Most Jews, it was true, did not despair of the Temple and its guardians. The very scale of the wealth banked on Mount Moria served as the witness of that. As critics of its priests pointed out, the offerings made to the Temple derived not just from Judaea, but from across the civilised world. Many more Jews lived beyond the limits of the Promised Land than within them. For the vast majority of these, the Temple remained what it had ever been: the central institution of Jewish life. Yet it was not the only one. Had it been, then it would have been hard for Jews settled beyond the Promised Land to remain as Jews for long. Distance from the Temple, from its rituals, and sacrifices, and prayers, would gradually have seen their sense of Jewish identity blur and fade. But as it was, they did not need to travel to Jerusalem on one of the three pilgrim festivals held every year to feel themselves in the presence of God. Rather, they had only to go to one of the numerous houses of prayer and instruction that were to be found wherever Jews were congregated: a ‘house of assembly’, or ‘synagogue’. Here, boys would be taught to read, and adults schooled throughout their lives in the interpretation of some very specific texts. These, lovingly transcribed onto parchment scrolls, were kept, when they were not being studied, in a box that deliberately echoed the long-vanished Ark: an awesome marker of their holiness. Other peoples too could claim possession of texts from gods – but none were so charged with a sense of holiness, none so attentively heeded, none so central to the self-understanding of an entire people as the collection of writings cherished by Jews as their holiest scripture.
Torah, they called it: ‘teachings’. Five scrolls portrayed the original working of God’s purposes: from the creation of the world to the arrival on Canaan’s borders, after many hardships and wanderings, of Abraham’s descendants, ready at last to claim their inheritance. The story did not end there, though. There were many other writings held sacred by the Jews. There were histories and chronicles, detailing everything from the conquest of Canaan to the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple. There were records of prophecy, in which men who had felt the word of God like a burning fire within their bones gave it utterance. There were collections of proverbs, tales of inspirational men and women, and an anthology of poems named psalms. All these various writings, by many different hands over the course of many years, served to provide Jews beyond the Promised Land with a much-craved reassurance: that living in foreign cities did not make them any the less Jewish. Nor, three centuries on from Alexander’s conquest of the world, did the fact that the vast majority of them spoke not the language of their ancestors but Greek. A bare seventy years after Alexander’s death there had begun to emerge in Alexandria large numbers of Jews who struggled to understand the Hebrew in which most of their scriptures were written. The commission to translate them, so the story went, had come from none other than Demetrius of Phalerum. Keen to add to the stock of the city’s great library, he had sent to Jerusalem for seventy-two scholars. Arriving in Alexandria, these had set diligently to work translating the holiest text of all, the five scrolls, or pentateuch, as they were called in Greek.* Other texts had soon followed. Demetrius, so it was improbably claimed, had defined them as ‘philosophical, flawless – and divine’.19 Not merely books, they were hailed by Greek-speaking Jews as ta biblia ta hagia – ‘the holy books’.†
Here was the manifestation of a subtle yet momentous irony. A body of writings originally collated and adapted by scholars who took for granted the centrality of Jerusalem to the worship of their god was slipping its editors’ purposes: the biblia came to possess, for the Jews of Alexandria, a sanctity that rivalled that of the Temple itself. Wherever there existed a scribe to scratch their verses onto parchment, or a student to commit them to memory, or a teacher to explicate their mysteries, their sanctity was affirmed. Their eternal and indestructible nature as well. Such a monument, after all, was not easily stormed. It was not constructed out of wood and stone, to be levelled by a conquering army. Wherever Jews might choose to live, there the body of their scriptures would be present as well. Those in Alexandria or Rome, far distant from the Temple though they were, knew that they possessed in their holy books – and the Torah especially – a surer path to the divine than any idol could provide. ‘What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to Him?’20
The Romans might have the rule of the world; the Greeks might have their philosophy; the Persians might claim to have fathomed the dimensions of truth and order; but all were deluded. Darkness covered the earth, and thick darkness was over the nations. Only once the Lord God of Israel had risen upon them, and his glory appeared over them, would they come into the light, and kings to the brightness of dawn.
For there was no other god but him.
Like Humans You Shall Die
Half a millennium and more before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians stormed the original Temple and burnt it to the ground, they transported the elite of the conquered kingdom to Babylon. There, in a city vast beyond their wildest imaginings, the exiles found themselves amid temples so steepling that they seemed to brush the sky. The greatest of them all, the Esagila, was hailed by the Babylonians as the oldest building in the world, and the very axis of the cosmos. No earthly hand had raised it. Instead, it was the gods who had erected its stupefying bulk, to serve as the palace of Marduk, the king of the heavens. Within it stood sculptures fashioned by Marduk himself, and a mighty bow: ‘marks never to be forgotten’21 of a victory won by the god at the beginning of time. Then it was, so the Babylonians claimed, that Marduk had fought with a dragon of terrifying size, a monster of the heaving ocean, and split her in two with his arrows, and fashioned the heavens and the earth from the twin halves of her corpse. Next, rather than condemn the gods to perpetual toil, Marduk had commissioned a further act of creation. ‘I will make man,’ he had declared, ‘who shall inhabit the earth, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.’22 Humanity, moulded out of dust and blood, had been bred to labour.
It would have been easy for the exiles from Jerusalem, numbed by defeat and a sense of their own puniness before the immensity of Babylon, to have accepted this bleak understanding of man’s purpose. But they did not. Rather than fall to the worship of Marduk, they clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, had been endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, which had seen heaven itself, and earth, and everything within them brought into being, had been created on the sixth day. Humans shared in the dignity of the one God, who had not, like Marduk, fought with a monster of the seas before embarking on His labour of creation, but had crafted the entire cosmos unaided and alone. To priests transported from the ruins of Jerusalem, the story provided a desperately needed reassurance: that the object of their worship still reigned supreme. Generation after generation, versions of it were retold. Written down, spliced together, fashioned into a single, definitive account, the story came to serve as the opening of the Torah itself. Long after the greatness of Marduk had been humbled into the dust, and the Esagila become the haunt of jackals, the book known to its Greek translators as Genesis continued to be copied, studied and revered. ‘And God saw all that he had done, and it was very good.’23