David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (29 page)

According to a certain school of thought within biblical studies—sometimes described as historical minimalism—the various David and Solomon stories, as well as the wider Deuteronomistic History, are late and largely fictional compositions motivated entirely by theology and containing only vague and quite unreliable historical information about the origins and early history of Israel.

Opinions differ among the minimalists about when ancient scribes wrote the Bible—from the Persian to the Hellenistic period (sometime between the fifth and the second centuries
BCE
)—but in any case they are confident that it took place many centuries after the kingdom of Judah ceased to exist.

The British scholar Philip Davies put the composition of the story into a clear political context. In his book
In Search of Ancient Israel
(1992), he sees the creation and compilation of the Deuteronomistic History as a long process, with the final form of the narrative probably being created in Hasmonean Judea during the second century
BCE
. “As an historical and literary creation,” writes Davies, “the Bible…is a Hasmonaean concept.” Davies depicted the authors of the biblical text as ideologues in service of the Temple establishment. Other minimalist scholars traced their ideology back to the political goals of the Judean priests and nobles who had returned from the Babylonian exile in the late sixth and fifth centuries
BCE
. These new leaders, the theory suggested, were loyal agents of the imperial power but they were also eager to bolster their position among the population that had remained in the land during the exile. As an imposed elite that had ousted the local leadership of Judah, they needed to create a history to legitimate their role. The Jerusalem scribes of the postexilic period thus supposedly collected folktales and vague memories and skillfully wove them into a wholly imaginary history that stressed the centrality of Jerusalem, its Temple, its cult, and its priests. It was a complete innovation, designed to establish a “national” myth of origin where none existed before. According to this premise, the Bible’s story is not only historically baseless, but powerful, focused propaganda that sold an essentially made-up narrative of patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and the glorious golden age of David and Solomon to a credulous public in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.

What is the minimalist reconstruction of the history of the land of the Bible
before
the Bible? In his book
The Mythic Past
(2000), the American biblical scholar Thomas Thompson not only accepted the idea of a very late and almost entirely fictional history of Israel but also reinterpreted the archaeological evidence to reconstruct a multiethnic society in Iron Age Palestine with no distinctive religion or ethnic identity at all. It was a heterogeneous population split between regional centers at Jerusalem, Samaria, Megiddo, Lachish, and other cities. Its people cherished their own local heroes and worshiped a wide panoply of ancient Near Eastern deities. The Bible falsified that reality with its uncompromising theology of national sin and redemption. That was why, the minimalists argue, there can be no archaeological evidence of the united monarchy, much less evidence of a historical personality like David, because they were part of a religious mythology wholly made up by Judean scribes in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.

This revisionist theory has both logical and archaeological inconsistencies. First of all, the evidence of literacy and extensive scribal activity in Jerusalem in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods was hardly greater—in fact much smaller—than that relating to the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
. To assume, as the minimalists do, that in the fifth or fourth or even second century
BCE
, the scribes of a small, out-of-the-way temple town in the Judean mountains compiled an extraordinarily long and detailed composition about the history, personalities, and events of an imaginary Iron Age “Israel” without using ancient sources was itself taking an enormous leap of faith.

The sheer number of name lists and details of royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Judah that are included in the Deuteronomistic History seem excessive or even unnecessary for a purely mythic history. Yet if they were all contrived or artificial, their coincidence with earlier realities is striking. Archaeological surveys have confirmed that many of the Bible’s geographical listings—of the towns and villages of the tribes, of the districts of the kingdom—closely match settlement patterns and historical realities in the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
.

Equally important, a relatively large number of extrabiblical historical records—mainly Assyrian—verify ninth-to-seventh-century
BCE
events described in the Bible. And no less significant, much of the Deuteronomistic History is written in late monarchic Hebrew, different from the Hebrew of postexilic times.

Can archaeology show that David and Solomon are historical figures? Even as the scholarly debate raged on, a discovery at the excavations of the ancient site of Tel Dan in northern Israel, near one of the sources of the Jordan River, altered the nature of the debate over the historical existence of David and Solomon.

A STONE FROM TEL DAN

Tel Dan is a biblical site excavated for many years by the veteran Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran and has been conclusively identified with Dan, the northernmost city of the kingdom of Israel. The excavations there revealed extensive sections of the Middle Bronze and Iron Age cities and uncovered a massive platform on which, it was supposed, sacrifices had been offered by Israelite priests and kings. Located far from Jerusalem, Dan would not be expected to offer much new evidence for an increasingly acrimonious debate over the historical existence of David and Solomon. But on July 21, 1993, Gila Cook, the surveyor for the Dan project, was working in a large open plaza outside the outer city gate of the Israelite city. A wall built of cracked and tumbled stones taken from earlier buildings marked the edge of the plaza. In the late afternoon sun, as she glanced at the wall’s rough construction, she spotted ancient writing on the smooth surface of one of the reused building stones.

