IX

LATER HISTORY

THE later history of the Jewish altar is mainly confined to Jerusalem. The law of Deuteronomy required, and the Reformation of Josiah at the end of the seventh century B.C. aimed at, the abolition of all altars of burnt-offering, except that of the Temple on Mount Zion. Certainly the Reformation in this respect was not immediately and permanently completely successful; in particular, between the death of Josiah and the fall of Jerusalem twenty years later the use of other altars revived, and these were used in the service of Yahweh. It was otherwise with the altars in town and country forced on such Jews as were prepared to acquiesce in his regulations by Antiochus Epiphanes; and the altar thrown down by Mattathias at Modin, one of many like it, had been intended for the service of another God. Outside Palestine, as is now known, an altar of burntoffering existed at Elephantine from before 525 B.C. to 411 B.C.; and three years or more later the Jewish community there received permission from the Persian government to re-erect the altar and to offer on it meal-offerings and incense, though permission to offer as formerly burnt-offerings also is not given. Again, from about 160 B. C. to A. D. 73 at the temple erected by the refugee high priest Onias at Leontopolis in Egypt, an altar existed on which sacrifices were offered. But the last-mentioned altar, like the temple to which it was attached, no doubt closely followed the model of Jerusalem; and of the altar at Elephantine we have no details. We may, with this brief reference to others, confine ourselves now to the altars of Jerusalem: i. e. ultimately the one altar of burnt-offering without and the altar of incense within the Temple.

As at Ophrah the first construction of an altar for the service of Yahweh was attributed to Gideon, so at Jerusalem to David; and as at Șor'ah there stands to-day on or near the site of

Manoah's sacrifice a natural rock altar, so on or near the site of the altar erected by David there exists a massive outcrop of rock bearing various traces of artificial workings; this rock, which has for the last 1,200 years been covered by the great Moslem building, the Dome of the Rock, has for long, in all discussions, been brought into association with the altar and Temple of Jerusalem; and rightly, the only question open being the precise nature of the association.

The earliest record of the Jewish altar of Jerusalem is in 2 Sam. 24, a narrative of the same nature as Jud. 6, the story of the theophany to Gideon, and his erection of an altar to Yahweh. The narrative is', as Budde' well remarks, 'first and foremost the iepòs λóyos of Yahweh's sanctuary at Jerusalem, the charter for the sacrificial service offered to Yahweh there on Mount Zion. Since now the sanctuary on Zion at last remained the only sanctuary of Yahweh, and became in the conviction of Israel the only one that was legitimate, since later it passed over, transfigured and spiritualized, into the possession of Christianity, and in the N.T. Apocalypse is transferred to the heavenly world, this narrative must be regarded as one of the most important in the entire Old Testament.'

The age of the narrative is not to be too closely defined; on the one hand it rests on popular expansion of certain facts, and is not strictly a contemporary document; on the other, with its companion piece in c. 21, it resembles the earliest narratives of the O.T. and should not be brought lower down than, let us say, the ninth century B. C.

According to this story, then, the pestilence sent as a punishment for David's sin in numbering the people raged from Dan to Beersheba, leaving Jerusalem at first untouched; but then the destroying angel stretched out his hand to smite Jerusalem too, standing as he did so beside (y) the threshing-floor of Araunah; but at that spot his destroying power is stayed by Yahweh, and Jerusalem escapes. In (a) the threshing-floor beside which the angel has stood David is instructed to erect an altar to Yahweh (na", 2 Sam. 2418), and does so, building it ("" 1 v. 25) and offering on it burnt-offerings.

1 ad loc.

1

In Samuel the site of this altar is not more closely defined by reference to features in the topography of Jerusalem which can still be determined; but the whole tenor of the story, even in the earliest form in Samuel, suggests what the much-modified form of the story in Chronicles affirms, that the site of David's altar in the threshing-floor of Araunah was within the site of Solomon's Temple (" na) including its courts, and consequently of the successive temples of Zerubbabel and Herod: 'And Solomon began to build the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem in Mount Moriah where Yahweh (so LXX) had appeared unto David his father "in the place which David had prepared (LXX) in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite' (2 Chron. 3').

