by Melissa Carpenter, maggidah
“Next year in Jerusalem!” is the phrase that concludes both the Passover seder and the holy day of Yom Kippur. For more than two millennia, Jews have referred to Jerusalem as their holiest place and ultimate home.
Yet the city we call Jerusalem in English, and Yerushalayim (יְרוּשָׁלַיִם) in Hebrew, is a Jebusite city in the Hebrew Bible until the second book of Samuel, when King David conquers its citadel and makes it his capital.
An Egyptian vassal city
So far, the oldest reference archaeologists have found to a place in Canaan called something like Jerusalem appears on Egyptian potsherds from the 19th century BCE, where Rushalimum is one of 19 Canaanite cities.
Rushalimum = uru (city of, founded by) + shaleim (the Canaanite god of the evening star, in the Semetic language of the Jebusites).
In the Amarna letters of the 14th century B.C.E., the king of the land of Rishalimum complains to the pharaoh of Egypt about how the Egyptian soldiers treated his capital city, “Beit-Shulmani”—a Semetic name meaning “House of Shaleim”.
Shaleim (שָׁלֵם) = the Canaanite god of the evening star (in the Jebusite language); completeness, safety, peace (in Hebrew, another Semitic language).
A place called Shaleim
Abraham is blessed by the king of Shaleim in the Torah portion Lekh Lekha (“Get yourself going”). And in this week’s portion, Vayeira (“And he saw”), Abraham almost slaughters his son as an offering on Mount Moriyah, later identified as the temple mount. Both of these place-names hint at the future Israelite city of Jerusalem.
A blessing in the city of Shaleim concludes Abraham’s only recorded military campaign. Five kings at southern end of the Dead Sea lose a battle against four northern kings, who then head north with the booty and all the southerners they can round up as slaves. One of the kidnapped southerners is Abraham’s nephew Lot.
Abraham and his 318 men chase the northerners, defeat them, and head back south with all the captured people and goods. Before they reach Abraham’s encampment in Hebron, the southern king of Sodom meets Abraham and his men in the Valley of Shaveh.
And the king of Sodom went out to meet him, after he returned from striking Kedarlaomer and the kings who were with him, in the Valley of Shaveh, which is the valley of the king. But Malki-Tzedek, king of Shaleim, brought out bread and wine; and he was a priest to Eil Elyon. (Genesis/Bereishit 14:17-18)
Shaleim (שָׁלֵם) = peace, safety, wholeness.
Eil Elyon (אֵל עֶלְיוֹן) = the High God.
If Shaleim is a shortened name for Jerusalem, then the Valley of Shaveh may be the level area where the Kidron Valley meets the Valley of Ben-hinnom. Commentators have pointed out that Shaveh also means “level”.
And he blessed him and he said: “Blessed be Avram to Eil Elyon, owner of heaven and earth. And blessed be Eil Elyon, Who delivered your enemies into your hand”. And he gave him a tithe of everything. (Genesis 14:19)
Abraham adds the name Eil Elyon to the four-letter name of God when he swears to the King of Sodom that he will not keep any of the people or goods that he won in battle. (See my blog post Lekh Lekha: New Names for God.) Abraham’s use of Eil Elyon may be diplomatic, but it also implies that Malki-Tzedek and Abraham recognize the same god as supreme.
Why would Malki-Tzedek give a tithe of the booty, when he is not listed as participating in the battle? Probably it is Abraham who gives a tithe of his booty to Malki-Tzedek, prefiguring the tithes that Israelites brought to the high priest in Jerusalem centuries later.
So the stage is set for the Jebusite city of Shaleim to become the capital and holy city of the Israelites someday. The site is associated with a name of God, with priesthood, with blessings, and with tithes.
A place called Moriyah
This week’s Torah portion, Vayeira, hints at the future site of the temple through a very different story. After Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac has grown up and become a young man, God speaks to Abraham in the night.
