Articles

Four Temples and One Belief -

About the True religion of King Solomon

Ohad Ezrahi and Yitzhak Hayut-Ma’n*

One of the most interesting figures in the whole Bible is undoubtedly King Solomon. Shlomoh, the son of David, inherited an empire won by military conquest and established peace with all the nations of the Middle East through intermarriage and diplomatic relations.  Solomon, who realized the Israelite dream to build the Temple of the Lord YHWH in Jerusalem and attained prophecy and the revelation of God.  Shlomoh, the wisest of all men, adept in sorcery, greater than the magicians of Egypt and the Wise men of the East, greater than all the kings of the East and the West, including the Queen of Sheba, who traveled great distances to challenge his wisdom. This is Solomon to whom the Bible attributes the Book of Proverbs, the Wisdom Book of Ecclesiastics and the holy of holies of erotic love - the Song of Songs (Canticles) of Solomon.

Yes, this is Solomon, a great personage indeed. But we should not overlook some other interesting details in the Biblical biography of him. The Torah prohibits the king from having many horses for his chariots, and Solomon did. The Torah prohibits the king from having many wives (a maximum of eighteen, according to the sages...), and Solomon had a great many more: he married three hundred wives, and took another seven hundred as concubines! Many of his wives were daughters of the kings of the nations of the region with whom he had made peace. Solomon had Hittite, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite wives, and over all there was the Lady Queen - the daughter of Pharaoh.

Four Temples, One Creed?

The Torah was concerned lest the king married foreign wives they might turn his heart after other gods. This indeed happened. The scriptures tell us that when Solomon became old his wives turned his heart and he began to follow their strange gods. At his wives’ request Solomon erected altars to the gods of the nations they came from. King Solomon, the wisest of all men who built a temple for The Lord `God of Israel in Jerusalem, built additional temples in proximity to that same Temple. Thus there was to be found in Jerusalem alongside the Temple of the Lord, altars for Kemosh the god of Moab, to Moloch the god of the Ammonites and to Ishtar the Cana’anite fertility goddess.

What was happening to the wisest of men and why was he acting thus? Did he simply yield to the pleadings of his wives (who must have known how to pressure him), and agree to build, offhand, some small shrines to the idolatrous nonsense that they were still attached to? On the face of it, such a meager explanation is not likely. The building of an official, royal temple of cult worship is something that is not done offhand. Building a temple is no slight matter, nor an altar or any other place of worship. It costs much money; workmen must be hired, and the project takes a long time. Indeed these altars, so relates the Bible, stood in Jerusalem for another three hundred years (!) after Solomon’s time, until King Josaiah came and demolished them. If so, it is clear that they were built to last. It could not have been done covertly. There were no uprisings or insurrections in the time of Solomon, and it seems likely that the Hebrews did not regard Solomon’s acts as betrayal of the God of Israel. How could this be?

In light of the theories that we will present below, Solomon clearly had other ideas about the nature and character of the Hebrew religion, seemingly different from the one presented in the Bible. In retrospect these ideas seem most interesting and quite relevant to the development of religion and beliefs in our times. But before dwelling on these, we would like to air another mysterious question that very few have considered.

Of the love of male and female.

The literature of the sages is full of descriptions of the erotic nature of First Temple rituals in Jerusalem. Talmudic legends tell of the two cherubs that were placed in the Holy of Holies in the heart of the Temple, the one in the image of a female angel and the other a male angel, engaged in erotic union. This sacred union, constituting the heart of the Temple, symbolized the deep union between the People and God, or between the Shekhinah and the Holy One Blessed be He. The sages further describe how, during the festivals, the priests would open the separating screen (Parokhet) and reveal to the pilgrims the secrets of divine love to all and announce: “See how much God loves you - like the love between male and female”1 .

