Reading Response: Chapter's 5-7 in Jerusalem

Armstrong gives a comprehensive history of Jerusalem, while adding comments about her personal experiences with religion. For example, in her first chapter "Zion" she says, "In fact, the goal of the religious quest has always been an experience, not a message. We want to feel truly alive and to fulfill the potential of our humanity, living in such a way that we are in tune with the deeper currents of existence" (Armstrong 8). In this statement, Armstrong assumes the a great about people's beliefs. She assumes that each person is looking for an encounter, which elevates them or connects them to their religion, which may be true for some people but not all. The idea that believers strive to connect to a higher power or are open to experiences with a higher power are presumptuous. This may be true for some practitioners but this seems like a difficult concept to apply to all practitioners. I find it interesting that Armstrong's views on Christianity are paired with elements of Israel's history in order to bolster her views, when they seem to detract from her specific arguments as they come across as more general. This constantly takes the reader from a single issue, such as the layout of Jerusalem at certain point, as Armstrong eloquently places maps throughout the chapters, to these larger sweeping statements about religion. 

In Armstrong's Jerusalem, she puts herself in the shoes of each group of people she discusses, such as Jews in the Babylonian exile, making the history more personal for the reader. This sets her representation of Jerusalem's history apart from most other histories. This is helpful because it allows her once again include her personal opinions about religion as a whole. It is a dense book and provides a nice breather or momentary pause until the reader is thrown into ancient Jerusalem at breakneck speed. In comparison to other histories we have read, Armstrong is more upfront about her agenda. She claims that she wants to remain unbiased, but this is almost impossible. She provides a lot of information and invests herself in each of her claims. For example, she discusses the brutality of the Babylonian exile for the average Jew and their struggles to retain their personal beliefs and practices, and in the Hellenistic period. The book is balanced because she does her best to fully describe each event in the simplest terms necessary, while still creating elegant sentences. Jerusalem's early history is tumultuous with rulers and conquerers destroying and building constantly and she expresses each moment in history with the same care. When she puts herself in the time she is writing about it allows her to express each transformation as they would have seen it.

When I continued to read Karen Armstrong's book after taking a brief break in between chapters, I was bothered by her lack of sourcing throughout the book. I have no doubt that she uses legitimate and reputable sources, but the fact that she did not include more footnotes or references fails to back up her claims. Her information is a combination of multiple sources, as a scholarly work should , but it is hard to trace her thought process when we do not know where the information came from. I believe the book is balance and does a good job of expressing many sides of Jerusalem's history as it is a highly debated topic. Armstrong ends the introduction with a strong disclaimer that she is not trying to predict Jerusalem's future. Her agenda is different than most because she is not trying to change the future by her representation of the past. I have read about Jerusalem's early history in Jewish Studies classes here at IU and through my early Hebrew school education. These accounts seem to gloss over many issues such as polytheism in the first temple and the number of people that veered away from Jewish traditions in favor of Hellenistic ones.