David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (24 page)

WHY DOES THE TRADITION OF DAVID AND SOLOMON
still move us, if their legend was born and shaped by the political concerns of a long-extinct Iron Age dynasty? The answer lies in its gradual transformation from a down-to-earth political program into the symbolic embodiment of a religious faith that would spread throughout the world. For the death of Josiah at Megiddo and the destruction of Jerusalem twenty-three years later in 586
BCE
not only put an irreversibly tragic twist on the myth of the Davidic dynasty; it also ended its practical political usefulness. Never again would a Davidic king reign in Jerusalem; much less ever possess durable political power. From now on, the Near East would be ruled by great empires. The resurrection of a Davidic kingdom—of the kind envisioned by Josiah and the Deuteronomists—would be unthinkable. Mighty empires would succeed one another in ruling and controlling the region’s lands and peoples: the Babylonians would give way to the Persians, and the Persians would give way to the great Hellenistic kingdoms in Egypt and Syria.

Cities would grow, new economies would develop, and new ethnic identities and historical understandings would emerge. Yet the David and Solomon story would never be forgotten. It offered a timeless image of founding fathers, of a golden age, and of a divine promise that would serve powerful new ideological functions undreamt of by the courtly bards of ninth century
BCE
Jerusalem, by the followers of Kings Hezekiah and Manasseh, or by the Deuteronomistic editors of Josiah’s day. This would happen when its emphasis was permanently shifted from the political and dynastic concerns of the present to a more sweeping vision of redemption—linked not to earthly kingship but to a code of religious belief.

For a few generations after the destruction of Jerusalem, hopes for the imminent restoration of the house of David still flickered brightly, at least in some circles, despite their increasing futility. Jerusalem lay in ruins. The kingdom’s elite was exiled, joining earlier groups of Judahite deportees (including the retinue of Josiah’s grandson King Jehoiachin) who had been resettled in the heartland of Babylonia.
*
Yet among the communities of the exiles in Babylon and the survivors in ruined Judah, scribal creativity continued—based partly on the traditional texts of the kingdom, and partly on new visions and prophetic oracles—serving to keep alive the traditions of the now-deposed Davidic dynasty. At least among the exiles in Babylonia, Josiah’s grandson Jehoiachin was still apparently considered the legitimate heir of David,
†
and hopes for his eventual return to Judah endured. This persistence of belief in the face of triumphant (and seemingly unshakable) Babylonian imperial power required an increasingly metaphysical justification. And the David and Solomon tradition, embodying the core of Judahite royal ideology, began to undergo a series of changes that would eventually transform it from a political platform into a unifying religious ideal.

The first step was an urgently needed revision of the Deuteronomistic History. Several decades ago, the American biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross noted two main strata in its composition that reflect this literary process. The earlier layer, which he called Dtr
¹
, represents the original compilation, expressing the ideology and historical understandings of late monarchic Judah. As we suggested in the last chapter—offering archaeological data that essentially confirms Cross’s original theory—this version of the David and Solomon tradition crystallized during the reign of Josiah as a validation and impetus for an ambitious political program. But with his death and the subsequent Babylonian conquest of Judah, Josiah’s grand strategy came to nothing. If the Deuteronomistic History were to maintain its authority, certain explanations would have to be made. Why did Josiah
not
succeed in uniting all of the land of Israel under his kingship? How could such a pious Judahite king be killed by a foreign monarch? Why had the God of Israel later allowed the Babylonians to plunder and burn the Temple and destroy the holy city of Jerusalem? A revision of the Deuteronomistic History was needed. This expanded version, written during the exile, has been called by Cross and other scholars Dtr
²
.

With a few deft editorial touches and additions, the story was continued to include Josiah’s death and the catastrophe of 586
BCE
. The overall message of the Deuteronomistic History was thereby reshaped. In place of the expectations of Josiah as the long-awaited successor of David, the destruction of the kingdom and the Babylonian exile now assumed an essential place in the history of Israel. Passages foretelling the exile were inserted throughout the Deuteronomistic History; the failure of Josiah’s reforms and the eventual destruction of the kingdom of Judah was blamed on the irredeemable wickedness of Manasseh, for which all Israel had to atone, despite Josiah’s righteousness:

Indeed, the story of Israel and the ultimate fate of the house of David—as told in the Deuteronomistic History—was brought to a conclusion not in Jerusalem but in distant Babylonia, with a subdued yet hopeful notice of the release of King Jehoiachin from prison in the thirty-seventh year of his exile, equivalent to 561
BCE
(2 Kings 25:27–30).