It was a fragment of a triumphal inscription written in Aramaic, its ancient letters chiseled in black basalt. In the following year, two more fragments of the stele were discovered, altogether preserving thirteen lines of a longer royal declaration that had been set up in a public square. The king it commemorates was most probably Hazael, ruler of Aram Damascus, who was known both from the Bible and Assyrian records as an important international player in the late ninth century
BCE
. His battles against Israel are recorded in the book of Kings, yet here in a contemporary inscription, translated according to the epigrapher Joseph Naveh and Avraham Biran, the voice of King Hazael himself was heard once again:

• 1.[……] andcut […]
  
• 2.[…] my father went up [against him when] he fought at […]
  
• 3. And my father lay down, he went to his [ancestors]. And the king of I[s-]
  
• 4. rael entered previously in my father’s land. [And] Hadad made me king.
  
• 5. And Hadad went in front of me, [and] I departed from [the] seven […-]
  
• 6. s of my kingdom, and I slew [seve]nty kin[gs], who harnessed thou[sands of cha-]
  
• 7. riots and thousands of horsemen (
  or
  horses). [I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab]
  
• 8. king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [ Jehoram kin-]
  
• 9.g ofthe
  House of David.
  And I set [their towns into ruins and turned]
  
• 10. their land into [desolation…]
  
• 11. other […and Jehu ru-]
  
• 12. led over Is[rael…and I laid]
  
• 13. siege upon […]
  

Though highly fragmentary and heavily reconstructed by Naveh and Biran, this inscription offers a unique perspective on the turbulent politics of the region in the ninth century
BCE
. It records, from the Aramean side, the territorial conflict between Israel and Damascus that led to frequent attacks and devastation. It tells how Hazael (described as the “son of a nobody” in an Assyrian source) launched a punishing offensive against his southern enemies.

In words chiseled into the stone around 835
BCE
, Hazael claimed to have killed the king of Israel and his ally, the king of the “House of David.” It is the first use of the name David in any source outside the Bible, in this case only about a century after David’s own time. It most probably refers to the deaths of King Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of the “House of David.” The minimalists’ contention that biblical history was a late and wholly creative composition and that David was a fictional figure was dealt a serious blow.

The “House of David” inscription, as it has come to be called, testifies to the existence of a line of kings who as early as the ninth century
BCE
traced their legitimacy back to David. Hazael used the common genre of his period, of referring to a state after the name of the founder of its ruling dynasty. But the mention of the royal name—though confirming the existence of a dynastic founder named David, offers no new information about the man himself. There is also a conflict with the narrative in the Bible. The biblical authors report in 2 Kings 9:14–27 that Jehoram and Ahaziah had indeed died at the same time, but they ascribed their deaths to an entirely different cause—not Hazael, but a violent coup d’etat by the Israelite general (and later king) Jehu. Biblical historians rationalized the discrepancy by suggesting that Jehu was merely a vassal of Hazael. But something far more complex seems to be involved here—and once again it concerns the tension between historical reality and biblical myth.

A faded memory of a shocking historical event—the sudden, almost simultaneous deaths of Jehoram and Ahaziah—survived through the centuries even as its specific historical context in ninth-century politics became vague and eventually forgotten. The survival of the memory, though transformed into a somewhat different scenario in the Bible, testifies to a continuing collective memory of ancient Israel, later incorporated into the text of the Deuteronomistic History. In short, the Tel Dan inscription provides an independent witness to the historical existence of a dynasty founded by a ruler named David, from just a few generations after the era in which he presumably lived.

Jerusalem has always been a primary focus for the archaeological search for David and Solomon. For centuries, pilgrims, explorers, and antiquarians had been drawn to the city of Jerusalem to visit the traditional religious shrines and to search for authentic traces of David’s citadel and Solomon’s fabled monuments. Throughout the biblical narrative, Jerusalem is the place where David and Solomon’s most glorious achievements were celebrated and where their most memorable acts occurred. From the time of David’s conquest of the city in a daring assault in an underground water tunnel (2 Samuel 5:6–8), through his residence in the city’s “stronghold” and his bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6), to Solomon’s massive project to build there a great palace and a holy Temple (1 Kings 7–8), Jerusalem was the sacred stage on which their biblical drama was played out.