The Talmud also relates how the pilgrimage festivals would often turn into erotic revels where the people would become “light headed” because of the intermingling of men and women who were present at those occasions. The priests then introduced “a great innovation” and created a partition between males and females in order to prevent this. (This is the partition that still stands prominently in synagogues, separating the men and the women’s sections).

In the times of the Talmud these ideas already seemed very strange to Judaism. The First Temple preceded the Talmudic sages by a few centuries.  Reish Lakish, a famous highwayman before he repented and became one of the most notorious characters to fill the pages of the Talmud, recounts the story of the Babylonians who, while destroying the Temple were amazed to find in its depths two Cherubs engaged in Tantric postures. They brought the loving Cherubs out to the market place and displayed them, as they twisted their faces in disgust and announced: “These Israelites, whose blessing is blessed and whose cursing a curse, could they have engaged in such things?” and immediately, says the Talmud, started despising Israel. It seems that this little legend best expresses the perplexity of the later Jewish sages with regard to the ancient temple-erotic tradition, a tradition that they themselves did not know how to reconcile.

The strange thing is that a simple reading of the Bible does not reveal any erotic ritual in the Tabernacle or the Temple. The plain (Peshat) text presents the cherubs not as male and female but as winged lions that symbolize the “holy animals” (Hayot haKodesh) on which the divinity rides, like the thrones of the kings of the ancient Middle East who are pictured with eagles and winged lions surrounding them.

If so, why then did the Talmudic sages give such detailed descriptions of the erotica associated with the Temple? What caused them to interpret the subject of the cherubs in such an unusual way in relation to the Jewish tradition of their own times? Back in 97, when I was co-writing a book on the subject in cooperation with Dr. Yitzhak Hayut-Ma’n, we did not know how to answer this. The breakthrough came as an outcome of an inquiry into the secret religion of King Solomon, which I shall present shortly.

To YHWH and His Asherah

A few years ago a unique archeological inscription was uncovered at the site of Kuntilat Ajrud. The inscription is dedicated to “YHWH Shimron and His Asherah”. The Bible does indeed mention YHWH the Lord of the Hebrews, but it never told us that He was worshiped as the partner of a famous divine consort - the Asherah. This archeological finding reveals something that is actually self-evident. All through the Bible the prophets were making a supreme effort to eradicate the worship of Ba’al and  Asherah from Israel, without much success. The people were continually sacrificing at the altars and very enthusiastically worshiping the Asherah on every hill and under every green tree. There was a great gap between what was assumed to be the religious belief of the people of Israel during the first Temple period and what actually took place. The bible consists of the writings of the prophets and the scribes, but does not reveal anything about the religious customs and folk rituals that nourished the spirit of the people at that time, quite different from what the editors of the Bible books wished to preserve.

It stands to reason that King Solomon, may he rest in peace, embraced a religion that was somewhat different from what was set forth in the Bible. In ancient times Hebrew beliefs had not yet become crystallized and defined, allowing for varying nuances of custom and ritual. We can surmise that Shlomoh too, behaved according to his own special understanding. This means that even though the Book of Kings describes King Solomon as one who strayed off the path, he himself apparently did not think so. It is reasonable to assume that King Solomon had a sort of spiritual and religious system in which the worship of YHWH was not so contradictory to the beliefs of the ancient East, in whose religious and spiritual wisdom he was an adept.

It follows that when Solomon built altars and temples in Jerusalem not only to YHWH the Lord of Israel but also to Ashtoret, Kemosh and Molekh, he did so as part of a wider religious outlook that considered the whole assembly of gods as legitimate representatives of the Lord.2  The people, who in the time of David seemed loyal to “Judaism”, did not rebel against King Solomon. Therefore we may deduce that these things did not seem as strange or too far from the accepted religious Status Quo of the nation...

Using radar scans and infra-red aerial photographs, our friend the architect Tuviah Sagiv was able to view the underground terrain of the Temple Mount, arriving at the astounding conclusion that all the four temples – dedicated to YHWH, Ashtoret, Kemosh and Milkom-Molokh - were situated in the Temple Mount precinct!

