Biblical Period


The First Commonwealth

King David

While the Israelites had been present in much of the Holy Land for two hundred years, already, by the time David was anointed king in the last decade of eleventh century B.C.E. the twelve tribes had become highly divisive. David surmised that Saul a particularly difficult time during his rule due the fact that he had no centralized seat of government. So David searched for a central location among the tribes which was easliy defensible, had significant meaning to the Israelites in order ot maintain its legitimacy, and which was in neutral territory, not claimed by any of the tribes, in order to prevent any one from becoming more powerful that the others. In 1004 B.C.E. David conquered a Jebusite city and made it his capitol.


In the picture at the top of this page is a model of the City of David at the time of David's successor King Solomon.


The picture to the left shows the actual location of the City of David today, the neighborhood of Silwan in contemporary Jerusalem. As can be seen, the site of the city is easily defensible on three sides by valleys and with a fortress/palace at the top. David built his seat of government at the top overlooking the city at the foot of Mount Moriah, where the Abraham was supposed to have offered his son as sacrifice to God, giving the site religious signifigance to David's choice and legitimacy in the eyes of the people to their new capitol. Sandwiched in a territory between to tribes, it also sufficed forthe neutral territory issue which David put such great importance upon.



King Solomon

Becuase King David was a warrior who had blood on his hands, Samuel, the prophet of God who anointed David king, told him that the construction of his Temple was to be completed by his successor, his son Solomon. The Temple was built adjacent to the palace atop Mount Moriah on the site where it is believed that Abraham offered his son to God. An artist depiction of Solomon's Temple is in the picture to the right. Unlike his father's reign of warlike expansion, Solomon's reign was peaceful bountiful. He had great political savvy and used a personal form of diplomacy: marriage. In order to seal alliances with surrounding kingdoms and others abroad, including Egypt, Solomon married the daughters of any and every ruler he met. It is said that he had over one hundred wives. Such a large royal family assured a long lasting dyansty, the longest ever to rule from Jerusalem.



Destruction of the First Temple and Exile to Babylon

King David's dynasty lasted longer than any other that ruled in Jerusalem, 418 years. In 586 B.C.E. the Babylonians laid seige to the city and after months of starvation the besieged city gave in. The Babylonians invaded the walled city and destroyed the Temple built by Solomon on the Hebrew date of the 9th day of the month of Av. Today you can visit an archaeological site in the Jewish Quarter of the Old city, pictured to the left where a broad wall that existed during the time of the Babylonian siege. In a museum under the foudations of a twentieth century building nearby, one can visit the ruins of the gate and see three arrowheads on the ground before the gate where they fell over 2,500 years ago during the battle over the city. Following the the destruction of the Temple and the city, the Babylonians took the Jewish population into exile to Babylon. They remained there until freed by a decree by Babylonian King Cyrus in 538 which allowed them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild city and the Temple.



The Second Commonwealth

When the Jews from Babylon returned, they immediately rebuilt the temple and the city's fortifications expanding it considerably. The map to the right shows how large the city grew in the first hundred years following the return from exile. As the map indicates, the size of the city is not certain, however archaeological evidence uncovered during excavations after 1967 reveal various landmarks and important cites in the city from this period. The yellow section shows the location of the original City of David, while the brown section shows the reconstructed structures on Mt. Moriah including the Second Temple. The red and pink areas are speculated sections of expansion.



Judah Maccabee and the Hasomneans

During the second Jewish commonwealth in Jerusalem, it became a weigh station along the trade routes between Egypt and the empires to the north and east. In 332, Jerusalem was conquered by Alexander the Great who died only nine years later. His surviving generals and their descendants fought battles of succession from rule in Egypt and Syria, both of which traded possession of Jerusalem from battle to battle. As these Hellenic armies moved through Jerusalem, their Greek customs and ways became familiar to the local Jewish population who assimilated some of Hellenic culture into their own. The photo on the right shows a room from a house which has Hellenic design with regard to the mosaic floor and furniture. Evidence that this was a Jewish home is in the mosaic design as it does not depict any animal or anthropomorphic figures as banned by Jewish law. By the second century C.E. the Selucids ruling from Syria had consolidated control of the region around Jerusalem. One of the Selucid kings, Antiochus IV began to actively assimilate the Jewish population in Jerusalem. One day in 167 C.E. a man named Mattithias Hasmon went to visit the Temple in and witnessed a Jew being forced to bow down to a statue of a Greek god. Incensed by what he saw, he killed the Jew for capitulating and the Greek official who forced him to do so. This sparked a war in which Hasmon's son Judah led a successful Jewish rebellion which launched the Hasmonean Dynasty. This period in Jewish history is marked by the celebration of Hanukkah.



Herodian Jerusalem

In 63 B.C.E., Pompey, the great Roman General and member of the ruling triumvirate of the burgeoning empire that included Ceaser, conquered much of the Middle East, including Jerusalem. Under Roman colonial rule, King Herod ascended the throne in 37 B.C.E. after leading Roman forces into Jerusalem, crushing a small Jewish rebellion. He attempted to gain legitimacy by marrying a Jewish woman of royal Hasmonean ancestry, but the Jewish populace never really recognized him as king. His megalomania left a legacy of massive construction projects which included the construction of the Temple Mount on Mount Moriah, much of which still stands today, and a refurbishing of the Temple , a model of which is pictured to the right, on top of the man made mount in Jerusalem. A central portion of the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount, in the right side of the picture above left, today symbolizes the holy temple and is considered the holiest site for Jews today. Herod also built a mountain sized fortress to the south of Jerusalem called Herodion, a well fortified palace at Massada near the Dead Sea, and a large port city on the Mediterranean called Ceasaria Herod died in 4 B.C.E., but his dynasty lasted until the Jewish war of 66-73 C.E.



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