Sheba

52
WRITING THE OLD TESTAMENT
of the Old Testament. H-yrdn, which the Masoretes vocalized to mean the
Jordan, is never referred to as a river in the Old Testament. Most likely it
meant a ridge or escarpment, while the words Msrm and Kws, which were
taken to mean Egypt and Ethiopia/Sudan, probably refer to ancient cities
near Yemen, an idea to be examined later.
Despite Ezra’s codification of the Old Testament, the Jewish
community of New Jerusalem as a whole was neither a literate nor wellinformed
one. The Muslims were later shocked to find that the Jews had no
well-defined method of transmitting sacred texts from the earliest times
down through the ages. A copy of the Old Testament was kept in the
temple but rarely consulted. Other materials were rare and have long
disappeared. Both Josephus and Paul owned prestigious texts, now lost, that
held different information from that found in the Old Testament. How well
any fifth-century B.C.E. Jerusalem priest or citizen knew Middle Eastern
geography is difficult to ascertain. Ezra’s community was originally known
as Aliyeh, the name the Romans themselves later called it. Only later did it
become Jerusalem. For a people so acutely aware of their history it is odd
that the whereabouts of the ten “lost” tribes was never discovered, and also
that the loss the Ark of the Covenant went unreported. While these two
anomalies are nowhere near clinching arguments, they do convey a feeling
of vagueness. As later Muslim commentators discovered, the Jewish
priesthood, let alone the ordinary people, seemed to know very little about
the origin and transmission of their most sacred texts through the ages.
Perhaps Zerubbabel’s followers were initially aware that the Palestinian
Aliyeh was not Solomon’s ancient capital, and that only later did the
priesthood begin to blur the two, a process accelerated when the Maccabees
created an independent state centered on the new Jerusalem and Herod built
a magnificent new temple.
The nature of the Zadokite tradition indicates the generations after Ezra
sincerely believed that Palestine was the Promised Land. Much of the Old
Testament’s appeal comes from faith, the belief that an inflexible will in
pursuit of a clear objective, however difficult, will be ultimately rewarded.
If they believed Palestine was not the Promised Land, they would have
made every effort to regain the true location. Perhaps Zerubbabel and Ezra
saw the Aliyeh settlement as the first step to an empire that would
eventually regain the true Promised Land. Certainly the militant Judaic
rulers of sixth-century A.D. Mahoza and Himyar saw their struggle in
global terms. Whatever their attitudes, by A.D. 143, when the Palestine
Jews were dispersed, all Jews firmly believed that Palestine was the