Holy of Holies. The Ark, upon which the glory of God Himself, in a cloud of impenetrable darkness, had been accustomed to descend, was gone. No one could say for certain what its fate had been. Only the block of stone seen by Pompey when he stepped into the chamber, bare and unadorned, served to mark the spot where it had once stood.
And now foreign invaders had desecrated Mount Moria again. Even as the high priest and his acolytes sought to cleanse it of the traces of the Roman siege, and to restore to the Temple its accustomed rites, so were there Jews who scorned their efforts. Why, after all, would God have permitted an alien conqueror to trespass within the Holy of Holies unless it were to express his anger with its guardians? To critics of the Temple priests, the explanation for the catastrophe appeared manifest: ‘it was because the sons of Jerusalem had defiled the Lord’s sanctuary, they profaned the offerings to God with lawlessness’.15 Just as centuries previously, amid the calamities of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, men known as nevi’im, or ‘prophets’, had appeared, to urge their countrymen to reform their ways or else risk obliteration, so now, in the wake of Pompey’s conquests, were there Jews who in a similar manner despaired of the Temple establishment. ‘Because you have plundered many nations, the peoples who are left will plunder you.’16 Moralists convinced of God’s anger did not hesitate to apply this warning, delivered many centuries earlier, to the priests in Jerusalem. That Pompey had spared the treasures of the Temple did not mean that the troops of some future Roman warlord might not seize them. ‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong, their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour.’17 Only if the priests repented of their greed, and of their avarice for gold harvested from across the world, would they be spared. Otherwise, the judgement of God would be swift and certain: ‘their riches and loot will be given into the hands of the army of the Romans’.18