The House of Yahweh

Lift up your heads, O gates,
And be lifted up, O ancient doors,
That the King of glory may come in!
Who is the King of glory?
Yahweh, strong and mighty,
Yahweh, mighty in battle!

Psalm 24:7-8

Jerusalem between Solomon's reign and Hezekiah's expansion of the city, tenth-eighth centuries B.C.E. Map created by L. Stager and K. Vagliardo

Built on the highest point in Solomon's Jerusalem, the Temple was the house where Yahweh lived on earth. It was also the primary manifestation of the House of Yahweh, the apex of the social order. Next to the Temple stood the palace originally built by Solomon. Temple and palace together constituted the acropolis of Jerusalem, elevated physically above the rest of the city and hierarchically above the rest of society. From here Yahweh and the king, his designated son, ruled the house and household Yahweh had established.

Together with its environs, the Temple functioned as a representation of the divine realm, that is, Paradise or the Garden of Eden. From beneath the ridge on which the Temple and the rest of the city were built, the Gihon, one of the primeval rivers of Eden, gushed up and watered the terraces of the Kidron, gardens that stepped down the eastern slopes of the city. Among the trees in these gardens Yahweh might have strolled, enjoying the evening breeze.

The courtyard of the Temple was itself a garden filled with transplanted trees. The great bronze Sea symbolized the Deep, the waters from which all creation had been called forth.

The inside of the Temple was a carved paradise, with rosettes, colocynths and, most important, palmettes, representing the Tree of Life. As in Eden after the Fall, winged cherubim stood watch in the Temple, forever guarding the way to the Tree of Life.