According to Sagiv the golden Dome of the Rock is situated over a large rock, mostly covered by earth and pavement, of a distinct geometrical form that in the past was dedicated to the goddess Ashtoret. Sagiv also analyses the Dome of the Rock structure itself and reveals that various motifs in it preserve spatial concepts that were already sacred in the ancient pagan world. He surmises that its origin dates back to the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian, as a Temple to Jupiter and his consort, which in turn was erected upon the ruins of the more ancient Temple of Ashtoret. The Temple of the Lord YHWH, claims Sagiv, was situated nearby - exactly in the area that today separates the golden Dome of the Rock and the silver dome of El-Aksa. Sagiv (who wears the knitted cap that identifies the national-religious sectors) claims that King Solomon could have built the temples of Kemosh and Milkom upon two then-prominent rocks in the present Temple Mount precinct. If his findings are true, they would help give credence to our claim.

We surmise that the tradition of our sages of blessed memory that speaks of the sacred union (“hieros Gamos”) that took place at the Temple in the times of King Solomon is based on a later edited retelling of the ancient historic reality. In the historic reality the cherubs were not in the form of male and female. But this does not mean that there was no erotic aspect to the Hebrew worship in the temple. On the contrary: the sacred union apparently took place between the two main alters on the temple mount (or at least in Jerusalem) - the Temple of YHWH and the altar of Ashtoret.

In Mesopotamia there was a fertility cult in which the king, who represented the god Tamuz (Domuzi), would copulate/enter in holy union once a year with the great priestess of the goddess Ishtar (identified with the Ashtoret of the Tsidonites). This ritual was to safeguard the fertility of the crops for the next year. In ancient Egypt there was a similar religious ceremony during which they would bring the sculpture of the god to mate with the goddess in her own temple, a few miles away along the Nile. This union was also supposed to safeguard the fertility and blessings for the coming year.

Did Solomon, whose wisdom was greater than “all the wisdom of Egypt”, establish a similar worship amongst the different gods to whom he built separate temples in the same sacred precinct? We assume that there was something of this sort, and the archeological finding of “YHWH and His Asherah” does amplify this possibility. Our sages of blessed memory acknowledged an erotic element within the Temple of Jerusalem. However, the Jewish religion makes no mention of a goddess that represents the female divine aspect. The sages therefore created, through their superb arts of Midrash-allegory, a way to understand the sacred union that takes place between “Knesset Yisrael and the Holy One Blessed be He” through the symbol of the mating of the cherubs.

In this way we have perhaps solved the riddle of the origin of the mating cherubs. But what is the meaning of these things in light of their ancient origin?  How is it possible to regard these idols as legitimate objects of worship? Is it not absurd to consider the cult of Ashtoret as part of the worship of Hashem? Doesn’t this present an internal contradiction of the Hebrew creed as a religion of unity and not plurality? In order to answer this, we must search deeper into the perspective of myth and Kabbalah in relation to the religion of the Bible.

The Struggle between the Bible and Myth

The world into which the Bible emerged was a spiritual world ruled by the mythologies of the ancient East. The pagan myths reflect the inner process of the human psyche, as was explained by C.G. Jung in his psychological studies. Through mythical story and worship ancient society touched upon the inner aspect of its spirit and managed to convey important processes of development and change. The language of myth is the symbolic language of the soul, nowadays defined as the language of dreams, the language of the unconscious.

But the world of myth trapped its believers in a prison of the unconscious forces of the soul. There was a need to liberate man from the oceanic inundation of his inner mythical world. The Ego in its positive sense, the autonomic conscious self, sought  freedom. This necessarily led to free choice between good and evil, abolishing the idolatry of the immense forces of nature and the positing of One God at the center of awareness, a God that is not subjected to the laws of nature, but creates and establishes them as He sees fit.