Some sites in Jerusalem have been connected with David as the result of folktales—and have no historical basis. The traditional Tomb of David on Mount Zion is a medieval structure. The famous Tower of David near the Jaffa Gate, long an icon for Jewish aspirations to return to the city, was actually built in the sixteenth century, by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, as a minaret for the city’s Ottoman garrison. But with its wealth of ancient remains, buried or obscured by modern buildings, Jerusalem has never lacked explorers intent on discovering authentic, if hidden, evidence of David and Solomon’s glorious reigns.

Dominating the ruins, bazaars, and clustered domes of the Old City of Jerusalem is the massive Temple platform constructed in the first century
BCE
by Herod the Great on the site of earlier Jewish Temples. The first of these, according to the Bible, was the Temple of Solomon. Yet the holiness of the site both to Jews and to Muslims (as the location of the Dome of the Rock and the el-Aqsa mosque) and the sheer extent and size of the remains of the later Herodian Temple have posed a nearly insurmountable obstacle to the hope of locating remains here from the time of David and Solomon.

One of the first modern excavators in Jerusalem, Captain Charles Warren of the British Royal Engineers, led an expedition for the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1867–70, risking his life and the lives of his men by excavating deep shafts alongside the massive walls of the Herodian enclosure, to search for traces of the earlier Solomonic sanctuary. Warren thoroughly examined the substructures and complex of ancient buildings attached to the Herodian platform to produce the first detailed plan of the area, but it became clear that the later remains had completely covered and probably obliterated any earlier structures built on this sacred site. So here on the Temple Mount, at least, the archaeological search for David and Solomon reached a dead end.

DIGGING IN THE CITY OF DAVID

As archaeological research in Jerusalem continued and expanded, it became clear that the best location for finding archaeological remains from the time of David and Solomon was not on the Temple Mount or among the close-packed buildings within the walled Ottoman city, but on a narrow, steep ridge that extended South of the Temple Mount, beyond the walls. This area was identified as early as the nineteenth century as the “Ophel,” or the “City of David” mentioned repeatedly in the biblical text. Indeed, this is the tell, or ancient mound, containing layers of accumulation and structures from Bronze and Iron Age Jerusalem. This ridge became the scene of large-scale excavations throughout the twentieth century.

The ancient remains uncovered here have always been quite fragmentary. Each of the major excavators in this part of Jerusalem—Raymond Weill (1913–14; 1923–25), Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister and Garrow Duncan (1923–25), John Winter Crowfoot and Gerald M. Fitzgerald (1925–27), Kathleen Kenyon (1961–67), and Yigal Shiloh (1978–84)—argued that because of the steepness of the slope and the destructive force of continuous erosion, the full extent of the Davidic city had been lost. Still, here and there among the various excavation areas, they found deposits of pottery or isolated architectural elements that they connected to the time of David, in the tenth century
BCE
: the possible podium of David’s royal stronghold; the underground water shaft through which he and his men conquered the city; and the supposed tombs of David, Solomon, and other Judahite monarchs. However, these claims were based on a kind of circular reasoning. Beginning with the assumption that the biblical narratives were reliable historical sources, the researchers identified these ruins as features mentioned in the Bible. And they used the hypothetical identifications as archaeological “proof” that the biblical descriptions were true.

A prime example is the so-called “Stepped Stone Structure,” first uncovered in the 1920s. It is an imposing rampart of fifty-eight courses of limestone boulders, extending for more than fifty feet, like a protective sheath or reinforcement over the upper end of the eastern slope of the City of David. Later excavations by Kenyon and by Shiloh discovered a network of stone terraces beneath it, probably constructed in order to stabilize and expand the narrow flat surface on the spine of the ridge, and perhaps to support a large structure built there. The early excavators suggested that the Stepped Stone Structure was part of the fortification of the Jebusite city that David conquered. Kenyon and Shiloh believed that it was evidence of substantial building activity in the tenth century, at the time of David and Solomon—perhaps even part of the enigmatic feature described in the Bible as the Millo (2 Samuel 5:9).

Yet the pottery retrieved from within the courses of the Stepped Stone Structure included types from the Early Iron Age to the ninth or even early eighth centuries
BCE
. It seems therefore that this monument was constructed at least a century later than the days of David and Solomon. Who used it, when exactly, and for what purpose still remains—archaeologically, at least—a mystery. The most that can be said, and even this is not absolutely clear, is that some of the terraces beneath it were in use in the tenth century.

