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

by Israel Finkelstein

Bibles stories are partially true?

as far as archaeology and historical sources can reveal, gained his greatest fame as something of a bandit chief.

Based on archaeological evidence, and clues within the text, we can now say that the tale could not possibly have been put in writing until more than two hundred years after the death of David. However, the text seems to preserve some uncannily accurate memories of tenth century BCE conditions in the highlands of Judah—and may contain at least the traces of a reliable, original account of the events of the historical David’s earliest career.

Thus

the

frequent appearance of place-names and geographical terms in David’s tale in the first book of Samuel should not be seen as a sign of a b...

The general geographical description of Judah in the David story indeed fits the environment, topography, and settlement system of the early phases of the Iron Age, in particular, the tenth century BCE

Is it possible that the narrative was composed at that time and that the general settlement patterns and population distribution described in the story of David’s rise reflect the situation at the time of writing—and have no real connection to the situation in the tenth century BCE? The answer is no. The geographical background behind the earliest David stories simply does not fit the eighth century BCE, when Judah was a fully developed monarchy with the apparatus of literary production and the need for a national history.

That clue is the prominence of the Philistine city of Gath in the David stories.

What happened?

“

general picture of the southern highlands remained that of a sparsely settled dimorphic

chiefdom, ruled from one of its main villages as a loose kinship network of herders and villagers. These overall settlement patterns remained quite constant until the rise of the kingdom of Judah in the ninth century BCE, a full century after the time of David.

With its difficult environment and low population, the highlands provided little agricultural

surplus with which a ruler could recruit substantial armed forces or maintain more than a symbolic appearance of authority. Working

dangerous form of resistance

two groups

Shosu,

the Apiru.

problematic socioeconomic class.

The Apiru continue to be mentioned as late as 1000 BCE. They help explain David’s rise to power in a quite down-to-earth way.

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.

a relatively large number of extrabiblical historical records—mainly Assyrian—verify ninth-to-seventh-century BCE events described in the Bible.

much of the Deuteronomistic History is written in late monarchic Hebrew, different from the ...

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.

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:

9. g of the House of David. And I set [their towns into ruins and turned]

ninth century BCE.

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.

“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.

they found deposits of pottery or isolated architectural elements that they connected to the time of David, in the tenth century BCE:

Stepped Stone Structure included types from the Early Iron Age to the ninth or even early eighth centuries BCE.

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 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 act...

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 ...

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 coun...