Alone with Jerusalem? If this were all a dream, I had changed my mind. Now the writer in me didn’t want to wake up. On steps of saffron-colored stone I descended past cultivated beds of sword lilies and anemones until I found a marble bench with an unobstructed view of the city. There I sat, chin in hand, struggling to comprehend the miracle that lay before my eyes.

The city was small, smaller than I had envisioned, although I did recall reading that it had covered only three hundred acres or so during the first century. To any stranger like myself, viewing it for the first time, Jerusalem appeared to be an invulnerable fortress, surrounded as it was by massive terracotta-colored walls studded with huge towers, casting shadows deep down into natural moats formed by one valley toward the east and another on the west and south. Yet, as I well knew from my research, no barriers, either natural or man-made, had ever withstood the endless parades of enemies and devout worshipers, each coming either to destroy or to honor the sanctuary of Yahweh, God of Israel and also, according to the ancient Jewish prophets, God of the entire universe.

Beneath my sandals, Jerusalem’s thin soil, veined with strips of tawny flint, was tinged in shades of rose and rust and magenta. Were it not so because of its rich iron content, it could have been because of the blood that had constantly washed over this tortured land ever since David, with Joab’s help, had seized the city from the Jebusites and claimed it for his people, the Israelites, centuries before the founding of either Carthage or Rome.

Many cities of the world, I’ve noticed, have a distinct sound of their own, and so did this one—a guttural but muffled hum interrupted frequently by a human cry or the sound of wooden wheels dancing over cobblestones or the clang of a bell drifting up from below on erratic gusts of dusty air. It was not difficult, as I sat there spellbound and bewildered, to let my mind drift backward to the amazing history of this troubled land I had studied for so long.

Twice, Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar II had captured and pillaged Jerusalem, and his second plunder reduced the city to what Isaiah had lamented was only “a wilderness of thorns and briars,” its walls reduced to rubble along with the magnificent temple built by David and Bath-sheba’s son, Solomon. All citizens except the poor and the sick had been removed in chains to a strange and pagan land, where they had endured the humiliation and iniquity of slavery for over half a century, until Persia’s Cyrus the Great defeated Babylon and allowed those Jews who had not forgotten, and their descendants, to return to their wasted homeland.