Introduction- Chapter 4

Within a few minutes of reading, I knew I was really going to learn a lot from Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (Karen Armstrong).  Especially enlightening to me was the introduction to this book.  It summed up for me the mystery surrounding the importance of a city.  I have gathered from other readings that the city’s significance is religious in nature rather than geographic or economic, but this book immediately made it clear that this is a common phenomenon that all humans have experienced in some way or another.  The divine/ sacred is a concept that is a part of all human cultures, and the devotion to a holy cite is one of the most ancient forms of expressing this.

I mentioned in my previous blog post that the Jerusalem that people defend and fight for seems more of a symbol to me than an actual city.  This is both confirmed and expanded upon when Armstrong speaks of the “inner geography” which is not necessarily associated with the immediate physical world, but which seeks to satisfy a spiritual human need.  It is, for us, a way of making the intangible reality tangible.  This really helped me to understand why there are so many people, including some of my fellow classmates, who care so passionately about this place.

Throughout this detailed account of the very ancient Jerusalem, I saw a lot of familiar names, whose reality for me, up until now, existed only in legend.  The reading laid out for me a more holistic examination of historical events, which before had been myths I was told as a child.  Armstrong is careful not to undermine these myths’ validity, however, as she repeatedly points out that the human experience has never been documented in a completely unbiased and mundane manner, recording only the observable human and environmental interactions.  Instead, these have always been interpreted and expanded upon by those who find their identity within them.

I have always been curious about the character of the ancient King David, who was first introduced to me in my childhood as a boy giant-slayer.  Beyond this famous legend, however, both biblical and outside historical records have portrayed a multi-dimensional person, with both many talents and many flaws.  Yet David has somehow managed to rise above his significant moral imperfections and emerge with spiritual significance as a “man close to God’s heart.”  Central to this idea is the fact that David was always repentant of his mistakes (even if deception and murder were on that list), and sort of made up for all that with all of the good deeds he did. 

The accounts of Judah were a bit more foreign to me.  I had heard of the Israel/ Judah split after Solomon, but the details were lost to me until now.  Now I can see this is probably because the kingdom under which the elements of the modern monotheistic faiths had been weakened considerably, and so the cultural legends had no room to thrive.  I was interested by a quote on page 58 about the notion of “evil empires,” which evokes images of today’s “war on terror,” as some in our country would call it.  History indeed has a way of showing patterns of human attitudes like that.