jerusalem

JERUSALEM

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According to ancient tradition, Jerusalem was at first a small village known as Salem and inhabited by Canaanites, the ancestors of the Palestinians. A great and righteous Canaanite king turned his village into a city and called it Jerusalem. He also built a temple there. The tradition is recorded by the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his book, The Great Roman-Jewish War. Josephus writes: "But he who first built (the city of Jerusalem) was a potent man among the Canaanites, and is in our tongue called Melchizedek, 'The Righteous King', for such he really was; on which account he was (there) the first priest of God, and first built a temple (there), and called the city Jerusalem, which was formerly called Salem." According to the Bible, Melchizedek was a contemporary of the Prophet Abraham (upon whom be peace) who lived around 1800 BC. It can thus be said that Jerusalem was originally a Canaanite city built, along with its temple, by a Canaanite king some 3800 years ago. From 1600 to 1300 BC the city came under Egyptian suzerainty, but continued to be governed by Canaanite rulers who paid tribute to the Pharaohs. During this period the city increasingly came under attacks from a people known as Hapiru or Habiru, probably the same as Hebrews who are presented in the Bible as the ancestors of Jews. In ancient Egyptian writings on tablet discovered in 1897 and known as the Tell El-Amarna Tablets, we find a correspondence exchanged between a Pharaoh in the fourteenth century BC and Abdi-Kheba, the Canaanite ruler of Urasalim (Jerusalem), in which the later appeals to his Egyptian overlord for help against the pestering incursions of the Habiru. Egyptians and Canaanites had by now been seriously weakened by moral degeneration, magic and superstition and it seems that the Habiru were able to get a strong foothold in Northern Canaan or Palestine. In the meantime, among the Israelite group of the Hebrews, who were living as slaves in Egypt, there arose a great leader, the Prophet Moses (upon whom be peace). Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and after him Aaron and Joshua led them to Northern Canaan, where they joined other Hebrews and shared their prosperity and freedom. Despite their numerous divisions and frequent lapses into idolatrous and immoral practices, something of the tradition left by Moses lived on among them and helped in the occasional rising of great men. Two such men were King David and his illustrious son, Solomon. It was under King David that the Israelites were first able to establish a strong kingdom in the whole of Canaan. It was also then (about 1000 BC) that Jerusalem first became a Jewish city, which King David proclaimed as the capital of the kingdom of Judah. Later, King Solomon built a Jewish temple on the site of the earlier Canaanite shrine built by Melchizedek. After Solomon's death, Jewish rule continued in Jerusalem under precarious conditions for about four centuries, during which

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