David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (12 page)

When we say “full-blown state,” we must be clear. Earlier we characterized tenth-century
BCE
Judah as a “chiefdom,” namely a loose network of more or less equal communities (both settled and pastoral) bound in largely ceremonial alliance with a strongman or chief and his family. The power of the chief was limited to dealing with neighboring peoples, mustering local forces to counter local threats and incursions, and cultivating and preserving the kin alliances of the chiefdom itself. The economic and military capacity of a chiefdom was severely limited; the key to its very survival was stability. That seems to have been the initial situation with the establishment of the earliest Iron Age villages in the north as well. But when the population grew and expanded into new areas—specializing in certain crops and animal products—exchanges grew increasingly complex.

To trade grain for olives, and wool for grain and wine, required permanent structures for administration and storage; thus regional centers emerged. The final stage in this transformation was the creation of a state—or a “kingdom”—to impose a centralized system of control. It is only at this level of organization that large professional armies, foreign conquests, and extensive building projects are possible, due to the existence of a specialized core of state officials and laborers, who are themselves supported by the surplus of the region’s agricultural and commercial wealth. It is a system with great power and many obligations for its inhabitants.

These are precisely the developments that we can see in the archaeological evidence of the emergence of a center at Samaria in the early ninth century
BCE
. And for the first time, we can associate archaeological evidence with identifiable biblical characters: the Omride dynasty of the kingdom of Israel, which ruled, according to the biblical and ancient Near Eastern chronology, between 884 and 842
BCE
, several generations
after
the reported time of David and Solomon.

According to 1 Kings 16:15–24, Omri, the dynasty’s founder, came to power in a military coup d’etat and established his capital on the hill of Samaria, from which he and his son Ahab ruled a vast kingdom. We have supporting testimony from independent, outside sources that confirms the main outlines of this biblical account. This report is substantiated by a number of contemporary inscriptions—the earliest extrabiblical records ever discovered to directly document the existence of biblical characters.

The Assyrians indeed refer to the northern kingdom as “the House of Omri,” confirming the biblical testimony that he was the founder of the dynasty and the capital. And in the monolith inscription of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, we read of a great coalition of kingdoms that confronted the Assyrian armies at the battle of Qarqar on the Orontes River in Syria in 853
BCE
. One of the most powerful participants in this coalition was a ruler referred to as “Ahab the Israelite,” who contributed two thousand chariots and ten thousand foot soldiers to the anti-Assyrian force. Even if this royal text is typically exaggerated, it still suggests an entirely new scale of military power possessed by the kingdom of Israel. And at the height of their power, the Omrides apparently extended their rule eastward into Transjordan and north into Syria as well.

The famous Mesha inscription, inscribed on a black stone monument, was discovered in the nineteenth century in Dibon, the ancient capital of Moab (in southern Transjordan). The text records that “Omri, king of Israel, humbled Moab many days.” It goes on to note that the Israelite occupation of the area continued under Omri’s son and included the construction of two new strongholds in the Moabite territory. Furthermore, the expansion of the Omrides into Syria is referred to in the Tel Dan inscription, in which Hazael, king of Aram Damascus, reports that Israel had formerly occupied parts of his land.
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From both archaeological and historical perspectives, we can therefore recognize the emergence of the first true kingdom of Israel in the early ninth century
BCE
. Could it be just a coincidence that the Omride struggle for centralized power, its lavish building projects, its royal court, its advanced professional army, and its sweeping foreign conquests in Transjordan and Syria call to mind the unforgettable stage scenery of David’s “Court History”?

THE RISE OF JUDAH

In the first half of the ninth century
BCE
, Israel was one of the most powerful states in the region. The question that immediately comes to mind is, if the Omrides used their military might to expand in the northeast and east, why didn’t they expand toward the south, in the direction of Judah? The biblical narrative, with its descriptions of the might and prestige of David and Solomon’s great kingdom, portrays the later struggle between north and south as one of equals. But as we have seen, the evidence for any great empire under David is utterly lacking. All we can say is that material life went on much as before and the dynastic line in Jerusalem continued without interruption after the death of David. Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijam, and Asa are listed in the book of Kings as David’s successors and we have no independent evidence either to confirm or to challenge this sequence. But something else was happening, implied by the Bible and clearly suggested by the archaeological evidence. By the time of David’s great-great-great grandson Jehoshaphat (who reigned according to the biblical chronology from 870 to 846
BCE
), Judah seems to have become a virtual vassal to the kingdom of Israel.

Israel and Judah in the ninth century
BCE

The Bible reports that Jehoshaphat, a contemporary of Ahab, offered manpower and horses for the northern kingdom’s wars against the Arameans. He strengthened his relationship with the northern kingdom by arranging a diplomatic marriage: the Israelite princess Athaliah, sister or daughter of King Ahab, married Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat (2 Kings 8:18). The house of David in Jerusalem was now directly linked to (and apparently dominated by) the Israelite royalty of Samaria. In fact, we might suggest that this represented the north’s takeover by marriage of Judah. Thus in the ninth century
BCE
—nearly a century after the presumed time of David—we can finally point to the historical existence of a great united monarchy of Israel, stretching from Dan in the north to Beer-sheba in the south, with significant conquered territories in Syria and Transjordan. But
this
united monarchy—a real united monarchy—was ruled by the Omrides, not the Davidides, and its capital was Samaria, not Jerusalem.