And [God] said: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and get yourself going to the land of the Moriyah. And lead him up there for a burnt offering on one of the mountains, [the one] which I will say to you.” (Genesis 22:2)
Moriyah (מֹרִיָּה) = Mor of God. Mor (מֹר) = myrrh; a shortened form of moreh (מוֹרֶה) = throwing or teaching; or a homonym for mareh (מַרְאָה) = seeing, vision, apparition, mirror.
After a three-day walk from his home in Beersheba, Abraham sees the place. The Torah does not say how he knows this particular hilltop is the one God chooses, but he climbs up with Isaac, some firewood, a fire-box, and a knife.
Beersheba is 44 miles from Jerusalem. If the Moriyah is one of the hills surrounding Jerusalem, then Abraham and Isaac would have to walk 14 to 15 miles a day—a reasonable distance, especially if the two servants Abraham brings along carry the firewood, and the donkey carries Abraham, age 117.
Just as Abraham lifts his knife to kill his son at the top of the hill, another voice from God calls to him and tells him to stop. Abraham sacrifices a ram caught by its horns in the thicket in place of Isaac. (The Torah does not say whether it is a thicket of myrrh.)
And Abraham called the name of that place “God Yireh”, as it is said to this day: On the mountain of God yeira-eih. (Genesis 22:14)
yireh (יִראֶה) = he sees, will see, perceive, look at, consider.
yeira-eih (יֵרֶָאֶה) = he/it will be seen, will become visible, will appear.
In this story Abraham connects the place-name Moriyah (מֹרִיָּה) with the word mareh (מַרְאָה) = seeing, appearance, vision.
The only other occurrence of the name Moriyah in the Hebrew Bible is in a book written several centuries later:
Then Solomon began to build the house of God in Jerusalem on the hill of the Moriyah, where [God] had appeared to his father David, where David had appointed the place on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” (2 Chronicles 3:1)
Moriyah is not mentioned in 2 Samuel, an earlier book that includes an account of Solomon building the temple. But this retelling of the story in 2 Chronicles (written circa 400-250 C.E.) firmly identifies Moriyah as a hill in Jerusalem.
A placed called Yerushalaim
The Hebrews conquer much of Canaan in the book of Joshua, but even though Joshua executes the king of Jerusalem, he cannot conquer the city-state itself.
As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Yerushalaim: the children of Judah were not able to dispossess them, so the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah in Yerushalaim to this day. (Joshua 15:63)
Yerushalaim (יְרֽוּשָׁלַ֔םִ) = Jerusalem; yeru (יְרֽוּ) = (possibly from of yarah (יָרָה) = “he founded” or “he shot arrows”) + shaleim.1
Joshua sets up the Israelites’ portable tent-sanctuary in Shiloh, about 20 miles north of Jerusalem, and it remains there for centuries, acquiring stone walls and becoming the main temple of the Israelites.
The city-state of Jerusalem remains an independent Jebusite enclave until King David conquers its citadel and makes it his capital in the second book of Samuel. Instead of enslaving or subjugating the native Jebusites, David integrates them into his kingdom. He moves the ark to his new capital in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:12-17), and his son Solomon builds the first temple there.
*
The story of Abraham and Malki-Tzedek, set in Shaleim, prefigures the requirement to donate a tithe to the priests in Jerusalem, first mentioned in the book of Leviticus/Vayikra. Shaleim is also were Malki-Tzedek blesses Abraham, as priests later blessed people.
The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac establishes the principle of burnt offerings of animals only, which later became the central form of worship in the temple in Jerusalem. The name Moriyah and its folk etymology at the end of this story make this the place where humans see and are seen by God.
So Jerusalem is supposed to be a place of blessing, and a place where humans meet God.
Over the centuries, Jerusalem has occasionally lived up to the promise of its name under Malki-Tzedek, the Hebrew word shaleim = wholeness, peace, and safety. At other times, too many of the human beings in Jerusalem have been unable to bless or to see each other—and therefore unable to truly bless or perceive the divine.
May the promises of a holy, whole, peaceful, and safe Jerusalem in Lekh Lekha and Vayeira finally come true, speedily and in our time.
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- In Genesis Rabbah 56:10, Yerushaleim is interpreted as a combination of yir’eh, “He will see [to it],” and shaleim, the city of King Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18.
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