A piece on the Acra in ancient Jerusalem is worthy of note.
One of the classic trick questions on a Bible trivia-type quiz is, “Who was the first king of Israel?” Many answer, wrongly, that it was David. They either forget or have never heard about Saul. A classic divine choice, he proved to be …. well …. a nut-job.
Nevertheless, David was such a success as king that he has gone down in memory as the perfection of kingly rule.
BTW, that is a comment that needs to be assessed with unwavering neutrality. David was, quite frankly, an SOB; ruthless, personally ambitious, manipulative, and sentimental. He used faith and the religious institutions as organs of state and glue of national pride.
Most lastingly David absorbed into his own persona and molded in the vision of his kingship the radical optimism of ancient Israel’s faith in their desert rescuer God, always on the move, always the Lord of surprises. By seeking to build a temple, and replace the old tabernacle, a wish realized by his son, Solomon.
Solomon, the perfect Davidist, pinned God down, gave him an address, and by insisting his presence was to be found in the Holy of Holies he put God in his place as it were, predictable, even subservient. It was this Davidism that the prophets were either prone to rail against or embrace with wild-eyed hope against hope.
Davidism, of course, was successful and there is no nationalistic glue quite like it, a glob of power with a dash of divinity.
As I have many a time heard on the terraces as Scotland faced another thrashing by some minor country’s futbol team, the mournful tones of the braggadocio, “Oh why are we so good?” Despite his boasts in moving poetry that God would bless his descendants and always have an heir on the throne, as long as their was seed-time and harvest, as long as the sun rose in the east, David’s success was short-lived. Under his grandson, Rehoboam, the Davidic kingdom split in two through a bloodless civil war, with nine of the twelve tribes abandoning Davidic self-glorification. Two kingdoms replaced the one. Davidism had lasted less than a century.
Ah, but its ideas survived in Messianism.
The One would come in order to be David all over again, to be what David was unable to be, a better David, a real David, a successful David.
And [as always happens] when foreign empires, their kings, and armies squashed Israel like the backwater irrelevance it was, this idealism spilled over into apocalypticism, the blind vision (yes!) of a world divided into Them and Us, with God on our side, and “they” reduced to dust and ashes. Oh joy; oh rapture. Hateful triumphalism passing as a theology of a merciful God. [Hmmmm. Echoes?]
Broken only by a brief period of independence under the Hasmoneans [of whom I was recently writing here] there was a parade of these foreign conquerors; Assyria, Babylon, the Greece of Alexander the Great and his followers, and then, of course, Rome. The last of these resulted in the Diaspora, the flinging of the Jews out of Jerusalem and its environs across Europe, the near emptying of the Promised Land, a collapse of the Abrahamic adventure to “Go to a land I will show you.” The Romans destroyed the Temple and Palace and with them any pretense of an actual Davidic future.
Back to the Acra.
During the Greek period the ancient literature speaks of a fortress erected in Jerusalem, from which the army would exercise its authority on Jewish life. A puzzle has been that remains of this structure have never been found. Doubts have thus been raised as to its actual existence and accordingly of the extent of Greek influence in Jerusalem.
In the piece I linked at the outset of this post you can read of the archaeological work of excavation and the revelation of the ancient Acra. This is interesting in and of itself, but I mention it to draw your attention to this telling sentence. In the context of the history of Davidism I have all too briefly sketched above, I invite you to ponder it and its application to all of us today:
Archaeologists in Israel believe they have found the remains of an ancient Greek fortification used to control the Temple in Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago.
clamjamfrey 