Thus the whole Bible may be read as a transcription of the struggle to eradicate the ancient mythologies from the hearts of the People of Israel. Dr. Mikha Ankori is a Jungian psychologist who has studied the traditions of Israel through the generations. He explores the way in which the Bible neutralizes Myth and its hypnotic influence, often by incorporating remnants of ancient myths (such as the mention of the great whales in Genesis) into the body of the text. From a psychological point of view, the Bible tries to mold the autonomic human soul capable of free choice and the human soul that establishes judgement and social justice by removing the great forces of the pagan myth from the surface.

But the monotheistic message of the Bible was hard to digest, among other reasons, because of the immense need of the human soul to interpret its inner world through symbolic representations, which the mythical world amply provided. Because of this    we find, throughout all the books of the Bible, the war between the prophets who call for belief in the One God - the One without definite form, the God without definite domicile, the Creator who is above nature and beyond it, the God who does not have to operate in accordance with human expectations - and the people, who did not wholly embrace this stern message, and sought to also cleave to the Ba’al and the Asherah and the other idols of the region whose mythologies told the story of the human soul, its fears and struggles.

The End of Divine Machismo

The monotheistic message actually took hold only after the Babylonian exile when Ezra the scribe edited the Bible and the religion of Israel became instituted. That was when the Oral Torah began its accelerated flowering. This Torah was recorded in writing only some centuries later, but from its beginning we can already sense a change in the “character” of the Jewish God (by that time there was no longer “Israel” and  “Judaism” was emerging as a religion).

The God that is revealed in the literature of the sages of blessed memory is still a definitely male god, but admittedly much less “machos”, as were the sages themselves. In those days after the destruction of the Second Temple the heroes of the nation were no longer the mighty men of war but those literate sages who were engaged in a “War of the Torah”. Accordingly, the God of the sages of blessed memory became a wise elder sitting in the heavenly Yeshivah (academy), debating, dealing in issues of ritual cleanliness, accepting the opinion of the majority, and even at times crying, turning inward and revealing a more sensitive side. The ideal male became less “masculine” in the days of the sages, and likewise the figure of the Biblical God underwent a degree of sublimation and even began to exhibit some feminine traits.

Many Appearances Within Monotheism

One of the most fascinating revolutions in the theology of the Talmudic sages is the liberty they took in revealing the aspect of multiplicity of appearances in the monotheistic deity. Sometimes, they said, God is revealed as a youthful warrior and sometimes as an elder sitting in a Yeshivah. But it is the same God who dresses in different clothes and plays different parts.

Here a new picture is suddenly revealed - the many faces of the God of Israel. This is the same One Divinity dressed in many disguises. One does not mistake the figure for the Divinity because He has no intrinsic form. He only changes persona according to need.

This innovation opened the way for discussion on the character and nature of the  Shekhinah. In the Bible there is no hint in the plain text (Peshat) of a feminine aspect of the deity. But in the time of the sages of blessed memory, even though the Shekhinah does not yet have the same fullness of divine figure of the later Kabalistic literature, it is possible to find the beginnings of new characteristics. Or as noted by professor Gresham Schooled, the sages in their midrashim have evoked new “pictures”3, which the masters of the Kabbalah in their turn adopted with open hands and developed in their own unique way.

The Swallowing Up of the Gods

So far, we have briefly surveyed the development of the Jewish creed in order to point out a very interesting process that will help us to understand the theology of King Solomon. It is as if the Israelite religion gradually swallowed the mythical beliefs into itself. At first YHWH the Lord of Israel appeared as “a new God” in Egypt - Pharaoh said to Moses, contemptuously, that he had never heard of such a god. But this new god, who psychologically represented the Self, rose up against the powers that ruled the pagan world, against the powers of the unconscious, fought them and at the battle’s end reigned supreme. In the times of the sages of blessed memory the concept of a plurality of gods had, on the whole, been discredited. Humankind was seeking a monotheism that the Roman Empire finally supplied in the form of the Christian religion.

