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The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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Foreigners became slaves in Israel by selling themselves, or when they were prisoners of war. The Law was lenient towards them. They had the right to take part in the panegyrics and joys of Yahveh, to share the repast of the climes and the natural fruit of the Sabbatic years, and to rest on the Sabbath day. If their masters mutilated them, they were obliged to liberate them; freedom might be the result of a broken tooth. If the slave died from his master’s ill-treatment, the master was terribly punished; how, is not clearly stated. A slave seems once to have enjoyed the office of steward; the management of the whole house was in his hands.
Except in regard to Yahveh, the Hebraic Law appears to have received beneficial influence from Egypt and Assyria; at every moment that beautiful chapter cxxv of The Book of the Dead seemed to be remembered, where the soul justifying itself before Osiris, after stating that the precepts of charity had been fulfilled, dares to add “I have not made tears flow.”c
HEBREW ART, ARCHITECTURE: THE TEMPLE, TOMBS, ETC.
During the last three centuries, many scholars have devoted themselves especially to the art of this nation that has played such an extraordinary rôle in the history of the world. These researches have been directed almost entirely upon the temple at Jerusalem and its furniture; for here, where the national life was concentrated, was in fact all the art that the country produced. Moreover, while the remains are no longer in our hands or under our eyes, there is not a single edifice in all oriental or classical antiquity concerning which we possess such numerous and circumstantial records.
The city of Jerusalem occupies to-day the northern extremity of a plateau which is bounded on the east by the valley of the Kidron, and on the south and west by the valley of Hinnom. This plateau is divided from north to south by a ravine called the valley of the Tyropœon (“the cheesemakers”) in such a manner as to form two hills. The eastern hill is Mount Moriah, whose southern extremity, now called Ophel, was Zion, the “city of David.”
When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem occupied only Zion, and did not begin to extend to the western and larger hill until under the kings of Judea. Mount Moriah, on the north, was given up to husbandry, and a rich man of Jerusalem, Araunah, owned there a field with a threshing-floor, where camels and oxen trod out the grain at harvest-time. David had bought the field of Araunah as a site for the temple of the true God, and had erected an altar on the threshing-floor.
The work began in the fourth year of the reign of Solomon. The materials had already been in great part fitted. Architects, workmen, and artists were engaged in Tyre by the aid of King Hiram, and the work progressed rapidly. The summit of Moriah was first levelled, and then around the remaining hillock was constructed an immense retaining wall of extraordinary solidity, extending up to the level of the summit. It was built of enormous blocks held together by cramp-irons, and was supported on the outside by embankments. All the space between the interior face of this wall and the rock was filled in with rubble in such a way as to form a square platform.
Movable Vessel of the Temple
(After Mangeant)
Then followed the erection of the temple itself, and so rapidly was it pushed that the dedication feast was celebrated only seven years after the laying of the first stone of the substructure. The temple was to be enclosed by two courts, but Solomon completed only the first or inner one, and the east wall of the second or outer, which was not finished until long after the great king’s death, in the reign of Manasseh.
The Bible gives us a detailed description of the magnificence of the interior of this sanctuary, built and decorated by Phœnician workmen, and of the objects of art accumulated there by the most ostentatious of Hebrew kings.
The architecture and the decorations of the interior were all in Egyptian style, like the temples of the Phœnicians themselves. But of the works of Solomon nothing has remained but the cisterns and the east wall of the outer court. This wall is ornamented with a gate under which Solomon had his throne placed when he assisted at public ceremonies; it was still called Solomon’s gate, even after the time of Herod. Numerous enlargements and restorations were made under the kings of Judea; but in 586 B.C., when the Chaldeans took Jerusalem, the temple was totally destroyed.
Fifty-two years later, the captive Jews in Babylon having been delivered by Cyrus, their leader, Zerubbabel, undertook to rebuild the temple of the true God. Though similar in plan to that of Solomon, the new edifice was less beautiful and of less majestic proportions; the old men who recalled the former one wept. This building stood for nearly five centuries, passing through the domination of the Seleucidæ and the Roman conquest of Pompey without being sacked or demolished.
Then Herod, the Idumæan, made king of the Jews by the Romans, conceived the idea of making himself popular with the people by rebuilding the temple in all the splendour of Solomon. The execution of his plan, which included enlargement,—Josephus says he doubled the original size,—required the complete demolition of the former structure and the rebuilding of the ancient terraces and the gates crowning them. The only portion of the old temple that he seems to have preserved was the eastern gate or gate of Solomon. The ancient plan, however, was apparently not departed from in the main.
The great outer court was surrounded on three sides by a double colonnade of Doric columns twenty-five cubits high. On the south side was a basilica, i.e. “a building with three unequal naves supported by columns.” This enclosure was the Court of the Gentiles, and was open to all visitors. A barrier only three cubits high prevented the ungodly from entering the enclosure reserved for the Israelites, which comprised the Court of Women and the Court of Men, or of Israel. The Court of Women had at its four corners square halls serving for the supplies of the temple, for ablutions, or other pious exercises.
From this court three gates led through a group of buildings to the Court of Israel. The principal one of these gates, celebrated as the Nicanor Gate, had doors of Corinthian bronze, and was of beautiful architectural proportions and rich construction. The Court of Israel, which was reserved for men who had performed certain acts of purification, was eleven cubits wide. The halls surrounding it on three sides, which had façades furnished with porticoes, were appendages of the divine cult. Each was consecrated to a special service. Here the skins of victims were salted and washed; the musical instruments, the salt, the eternal fire, the wood were kept here; and here was the hall of the sanhedrim.
Finally came the Court of the Priests, in the middle of which were the temple proper and the altar of burnt offerings. The temple stood on a terrace six cubits high, so that there was thus a difference of level of eight and a half metres between the platform of the temple and the Court of the Gentiles. Its architectural features were essentially the same as those of Solomon’s temple. This temple of the Jews was one of the most majestic works of architecture that antiquity produced. The succession of enclosed courts rising one above another and crowned by the gigantic white marble pylons of the sanctuary is a conception of genius that was realised only here, and all antiquity had but one voice in praise of its imposing grandeur.
The House of the Eternal was embellished with an unprecedented luxury. Costly woods, gold, silver, ivory, precious stones even—nothing was spared by this people that was so jealous of its God. The accessories of the cult, moreover, sacred vessels, knives, basins, utensils of every kind, were works in which caster and engraver vied with one another in the display of their art.