David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (9 page)

A similarly dramatic settlement expansion took place across the Jordan, in the northern part of the Transjordanian plateau. There, too, the number of settled sites vastly expanded, from about thirty in the Late Bronze Age to about 220 in the Early Iron Age. In the area of Gilead, with its fertile plateau, where agricultural potential was high, surveys have identified the largest single cluster of settlements in this period, indicating a significant settled population there.

Hence, while the number of tenth-century settlements in the Judahite hill country was extremely limited—probably numbering no more than twenty—and the villages were relatively small (most not exceeding an acre in size and inhabited by no more than a hundred people), the highlands to the north were occupied by many more settlements, many of which were larger, representing a much more significant and potentially powerful demographic phenomenon.

In the last chapter we drew some important information from the Tell el-Amarna letters about the society and economy of the highlands in the Late Bronze Age. A south-north division is implicit in their reports of the contemporary situation, since at that time, two main centers—Jerusalem and Shechem—divided the highlands between them, each ruling over extensive areas of approximately six hundred square miles. Yet while the southern territory of Abdi-Heba was beset by strife on its western border and by a shortage of the manpower necessary for territorial expansion, the northern area (ruled from Shechem by a local prince named Labayu) was on the offensive and engaged in repeated attempts to expand its territory. In fact, Labayu seems to have been intent on expanding from his highland base into the lowlands in order to establish a larger, composite political entity. Labayu’s aggressive moves were wide-ranging. He threatened Gezer and Jerusalem in the south and attempted to expand his rule into the Jezreel Valley and to gain territories from the city-states of that region, including Megiddo. Yet he was ultimately thwarted by other Canaanite vassals who captured and killed him on the orders of the Egyptian authorities. Nonetheless, his ability to attempt territorial expansion beyond the highlands offers interesting testimony for the military and economic potential of a northern highlands polity.

Archaeological evidence hints that the center of power in the northern highlands shifted southward during the centuries after the Amarna period. Labayu’s center was the city of Shechem, but by the tenth century
BCE
, a significant proportion of the inhabitants of the highlands lived in the plateau just to the north of Jerusalem. This relatively small territory of just over sixty square miles—which, as we have seen, is remembered in the biblical tradition as the core of Saul’s kingdom—was dotted with almost fifty settlements, including some elaborate sites, such as Khirbet Seilun (identified as the Israelite cultic center of Shiloh), el-Jib (identified as the biblical Gibeon), and Tell en-Nasbeh (the location of the biblical Mizpah). Although this settlement phenomenon should be seen as part of the much broader settlement wave that swept over the highlands both west and east of the Jordan, there is something unique in a particular group of sites in the Benjaminite plateau, around Gibeon.

A MYSTERIOUS ABANDONMENT

In marked contrast to the vast majority of Iron I sites in the highlands—over 90 percent of the approximately 250 that have been recorded throughout the entire central hill country—which continued to be inhabited without interruption until the late Iron Age II (eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
), the area of settlement north of Jerusalem went through a crisis that led to abandonment of a significant number of settlements. New radiocarbon dating and reanalysis of excavated pottery groups suggest that Shiloh was destroyed by fire in the late eleventh century
BCE
and then abandoned. Et-Tell (biblical Ai), Khirbet Raddana near Ramallah, and Khirbet ed-Dawwara to the northeast of Jerusalem were abandoned in the late tenth century
BCE
and never reoccupied. Gibeon may also have been abandoned and resettled only after a long occupational gap.

This suggests an intriguing correlation: the area with a dense system of Iron I sites, some of which were destroyed or abandoned in the Early Iron Age, corresponds to the core of Saul’s “kingdom” to the north of Jerusalem. Something indeed significant seems to have been developing there, perhaps the emergence of a new highland polity, quite distinct from the isolated bandit chiefdom in Judah. Yet in contrast to the settlement wave in the rest of the highlands, its period of great demographic growth in the twelfth to tenth centuries
BCE
came to a sudden end.

The redating of the abandonment of sites in this settlement core, placing it in the late tenth century—a time of supposed peace and prosperity under the rule of King Solomon—suggests that the traditional biblical chronology needs to be revised. How does this redating fit into the larger picture of what was happening in the region in this period? What brought about the abandonment of sites in the core of highlands settlement in the plateau of Benjamin? Can a possible answer to that question shed new light on the historical events and developments that underlay the biblical traditions about the rise and fall of Saul? Surprisingly, the answers to these questions come from an entirely unexpected source.

RETURN OF THE PHARAOH

If you mention the name Shishak to close readers of the Bible, a famous passage in the first book of Kings will immediately come to mind. This text has nothing to do with Saul or David, but comes from the time of David’s grandson Rehoboam, who, according to the traditional chronology of the Judahite and Israelite kings, reigned at the end of the tenth century
BCE
. According to the Bible, Rehoboam’s reign was one of rampant idolatry, when his Judahite subjects “built for themselves high places, and pillars, and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree; and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land” (1 Kings 14:23). Misfortune was not long in coming.