It is precisely at this time that the first archaeological signs of state formation are evident in Judah. Archaeological surveys have revealed that the number of scattered agricultural villages (though still modest) was steadily growing. In the Judahite lowlands, permanent centers of administration, controlling specific regions or specialized aspects of the economy, were first constructed in the ninth century
BCE
. In the rich grain-growing lands of the Shephelah in the west—the traditional breadbasket of Judah—two impressive citadels were constructed, requiring the organization of considerable labor, and were far more imposing in appearance than any previous settlements in that region in the Early Iron Age. At Lachish, excavations by British archaeologists in the 1930s and a subsequent Israeli expedition directed by David Ussishkin revealed a massive podium that supported a fortified complex containing storerooms and a palace; at Beth-shemesh, slightly farther to the north, evidence of another massive construction effort has recently been uncovered by a Tel Aviv University team headed by Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman. It includes a system of massive fortifications and an elaborate subterranean water system that would enable the residents of this important site in the rich Sorek Valley to withstand a protracted siege.

Even more telling is the sudden appearance of evidence for centralized administration in the Beer-sheba Valley, which had for centuries been the active route of overland trade between Transjordan and the Mediterranean coast. At both Arad, on the eastern end of the valley, and Tel Beer-sheba in the west, permanent fortresses were constructed in the ninth century
BCE
. They seem to represent an effort to take control over the trade routes that passed through the Beer-sheba Valley and to protect the southern borderlands of the kingdom. Was this achieved by the kings of Judah under the auspices of the Omrides? The story (in 1 Kings 22:48–49) of Jehoshaphat’s attempt to engage in southern trade with the help of the northern kingdom, even if grossly exaggerated and confused with later Red Sea trading efforts, may represent a vague echo of this period.

And what of Jerusalem? Here too, the first signs of elaborate construction seem to appear in the ninth century
BCE
. Though the date of the famous Stepped Stone Structure has long been a matter of contention, it was clearly the support for a structure that must have been much more elaborate and impressive than the earlier buildings on the city’s southern edge. A close examination by the Dutch archaeologist Margreet Steiner of the datable potsherds retrieved from the mantle of the Stepped Stone Structure included red slipped and burnished types of the ninth century
BCE
.

An important clue to the nature of the building that originally stood on top of the Stepped Stone Structure—and was obliterated by later occupations—may have been found immediately to the north. In the 1950s the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon uncovered a pile of ashlar blocks there, including a beautiful proto-Aeolic capital, characteristic of the distinctive architectural decoration at the royal compound of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom. These blocks were found at the foot of the Stepped Stone Structure and may have collapsed from a building that stood on the platform farther up the slope. Indeed, David Ussishkin proposed that a Samaria-like government compound, which included a palace and a temple, was built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in the ninth century
BCE
. Similar to Samaria’s, it must have featured massive operations of leveling and especially filling in order to create a flat platform for a royal quarter, surrounded by a casemate wall.
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Unfortunately, that hypothesis cannot be confirmed archaeologically, as the huge Herodian podium for the Second Temple built in the Roman period has completely eradicated or buried any sign of earlier structures on the Temple Mount. Yet it remains an intriguing possibility that the domination of the royal house of Judah by the northern kingdom was expressed in Jerusalem by architectural imitation—with the construction of an elaborate royal compound on the Temple Mount, on the model of the Samaria acropolis.

Thus from archaeological and historical evidence it is likely that the first structures and institutions of statehood appeared in Judah in the ninth century, most likely under the influence of the more developed royal institutions of the north. According to the Bible, the marriage of the Davidic king Jehoram to the Omride princess Athaliah produced a royal heir named Ahaziah, who was a product of
both
royal lines. With Ahaziah’s succession to the throne—and even more so after his death, when Athaliah eliminated the surviving Davidic heirs and ruled in Jerusalem alone as a queen mother (2 Kings 11)—the Israelite nobility was more close-knit than ever, representing what must have been functionally a single polity, dominated by Samaria.

Despite the contention of some biblical scholars that David’s “Court History” was composed in tenth-century Jerusalem by David or Solomon’s personal spin doctors, we will soon see that the world described in the biblical stories of David’s conquests and court politics far more accurately evokes the social and political landscape of Omride and post-Omride times in the ninth century
BCE
. Those stories, in their vividness and wealth of detail, profoundly altered the image of David. Why was this done?

RESHAPING THE PAST

In a detailed study of the biblical stories of David’s wives Bathsheba and Michal, and the later Queen Athaliah, the German biblical scholar Axel Knauf underlined the importance of the art of storytelling in the inner life of the Judahite court. He pointed out that official feasts and gatherings were important occasions for social and political interaction between the ruling family and the lineages associated with it. They provided an opportunity for boasting, critique, and competition, expressed in stories, legends, and folktales.