A PROPHETIC REVIVAL

The Davidic dynasty remained central in literary expressions of Judahite self-definition, but with the collapse of the kingdom and the dynasty’s fall from earthly power, those expressions became increasingly poetic and metaphorical. Some of the most eloquent and moving biblical evocations of faith in Davidic restoration were expressed in works of sixth-century
BCE
prophecy, which begin to shift the emphasis to national regeneration and away from purely dynastic legitimation or short-term political strategy. The book of Isaiah, though ascribed to the late-eighth-century prophet, also includes material that expresses the hopes of later generations, down to at least the end of the sixth century
BCE
. Its image of the return of the Davidic redeemer is cosmic in scope and global in reach—no longer restricted to the political fate of the lineal heirs of Jesse’s son, the shepherd from Bethlehem:

An oracle in the book of Jeremiah is no less stunning in its vision of a Davidic restoration as a complete moral transformation of Judahite society, living securely in its land:

In a famous oracle of Ezekiel, the shepherd motif—historically founded in Judah’s highland pastoralist background—becomes a metaphor of beneficent moral leadership:

These verses all reflect a generalized hope of redemption that went far beyond the earlier territorial and strategic goals of the earthly Davidic dynasty. By the sixth century
BCE
the era of the small independent kingdoms had given way to a contest of grand empires. Babylonia’s rule over the Near East did not remain unchallenged for long. The Medes of western Persia rose to wrest control over the upper Tigris and Euphrates Valleys. They were, in turn, conquered by the southern Persian Achaemenids, led by Cyrus the Great (559–530
BCE
), who swept eastward and westward to construct a great empire for himself. These developments were watched closely by the Judahite community in Babylonia, Egypt, and Judah, who saw them as evidence of God’s plan on a scale vaster than ever before. Some, like the author of the oracle in Isaiah 45:1, declared the Persian king—rather than a descendant of David—to be God’s anointed savior in the redemption of the world. But with Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon in 539
BCE
, the political fortunes of the Davidic dynasty suddenly rose again.

In establishing a new basis for his empire, Cyrus reversed the old Babylonian policy of deportation and exile. The Persians tolerated and even promoted local cults in their vast empire, and granted autonomy to loyal local elites. Indeed, Cyrus issued an edict giving permission to the exiled Judahites to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. We have only the later testimony of the book of Ezra (1; 6:3–5) for the developments in this period, but they mesh well with contemporary Persian policy concerning the restoration of other regional shrines. The Temple vessels were handed over to “Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah,” who was appointed governor of the newly formed Persian province of
Yehud,
as Judah was now called (Ezra 1:8; 5:14). Also returning to Jerusalem were prominent members of the exiled community (Ezra 2:2; 3:2), including a priest named Jeshua son of Jozadak and a Davidic prince Zerubbabel, grandson of Jehoiachin.
*
Hopes were apparently high that the national life of Judah under the leadership of the Davidic dynasty could be restored. Yet what occurred was a series of far-reaching developments that would put a final end to the earthly pretensions of the Davidic dynasty and begin the transformation of Judah’s national cult into the religion we now know as Judaism.

DAVIDIC ROYALTY’S LAST FLICKER

At the time of the arrival of successive waves of Judahite exiles from Babylonia, the province of Yehud was a pale shadow of its former existence as the kingdom of Judah.
†
Its borders were shrunken, its population significantly diminished, and Jerusalem remained in ruins, the official center of neither state nor cult, nor a developed and diversified economy. Production was—perhaps with the exception of village handcrafts—entirely devoted to agriculture.

Comprehensive archaeological surveys of recent years have produced a reasonable picture of the demographic situation in this period. They largely confirm the sketchy details to be found in the biblical texts. The second book of Kings and the book of Jeremiah tell us that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586
BCE
, the leadership of the remaining population was centered in the town of Mizpah, about eight miles to the north of Jerusalem. Excavations at Tell en-Nasbeh—the location of biblical Mizpah, near modern Ramallah—have shown that the site was not destroyed in the Babylonian campaign and that it became the central and most important urban center in this region. Indeed, other sites in the same area north of Jerusalem, including Bethel and Gibeon, continued to be inhabited in the early sixth century
BCE
with no evidence of destruction during the Babylonian campaign.

The area around Jerusalem, on the other hand, was thoroughly devastated. Intensive excavations in Jerusalem have shown that the city was systematically destroyed by the Babylonians and its immediate vicinity remained sparsely settled for decades. To the south, around Bethlehem, rural life seems to have continued without interruption, mainly in the form of small villages that extended no farther southward than the vicinity of Beth-zur. The population of the whole province was considerably sparser than it had been in the previous century. The Israeli biblical historian Oded Lipschits analyzed the archaeological data from this period and has estimated the total built-up area in all of Yehud as no more than around 350 acres (140 hectares). Multiplying this number by a density factor of about two hundred people per hectare (the accepted estimate of average village population in premodern Middle Eastern societies), we arrive at an overall figure of about thirty thousand people—around 40 percent of the population of late monarchic Judah. In short, the province of Yehud to which the Babylonian exiles returned was a rural landscape of scattered communities of survivors, with a ruined city where a Temple and royal capital had once stood.