Establishing a secure chronology for this earliest phase of Israelite history is, as we have seen, extremely difficult. With a lack of datable inscriptions (presumably due to the decline of Egypt and the other major literate powers in this era), the possibility of confirming or precisely dating the biblical events is virtually nil. But the biblical passage referring to Shishak holds the key to one unique chronological anchor—or at least it has served as such for many decades. Early in the modern exploration of Egypt, scholars came upon a huge triumphal relief commissioned by Sheshonq I, a pharaoh of the Twenty-second Dynasty, who ruled in the tenth century
BCE
. Reviving the country after two centuries of decline, in which Egypt lost its leading role as a great world power, Sheshonq I embarked on a military campaign to the north—into the land of Canaan—that is recorded on the outer wall of the Hypostyle Hall in the great temple of Amun at Karnak. This is significant, for the consensus among Egyptologists and biblical scholars has long been that the Egyptian Sheshonq I and the biblical Shishak are the same historical personality.

The Shishak (Sheshonq I) campaign

In the Karnak relief, a gigantic image is shown of Sheshonq smiting his enemies and leading off a large group of prisoners of war. Each figure is identified with the name of a place that the pharaoh claimed to have conquered. This list of place-names provides apparent evidence for the likely route of Sheshonq’s invasion, though it has no clear geographical order. The places mentioned are organized in three groups in widely separated regions. The first group includes villages or towns in the coastal plain, in an area of the central hill country north of Jerusalem, in a sector in Transjordan along the Jabbok River, and in the Jezreel Valley. The second group includes places in the south, including the Beer-sheba Valley and, possibly, the Negev highlands. And the third, on a part of the relief that is damaged, seems to have included places along the southern coast. As we will see, it is highly significant that Jerusalem and the highlands of Judah—in fact the entire land of Judah—which are the pharaoh’s main target in the biblical story, are conspicuously absent from the Karnak list.

The biblical text puts Shishak’s campaign in the fifth year of Rehoboam, 926
BCE
according to the widely accepted chronology of the Judahite monarchs. Yet this date is far from reliable, because of another case of circular reasoning. Due to the very fragmentary nature of Egyptian records in this period, it is difficult to provide the pharaohs of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties with exact dates. The reign of Sheshonq I has always been dated by his identification as Shishak, according to the traditional biblical chronology of the Judahite kings’ reigns. And to make things even more questionable, scholars seeking to confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible have done so by evincing the evidence of the Sheshonq relief. Neither one proves the other. Neither provides any independent dating evidence. So even though it is safe to say that Sheshonq and Shishak are, in fact, the same person, and that he ruled in the tenth century
BCE
, we are left with a considerable measure of uncertainty about when his famous northern campaign took place.

Moreover, it is unclear whether he carried out his campaign in his early years on the throne or in his later days. There is even a serious debate among Egyptologists whether Sheshonq I carried out one or more northern campaigns. If we take into consideration all these factors, the Sheshonq campaign could have taken place almost any time in the mid to late tenth century
BCE
, not necessarily during Rehoboam’s reign.
*

What was the purpose of this campaign? Many biblical scholars have traditionally described the Egyptian invasion as a
razia
—little more than a destructive raid, designed to cause maximum damage but leave no permanent presence, but a reexamination of the evidence suggests that it should be seen as the revival of a centuries-long ambition by the pharaohs of Egypt to reconquer and control its former Canaanite possessions.

SHISHAK’S HIDDEN STRATEGY

For centuries the great pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom (the Late Bronze Age in the fifteenth to twelfth centuries
BCE
) had placed great importance on their empire in Canaan for its strategic military and trade routes and its agricultural wealth. In times of Egyptian power, the city-states of Canaan were administered by the pharaohs, either directly, through the establishment of Egyptian garrisons and government centers, or indirectly, by vassal princes. Yet Egyptian domination of Canaan crumbled in a time of great upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age, around the mid–twelfth century
BCE
. The destruction of the old palace-based culture of the Canaanite cities and the arrival and settlement of the Sea Peoples—with the Philistines prominent among them—created an entirely new political landscape. In the period that followed, when the northern highlands experienced dramatic demographic expansion, some of the old Canaanite cities in the fertile and strategically important valleys seem to have experienced a revival of urban life.

The Sheshonq I relief from the temple of Amun at Karnak, Upper Egypt

In the Jezreel Valley, the once great city of Megiddo slowly rose from the ruins of Late Bronze Age destruction. Signs of a neo-Canaanite renaissance are also visible at the nearby city of Taanach, at Rehov in the Beth-shean Valley, and at Kinnereth and Tel Hadar by the Sea of Galilee. On the basis of the pottery vessels produced at these centers, as well as metal and stone objects, cult remains, and architecture, it is clear that the old Canaanite traditions continued. More important, new carbon 14 dating results from Megiddo and other sites place this period of presumably independent Canaanite revival squarely in the tenth century
BCE
. And this neo-Canaanite system in the northern valleys came to a violent end, with devastation by fire recorded at every excavated site.