Yet it seems that the battle between the God of Israel and the other gods was best described by the Bible itself. When the magicians of Egypt turned their staffs into crocodiles - namely dragons that symbolize the powers of their gods - the rod of God was transformed before the very eyes of Pharaoh and the magicians of Egypt into a crocodile that swallowed their staffs. The One God of Israel indeed swallowed the many pagan gods as a snake swallows an elephant, holding them captive in his belly, looking eventually like a hat. What in Biblical times was contrary to monotheism, such as mention of certain feminine aspects of the godhead, was swallowed over time into the Israelite religion, emerging as the Face of the Shekhinah.  Not a separate entity from the One God but only a certain face or aspect of it.

Figures that were regarded in Biblical times as strange gods were swallowed through the generations into the one all-inclusive figure of the God of Israel, who anyway has no image of its own, and became in time the intuitive basis for the development of the Kabbalah. Thus while the Bible assumes Unity as simple, the sages of blessed memory hinted at a Unity that contains in it a multiplicity of appearances. In Biblical times, when a feminine deity is mentioned, we immediately conjure the clay and metal statues of the naked goddesses - Ashtoret, Asherah or Anat. But in the times of the sages of blessed memory and the medieval Mekubalim, Ashtoret had already been swallowed into the entrails of the God of Israel, and she is revealed before our eyes as the figure of the Shekhinah4.

For the Sake of Unification (leshem Yihud)

We can now attempt to understand what King Solomon’s true intentions might have been. It is easy to see how he was not satisfied with the “lean” religion advocated by the Biblical scribes of his time. Just as the sages of the Kabbalah were not satisfied with the philosophy and rationalism of Maimonides and renewed the multi-faceted myth within Medieval Judaism, so apparently Solomon was not entirely satisfied with what was advocated in those times as “the official religion of Israel”. He understood that the way to touch the depths of soul and existence was through the mythical beliefs of his people. Solomon, in his own way, did what was done many centuries later by the masters of the Zohar and Kabbalah and their successors. Indeed, against the first Mekubalim there rose the rabbis of their generations, who claimed that the Kabbalah is a special type of idolatry within Judaism” “The Christians tripled Him” - was the claim - “and the Mekubalim made Him into ten!”

According to the Kabbalah, most of the spiritual work of man is meant to restore the coupling between the Sefirot. The Mekubalim taught that before each Mitzwah (fulfilling a commandment) one should say ”I’m doing this Mitzvah for the sake of the Holy One Blessed be He and His Shekhinah”. With a slight variation this formula comes very close to the inscription found at Kuntilat Ajrud dedicated to the “unification of YHWH and His Asherah”.... Asherah and Ashtoret were goddesses that were already identified in the ancient orient as manifestations of the same goddess - in Phoenician garb as Ashtoret or in Cana’anite garb as Asherah. When the Greeks arrived in the region they had no difficulty merging Ashtoret with their goddess Aphrodite - identified in turn by the Romans as Venus. In Finical mythology too, Ashtoret was identified with the planet Venus. The scholars of the Renaissance who had access to the Jewish Kabbalah also understood that the Sefirah of Malkhut, the Shekhinah - associated in the Kabbalah itself with the planet Venus - is but the Jewish expression of the same divine feminine power, found in the depth of all human beings.

King Solomon, in his wisdom, instituted the worship of the Lord YHWH “in the manner of the Kabbalah” before the language of the Kabbalah was developed. In place of unification between the Holy One Blessed be He and His Shekhinah, he attempted unification between YHWH and Ashtoret and built for this purpose two temples in Jerusalem “built as a city that was joined together. “.