Another important discovery in this area has been related to David’s cunning conquest of Jerusalem via an underground water shaft, mentioned in an enigmatic biblical passage:

In 1867, the British explorer Charles Warren investigated an underground water system on the upper, eastern slope of the City of David, not far from the Stepped Stone Structure. He found that it led through a system of two shafts and a horizontal tunnel, over fifty meters long and around thirty meters deep, to the area of Jerusalem’s only permanent source of freshwater, the Gihon spring, located in the Valley of Kidron at the foot of the slope. Such an underground water system is by no means unique in the ancient Near East, since one of the most severe problems that faced the inhabitants of even modest-sized cities was how to protect access to springs outside the fortifications during times of siege. The most sophisticated solution was to create a covered passage from the city to the spring, usually by cutting an underground tunnel.

Many biblical scholars have proposed that this was the very water shaft that David used to conquer the city in an act of heroic surprise. But the dating of “Warren’s shaft” has proved extremely difficult. Recent research on the eastern slope of the City of David by the Israeli archaeologists Ronnie Reich and Eli Shukron has indicated that Warren’s shaft was cut and extended over hundreds of years. It was first hewn in the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550
BCE
) and then expanded in late monarchic times, in the eighth century
BCE
. With such a long history, this find cannot prove that the biblical story of David’s conquest of Jerusalem reflects a historical reality, but rather could be a folktale that developed in later periods to explain the origin of the system of shafts and tunnels on the eastern slope of the ridge. The ending of the biblical story with the words “Therefore it is said” seems to support this explanation of a folk etiology.

THE TOMB OF THE EARLY DAVIDIC KINGS?

Another questionable relic was a half-destroyed feature cut from the bedrock that has been identified by some scholars with the resting place of many members of the Davidic dynasty. The original tomb of David—as distinguished from the medieval shrine on Mount Zion—is indirectly mentioned in the biblical narrative, in the repeated reports about David, Solomon, and later kings of Judah, that each “was buried with his fathers in the City of David.” In the early twentieth century, the French scholar Raymond Weill uncovered a series of artificial caves cut in the bedrock near the southern tip of the City of David and found two unusual barrel-shaped chambers, whose front portions had been quarried away. Weill interpreted these structures as remains of the tombs of the kings of Judah. Several other scholars, including the Israeli biblical historian and archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, specifically related them to David and Solomon.

This interpretation has been questioned in light of a growing archaeological familiarity with the characteristic tomb types of the noble Jerusalem families in the Iron Age, some of which are known from the Siloam cemetery facing the City of David on the east. The rock-cut features excavated by Weill bear no similarity to the single-or multiple-chamber family tombs of Judahite nobility in various phases of the Iron Age. Of course, the royal tombs of Judah may have been unique, but at present, the empty rock-cut chambers in the City of David are more a mystery than conclusive proof of anything.

ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE, OR EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE?

As we noted earlier, both early and modern scholars proposed that the main archaeological remains of David and Solomon’s Jerusalem were located at the very summit of the ridge, in the area now covered by the Temple Mount, and that the massive construction activities undertaken there by King Herod the Great in Roman times covered or obliterated every trace of this settlement. Yet if this was a bustling royal capital with intense daily activity, at least some of its refuse would have been preserved. The slopes of every ancient city mound in the Near East served as dumps for the garbage of the ancient inhabitants, and thick layers of bones, building material, and broken potsherds are found outside the walls. Yet thorough, large-scale excavations on the slope to the south and southwest of the Temple Mount have failed to find more than a scatter of potsherds from the tenth century
BCE
.

Sites connected to the debate over the archaeology of the united monarchy

The archaeological results in this part of Jerusalem have been impressive, but they do not mesh with the chronology of the biblical narrative. Although the site was occupied continuously from the Chalcolithic period (in the fourth millennium
BCE
) to the present, there were only two periods of major building and expansion before Roman times—and neither could possibly be identified with the reigns of David and Solomon. In the Middle Bronze Age, six or seven centuries
before
the estimated time of David, massive walls and towers of an impressive city fortification were built on the eastern slope of the City of David. And only in the late eighth and the seventh century, two to three hundred years
after
David, did the city grow and dramatically expand again, with fortifications, close-packed houses, and indications of foreign trade. In fact, the impressively preserved remains of the monumental fortifications of the earlier and later periods—of the Middle Bronze and Late Iron II—contradict the suggestion that the building activities in the time of Herod and in later periods eradicated all monuments of the time of David and Solomon.

During all the centuries between the sixteenth and eighth centuries
BCE
, Jerusalem shows no archaeological signs of having been a great city or the capital of a vast monarchy. The evidence clearly suggests that it was little more than a village—inhabited by a small population living on the northern part of the ridge, near the spring of Gihon. If analyzed from a purely archaeological standpoint, Jerusalem, through those intervening centuries—including the time of David and Solomon—was probably never more than a small, relatively poor, unfortified hill country town, no larger than three or four acres in size.