Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity

9. Israelite Kingship, Christian Rome, and the Jewish Imperial Imagination: Midrashic Precursors to the Medieval “Throne of Solomon”

c h A p t e r 9 Israelite Kingship, Christian Rome, and the Jewish Imperial Imagination: Midrashic Precursors to the Medieval “Throne of Solomon” rAʿAnAn BoustAn In front of the emperor’s throne there stood a certain tree of gilt bronze, whose branches, similarly gilt bronze, were filled with birds of different sizes, which emitted the songs of the different birds corresponding to their species. The throne of the emperor was built with skill in such a way that at one instant it was low, then higher, and quickly it appeared most lofty; and lions of immense size (though it was unclear if they were of wood or brass, they certainly were coated with gold) seemed to guard him, and, striking the ground with their tails, they emitted a roar with mouths open and tongues flickering. Leaning on the shoulders of two eunuchs, I was led into this space before the emperor’s presence. And when, upon my entry, the lions emitted their roar and the birds called out, each according to its species, I was not filled with special fear or admiration , since I had been told about all of these things by one of those who knew them well. Thus, prostrated for a third time in adoration before the emperor, I lifted my head, and the person whom earlier I had seen sitting elevated to a modest degree above the ground, I suddenly spied wearing different clothes and sitting almost level 168 Chapter 9 with the ceiling of the mansion. I could not understand how he did this, unless perchance he was lifted up there by a pulley of the kind by which tree trunks are lifted.1 In his astonishing description of the throne of Solomon in the imperial palace at Constantinople, the Ottonian ambassador Liudprand of Cremona (ca. 922–972 ce) bears witness to the transformation of this “scriptural object” into an actual physical manifestation of the Byzantine emperor’s claim to universal rule. Court ceremonial—and the objects and technologies through which it was enacted—had long played a crucial role in sustaining imperial power in the Roman world.2 The deployment of the throne of Solomon in imperial discourse , however, encapsulates the striking rise of the figure of King Solomon to prominence in Byzantine political ideology toward the end of Late Antiquity .3 In particular, the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056) saw an intensification of interest in “relics” from biblical Israel, the possession of which were seen to lend weight to the claims of the emperor in Constantinople to participation in the sacral authority of Israelite kingship.4 But the “biblicization” of imperial ideology in medieval Byzantium already had a history reaching back hundreds of years, into the sixth and early seventh century. The Jewish population of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity participated in the creation of Christian imperial “public culture.”5 Like others in the empire, they were caught up in the dense semiotic web that enveloped symbolically potent memorabilia from the distant past—whether Roman or biblical—through which power was authorized and enacted.6 Byzantine Jews were especially conscious of the fact that “their” Solomon had been pressed into service on behalf of Roman-Christian claims on the biblical past.7 As Alexei Sivertsev has recently argued, “Jewish religious culture in the Christian Roman Empire was characterized by the same combination of participation in and alienation from the dominant imperial culture as were the religious cultures of other members of the Byzantine Commonwealth(s).”8 Like the various competing groups of Christians in the Byzantine world, Jews also looked to biblical kingship—especially to the figures of David and Solomon—as the archetype for legitimate earthly rule. The present chapter explores one facet of the Jewish engagement with this transimperial discourse of royal ceremonial: tracing the changing significance of the throne of Solomon in Jewish sources from the fifth to the tenth century , I argue that the image of the throne indexes the wider Jewish response to the rise of Christianized notions of kingship. An actual material throne Jewish Imperial Imagination 169 of Solomon did not come into use at the court at Constantinople prior to approximately the ninth or tenth century, and this icon of biblical kingship seems not to have been central to Byzantine imperial ideology or ceremonial before then. By contrast, late antique and early medieval Jewish writers produced elaborate depictions of the throne...