And indeed, whoever peruses Hassidic literature will find that the more profound Hassidic thinkers viewed the marriage of Solomon to Pharaoh’s daughter as designed to retrieve the holy sparks that fell into the depth of the Kelipot and bring them back to holiness. Rabbi Simha Bunem of Pshiskha asserted that Solomon tried to transform evil  into goodness, rectify idolatry and reveal in it the light of divine unity, but that it was not yet the proper time for it. What does “not yet the proper time” mean? It means that  the proper language of consciousness had not yet been developed, a language that would allow pious Jews to engage daily in the unification of the Shekhinah with the Holy One Blessed be He without any suspicion of idolatry. The Kabbalah has developed a language, and this development meant the ability to incorporate ideas from the mythical pagan cultures into monotheistic Judaism. In this way the ancient Taninim were swallowed into the Rod of God.

A Whole Generation Seeking Solomon[דיח1] 5

Our understanding of the figure of Solomon has special poignancy for the age we live in. The generations that preceded us, the generation of pioneering and battling for Zionism was associated with a return to the myth of King David. The image of the simple warrior and founder of the kingdom of Israel who courageously fought and conquered mighty Goliaths greater than himself, served the fathers of Zionism as an archetype and model for emulation. It is no secret that David Ben Gurion had a deep affiliation with the Biblical figure of King David. But the generations have changed. What suited the founders of the State is no longer suitable for what the present generation asks of itself. What is this generation searching for? It is seeking peace in the Middle East, no more war. It seeks to engage in mysticism and alternative consciousness. It is questioning beliefs and religions that encourage intolerance and malice and sow the seeds of war. It follows that no one is more suited than Solomon as the archetype for our generation. Solomon, who creates a New Middle East through drawing covenants and peace agreements with the neighboring peoples,  Solomon who says: “make love not war”, Solomon who deals with mysticism, magic and alternative medicine (according to tradition, King Hezkiyah has hidden Solomon’s Book of Medications”) – he is the suitable archetype for our wonderful generation…

But Solomon also attracted international interest in Jerusalem as a cult center. A center that is not limited to Jews as a people separate from all the other nations of the region but also contains in a profound manner different foci of cult that combine with each other and together embody the wholeness of the Hebrew Belief.

By acknowledging Solomon as the patron of our generation we can also understand how his work as temple-builder can influence the contemporary conflict over Jerusalem. It is as if Solomon, “The King of Peace”, is calling us to follow in his ways and unify the relevant religions of today under the wings of the One God, whose Unity is not necessarily exclusively “Jewish” and whose oneness does not negate a plurality of faces.

Four Faces of the Merkavah

Further questions for contemplation would be whether Christian and Islamic temples are “situated” (also in the psychological and anthropological sense) over ancient religious structures whose lines can be drawn back all the way to the temples of Kemosh, Milkom or Ashtoret. Of course, human history is very meandering, and the lines drawn from these ancient religions to the present ones are not likely to be straight and simple – yet the challenge is quite interesting. Likewise, it is of interest that there is a parallel between the fact that Solomon built precisely four temples and the fact that the Hebrew Name of God is of four letters – Y’ud H’eh W’av H’eh. Another fascinating fact: when the prophet Ezekiel saw the Vision of the Merkavah (Divine “Chariot”) he envisioned the divinity that dwells in the Temple. In the center of this vision there stand the four “Holy Animals” of the Merkavah: the Lion, the Bull, the Eagle and the Man. These are the four faces that are arrayed towards the four cardinal directions and upon whose backs rise the image of the Glory of the Lord. Is there a connection between the Four Faces of the Merkavah and the Four Faces that Solomon sanctified in the four temples that he built in Jerusalem? This is a topic that requires additional research, and whoever has any information that might help to put this mysterious divine puzzle into a more coherent picture is hereby invited to write to the authors.

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My thanks to Dr. Yitzhak Hayut-Ma’n and to the Academy of Jerusalem for their research assistance.

* This article was the result of discussions at the Academy of Jerusalem, as a joint paper by Ezrahi and hayut-Ma’n, written mostly by the former. It was published in the Israeli monthly Hayim Aherim (alternative Living) of February 2000 under the name of Ohad Ezrahi alone, due to differences in style. Here it was edited in the common vernacular.