The Rivers of Babylon

Sunday was a day of mourning for traditional Jews, the Ninth of Av on the traditional (originally Babylonian) calendar. By tradition, both of the Jerusalem temples were destroyed on this day, and with them the freedom of the Jewish people, which was twice driven into exile with great violence. (See inset from the Roman Arch of Titus). Hence the 137th Psalm's “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

Traditional belief holds that some day, the Anointed One will come and miraculously restore the Temple, and convert the world to the worship of the One True God.

Now ancient ideas about religious practice are rather different from contemporary ones. The Temple was a giant abbatoir, where animals by the dozens and hundreds had their throats cut and parts of their bodies were burnt, all for the greater glory of God. Not so different from what pagans did around the world (just read Herodotus, to see the universality and normality of sacrifice).

After 70 AD, when the Romans smashed a great Jewish uprising and destroyed the Temple, both the Jews and the Christians moved away from physical sacrifice, the Jews substituting prayer and the domestic practice of ritual purity for the Temple cult, and the Christians opting for their own version of a ritual meal commemorating the sacrifice of their own Man-God, which did away with the need for animal sacrifice forever. Muslims, on the other had, still practice sacrifice in memory of Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son, in the Muslim tradition the elder Ishmael, not the younger Isaac.

The deaths of thousands, enslavement and exile, loss of freedom, are surely to be mourned. The abolition of the Temple cult, perhaps not. It would be less than edifying, it seems to me, to see restored a priest-ridden Iowa Beef plant in the center of Jerusalem.

By some irony, or by plan, the evacuation of the Israeli settlements in Gaza also is being carried out just after the Ninth of Av. Gaza, of course, was not part of ancient Judea, but the land of the Philistines, heirs of the invading Sea Peoples. It was in Gaza that eyeless Samson brought down the temple upon the mocking Philistines and himself. A suicide bomber without explosives.

This is not the place to comment on the wisdom or likely outcome of Sharon's maneuver.


The exiled Jews could not sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, and the exiled Rastafarians cannot sing King Alfa's song in exile either.

And we are all in exile from Eden, so they tell us.