I assume as proved that the Mount Moriah of Chronicles, more commonly called in the O.T. Mount Zion, is the eastern of the two hills or ridges of which Jerusalem consists, and that the Temple lay above the old Jebusite fortress, renamed after its capture, the city of David. On this loftier, plateau-like portion of the hill, nearly midway across from the eastern edge of the plateau, above the deep valley of the Kidron, to the western edge above the shallower Tyropoean valley lies the famous rock now covered by the so-called mosque of Omar. The Jebusites must have had an altar, and it would have been entirely in common with suggestions of such narratives as that in 1 Sam. 9 of Samuel's sacrifice at Ramah that this Jebusite altar lay above the Jebusite city itself; it is natural then to see in the remarkable rock on the plateau about a quarter of a mile away from the site of the old Jebusite city an ancient Jebusite altar; for there are features, in at all events the present surface, which make it resemble the rock altars of Megiddo, Șor'ah, and other places, and which would render it suitable to the kind of ancient sacrificial use to which the story of the rock at Ophrah points; and it would be in accordance with a common law of religious history that a place sacred in one cult continues to be sacred in a later cult that replaces it. On these grounds it is now commonly held that the rock was in the first instance a Jebusite altar, on which the pre-Hebrew inhabitants of Jerusalem set forth food and poured out liquids for the deity. The narrative of 2 Sam, 24, it is true, does not, as in the case of the rock at

Ophrah, in any way suggest this earlier religious use; and Budde is inclined to draw the conclusion that such use there had not been. The chapter', he remarks,1 'forms a companion piece to the stories of the foundation of (the) sanctuaries . . . of Beersheba, Bethel, Mizpah, Ophrah. Which is the most ancient? Was Jerusalem compelled to justify its origin because these other sanctuaries had such charters to show, or vice versa? The former alternative seems obvious, but is not really so. For the iepoì Móyou of these other sanctuaries served to wipe out the stain of earlier heathen worship at them: this Jerusalem had no need to do, since it was founded on a threshing-floor, which had never persistently served any sacred purpose. In any case, on this in part rested Jerusalem's claim to rank above the others.'"

If the rock had a prior history as a Jebusite altar, how closely were the earlier Jebusite and the later Jewish altar connected? Among those who identify the site of the Temple with the immediate neighbourhood of the rock, there is, as is well known, a difference of theory in detail; some holding that the rock was enclosed and covered, as now by the Dome of the Rock, so formerly by the Temple, and in particular by the Holy of Holies; others that the Temple itself stood to the west of the rock, the rock forming the basis of the later-constructed Jewish altars. Both theories have some difficulties to meet the area of the rock is too great to have been covered by the Holy of Holies: on the other hand, if the Temple is placed west of the rock, it is necessary to conclude that it rested on extensive substructures : and, further, if we must limit the actual threshing-floor (a) to the actual circular area trodden by the oxen engaged in threshing, the rock and the threshing-floor would coincide: but the rock with its uneven surface is unsuitable for oxen treading out corn. On the other hand, a point sometimes urged in favour of identifying rock and altar, viz. that angels in the O.T. appear on rocks, really turns against the theory, for the angel appears close to (by) but not in the threshing-floor: if then the angel appeared on, or (1 Chron. 2116) hovering above the rock, the threshing-floor on which the altar was erected was neither on nor included the rock, but was simply contiguous to it; in this case we should naturally think of the threshing-floor and altar as south 1 Samuel, KHC., p. 327. 2 Freely translated and slightly condensed.

of the rock and contiguous to it-the first plot of ground over which the destroying angel in approaching Jerusalem did not pass.

To enter further into theories of the exact site of the Temple and the altar is unnecessary: for our present purpose we need to note (1) that the narrative of 2 Sam. 24 certainly recognizes no Hebrew use of natural rock on Mount Zion as an altar; (2) that it attributes to David, i.e. to the earliest days of the Hebrew Occupation of Zion, the construction of an altar of burntoffering, though, as in many similar narratives of altar building, not specifying the material, whether earth or stone; but (3) the narrator probably had in view a stone altar, and in any case an altar with a continuous history to his own day: the story is told not like that of Saul at Michmash in 1 Sam. 1432-35 of an altar used for the nonce on a battlefield, but of an altar built close to a town on a particular occasion indeed, but not merely for a particular occasion;1 the whole point of it is rather to describe the origin of not a natural but a constructed altar existing in the storyteller's own day; (4) consequently, as early as this story took shape, i.e. probably before the ninth century B. C., there existed on Mount Zion in connexion with the Temple a built altar. If I seem to labour the point, the reason will become clear as I pass to the altar of Solomon's Temple and a particular theory recently put forward with regard to it.

I

An altar existed and sacrifices were offered on Mount Zion before any temple was built, just as in many places altars continued to stand without temples. The Temple on Zion was the work of Solomon; the origin of altar and worship there was attributed to David. But what part had Solomon in the history of the altar? What altar, what form of altar, stood before his completed Temple? The question arises because, somewhat remarkably, in the full account of the Temple building and its furniture in 1 Kings 6 and 7 no account is given of the altar of burnt-offering.2 In the following chapters (8 ff.) there are incidental allusions to such an altar; that is all. The first records that Solomon, when

1 The chronicler's inference is correct, I Chron. 221.

2 Altar in 1 Kings 620, 22 is the table of shewbread (but ? text). The omission in Kings is made good in 2 Chron. 41, which inserts before the account of the molten sea the statement that Solomon made an altar of bronze, giving its dimensions.