Jerusalem Was Holy Ground Long Before David Arrived

When David set his eyes on Jerusalem, he was not discovering a place. He was recognizing one.

The city called Yerushalayim had been carrying its holiness long before any army marched toward its walls, long before any king claimed its heights, long before its name appeared in any genealogy of conquest. Adam had prayed there, according to the tradition. Noah had built an altar there after the flood receded and the earth dried. Abraham had climbed its hill with his son and had nearly done the unthinkable, and God had stopped his hand and confirmed the place as the hinge of the world.

All of this the Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's monumental compilation completed between 1909 and 1938, preserves with careful attention. By the time David arrives at the city, the ground beneath his feet has already been consecrated four times over. He is not creating sacred space. He is claiming what was always his people's to claim.

The Monuments That Blocked David's Path

But the Jebusites held the city, and they held it with more than walls and soldiers. They held it with a contract.

According to Ginzberg's retelling, the Jebusites were descendants of the sons of Heth, the very family that had sold the Cave of Machpelah to Abraham. And in the same transaction, or one very like it, a covenant had been struck. The Jebusites would cede the cave, and in return Abraham's descendants would never forcibly remove the Jebusites from Jerusalem. To make certain no one forgot, they had erected brass monuments throughout the city, inscribed with the terms of the agreement. These were not decorative. They were legal instruments, permanent reminders that Abraham's word was Abraham's bond.

When David arrived with his army, the Jebusites pointed to the monuments calmly. The text tells us they felt entirely secure. They put the lame and the blind on the walls as a taunt, a theatrical gesture meant to say: we need no soldiers to hold this city. Your forefather's promise is our army. Try taking us by force and you dishonor the very covenant that makes you who you are.

It was an elegant trap. David could not deny that the covenant existed. He could not pretend it did not bind him. And so the city that was meant to be the center of his kingdom stood just out of reach, protected not by weapons but by words spoken generations before he was born.

Joab's Extraordinary Solution

Enter Joab, David's general, whose relationship to conventional problem-solving is best described as flexible. Midrash Tanchuma, compiled in the 5th century CE, notes that Joab had a particular gift for finding the path through situations that everyone else considered closed. He did not argue with the Jebusites. He did not contest the contract. He found a way to make the contract void.

His method was, to put it gently, unconventional. He located a tall cypress tree growing near the city wall. He bent it down to the earth. Then he stood on David's head, reached up for the tip of the bent tree, and when the tree snapped back upright it launched him over the wall like a man fired from a catapult. Joab landed inside the city, found the brass monuments, and destroyed them. With the monuments gone, the covenant that had been inscribed in them lost its visible embodiment. The legal instrument had been removed. The agreement, according to the legal reasoning of the time, could no longer be enforced.

The Talmud Bavli, compiled in the 6th century CE, contains a rich body of discussion about the relationship between written instruments and the obligations they represent. The tradition was not naive about what Joab had done. But it also understood that the holiness of Jerusalem was not a matter that could be held hostage by brass monuments, however legitimately made.

The Miracle Version and What It Tells Us

The Legends of the Jews preserves a second version of Jerusalem's capture, and it runs alongside the cypress-tree story without displacing it. In this version, the walls of the city lowered themselves before David. Miraculously. Without siege engines, without catapults, without Joab being launched through the air. The city simply opened, the way Jericho's walls had fallen for Joshua, the way the sea had parted for Moses. Jerusalem recognized its king and made way.

The Zohar, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism compiled in Castile around 1280 CE, speaks of Jerusalem as a place where the boundary between the upper and lower worlds is thinner than anywhere else. If miracles can happen anywhere with ease, they happen there. That the tradition preserves both versions, the cunning one and the miraculous one, suggests something important. The city did not require a particular method of liberation. It required the right person. Whether walls fall by their own mysterious logic or by a general being slung over them on a cypress tree, the outcome is the same. Jerusalem belongs to those who belong to Jerusalem.

David Pays for What He Takes

Even after the walls were breached, even after the monuments were gone, David did not simply declare the city his by right of conquest. He paid. Six hundred shekels of silver, fifty for each tribe of Israel. The Jebusites received a bill of sale. The transaction was recorded. The city was purchased as well as captured.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the 8th-century midrashic work attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, reflects on three sites in Jewish history that the tradition insists were purchased rather than conquered: the Cave of Machpelah, bought by Abraham; the threshing floor of Araunah, bought by David for the Temple site; and Jerusalem itself, bought six hundred shekels at a time, one tribe's worth after another. The pattern is deliberate. The holiest places in the world were acquired through willing transaction, not force alone. Even when force was used to breach the walls, the purchase came after, as if to say: we know what this ground is worth, and we are willing to pay what it costs.

David entered the city that Adam had prayed in, that Noah had consecrated, that Abraham had climbed toward with a knife in his hand. He entered it through miracle and cunning and commerce all at once. And the city, which had been waiting since the beginning, let him in.