Jerusalem in the Persian Period – 3

The exiles’ return to Jerusalem was first and foremost a symbolic, national and political act. The scenario described, moreover, is consistent with the Biblical account: “The city was large and spacious; there were few people in it and no houses had yet been built” (Nehemiah 7:14). That living in Jerusalem at this time was a symbolic act is indicated by the fact that few of the returning exiles wanted to reside here—and those that did were blessed. As the Bible describes the situation: “The leaders of the people settled in Jerusalem; and the rest of the people cast lots to bring one in every ten to live in Jerusalem, the holy city, while the remaining nine lived in other towns. And the people gave their blessing to all those who volunteered to live in Jerusalem” (Nehemiah 11:1–2).

Jerusalem in the Persian period is not the only case in which a large city includes many unsettled areas surrounded by a strong city wall. A similar situation existed, for example, in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in the period just before its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in ‘3 CE. Steven Runciman vividly describes the situation in Constantinople at that time:

“The city itself, within its fourteen miles of encircling walls, had even in its greatest days been full of parks and gardens, dividing the various quarters. But now many quarters had disappeared, and fields and orchards separated those that remained. [To one observer in the first years of the 15th century,] it was astounding that so huge a city should be so full of ruins.” [1]

Persian period Jerusalem was much the same: A magnificent metropolis, heavily fortified, which, due to tragic historical circumstances, was emptied of the majority of its population, while the walls encircled an area as large as it had been before.

This leaves me with one small point concerning the location of the Persian period wall on the eastern slope of the City of David, where large portions of the MB wall have been found, as well as portions of the eighth-century BCE wall (in places a double wall). Kenyon uncovered a structure further up the slope that she identified as the new wall built in the Persian period. According to the minimalists, the exiles constructed here a new wall rather than restoring the old one further down the slope. In my view, here, too, Nehemiah restored the line of the previously existing First Temple wall: Even on the difficult lower slope, it would be easier to restore the wall than to build an entirely new one upslope.

NOTES:

[1] Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 9–10