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

by Israel Finkelstein

In analyzing the contents of the various parts of the Hebrew Bible, many biblical scholars have concluded that the long David and Solomon narrative contained in the books of Samuel and 1 Kings is a part of a distinct literary work, known as the Deuteronomistic History, that spans the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings.

Alone of all the books of the Torah, only Deuteronomy imposes a strictly centralized worship on the people of Israel and prescribes a detailed code of legislation about everything from religious ceremonies to dietary habits, to lending practices, to the process of legal divorce.

According to many scholars, the Deuteronomistic History appeared in substantially its present form in the late seventh century BCE, during the reign of King Josiah of Judah (639–609 BCE), approximately three hundred years after the time of David and Solomon.

These hypothesized early works are called by scholars “The History of David’s Rise” (1 Samuel 16:14–2 Samuel 5), the “Court (or Succession) History” (2 Samuel 9–20 and 1 Kings 1–2), and “The Acts of Solomon” (1 Kings 3–11).

Most scholars followed suit, accepting the contention that the major narratives about David and Solomon were originally independent sources written in the early days of the Israelite monarchy. We now know, however, that this theory is mistaken. As we will see, it is clearly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

When we proceed backward from Rehoboam, the chronology gets considerably fuzzier. First, as previously noted, David and Solomon are not mentioned in any contemporary extrabiblical text, and hence do not have any reliably direct anchor to ancient Near Eastern chronology.

To make matters even more difficult, the passage containing the length of the reign of Saul, the first king of Israel, has been garbled by scribal copyists over the ages, reading: “Saul was . . . years old when he began to reign; and he reigned . . . and two years over Israel” (1 Samuel 13:1).

Yet we can now say—as we will argue in considerable detail throughout this book—that many of the famous episodes in the biblical story of David and Solomon are fictions, historically questionable, or highly exaggerated.

In other words, the true, historic David, 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.

Since evidence of extensive literacy is lacking in Judah before the end of the eighth century BCE, “The History of David’s Rise” is unlikely to have been put into writing less than two hundred years after David’s time.

Only a handful of permanent sites, including Jerusalem, have been recorded in archaeological surveys of the entire territory throughout the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (c. 1550–900 BCE). Most were tiny villages. There was no real urban center, and not even a single fortified town. In fact, the small sedentary population of the southern highlands can be estimated, on the basis of settlement size, at no more than a few thousand.

Dynasties may have changed; a village may have been abandoned and a new one may have been established; but the 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.

The Apiru continue to be mentioned as late as 1000 BCE.

Put simply, the description of the rise of David in the first book of Samuel contains many distinctive parallels to the activity of a typical Apiru chieftain and his rebel gang.

Outside Jerusalem in any case, little was changed. The hill country to the south was still sparsely inhabited, even though the number of settled sites grew modestly. All in all, surveys recorded the remains of only about twenty permanent Early Iron Age settlements in the southern highlands. Their population can be estimated at a few thousand people, to which must be added the roving bandit groups and the large herding communities.

As mere summaries, they provide us with the clear recognition that the compilers of the biblical narrative had at their disposal a vast body of tradition for inclusion in their work. Some tales were selected, others were abbreviated, and yet others were probably rejected altogether. Theirs was a task of collection and heavy editing, surely not an accurate recording of history.

And there was again war with the Philistines at Gob; and Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. (2 Samuel 21:19) Who killed Goliath?

It would be a mistake to assume that the people of the southern hill country had a single, uniformly defined national identity at the time of David.

Calculating backward from the sequence of later monarchs, for whose reigns we have some external chronological confirmation—and accepting at face value the biblical testimony of a forty-year reign for both Solomon (1 Kings 11:42) and David (2 Samuel 5:4)—most biblical historians have traditionally placed the reign of Saul in the late eleventh century, around 1030–1010 BCE. But we have already noted that these dates are not as precise as they seem. Generations of historians and biblical scholars have become accustomed to accepting them quite literally; at best they should be taken as only a very rough approximation.

Although the text declares that Saul was king of “all Israel,” his activities were restricted to the northern highlands to the west of the Jordan, with an extension across the Jordan to Gilead to the east. It is important to note that the biblical narrative records no independent actions taken by Saul anywhere in the highlands of Judah.

Their estimated population was just over forty thousand, compared to less than five thousand in the entire hill country of Judah.

Though many biblical scholars have traditionally described it as a one-time raid (particularly because the traditional chronology placed it after the creation of the biblically described vast and powerful kingdom by David and Solomon), reanalysis of the archaeological evidence suggests that it should be seen as an attempt by Egypt to revive its empire in Canaan.

At the time of the Sheshonq campaign, Judah was still a marginal and isolated chiefdom in the southern highlands. Its poor material culture leaves no room to imagine great wealth in the Temple—certainly not wealth large enough to appease an Egyptian pharaoh’s appetite. From the archaeological information, we must come to a conclusion that undermines the historical credibility of this specific biblical narrative. The reason that Jerusalem (or any other Judahite town or even village) does not appear on the Karnak inscription is surely that the southern highlands were irrelevant to Shishak’s goals.

The archaeological evidence suggests that this actually happened: the places just to the north of Jerusalem that appear on the Karnak list (and that the biblical tradition describes as the core of Saul’s activity) were the scene of a significant wave of abandonment in the tenth century BCE.

But why were the Egyptians forgotten in this part of the biblical tradition? Over the centuries, as the heroic stories of this period were told and retold among the people of Judah, Egypt again slipped into a period of historical eclipse, whereas the Philistines remained present and grew stronger. By the time of the compilation of the stories, when the scattered local traditions were collected and woven into a single narrative, hostility to the Philistines was as strong as ever. So they were portrayed as the main villains of the piece.

In short, the southern chiefdom could have been a passive partner in the Egypto-Philistine alliance. This could be the reason that—like the Philistine cities—it is not mentioned in the Sheshonq I list at Karnak. It could also have been the origin of a northern accusation that David cooperated with the Philistines and was, at least indirectly, responsible for Saul’s demise.

First, with regard to the physical background, there is little evidence in Jerusalem of any impressive tenth-century BCE royal constructions or, for that matter, much construction of any kind.

Over a century of excavations in the City of David have produced surprisingly meager remains from the late sixteenth to mid–eighth centuries BCE. They amount to no more than a few walls and a modest quantity of pottery sherds, mostly found in erosion debris.

The evidence clearly suggests that tenth-century Jerusalem was a small highland village that controlled a sparsely settled hinterland.

The few thousand farmers and herders of Judah—a number including women, children, and old people—could probably provide no more than a few hundred able-bodied fighting men, which is hardly enough for any military adventure beyond a local raid.

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.

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.

Geshur appears in these biblical texts but is not mentioned in the eighth-century BCE Assyrian records. The large, fortified site of Bethsaida on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee may have been its capital. It was established in the ninth century and initially shows clear Aramean material culture, while in the eighth century BCE, when perhaps it was conquered by the northern kingdom, its Aramean character ends. The only logical chronological setting for a story in the land of Geshur is therefore in the ninth century BCE.

The “Court History” of David thus offers a whole series of historical retrojections in which the founder of the dynasty of Judah in the tenth century is credited with the victories and the acquisitions of territory that were in fact accomplished by the ninth-century Omrides.

The structures and customs of monarchy were now firmly in place in Jerusalem, and the court bards of Judah gave expression to their new independence. They explained that the great united monarchy of Israel and Judah—known at their own time to have ruled from Samaria—actually had its roots in the distant, legendary time of their own King David. They claimed that their great founding father had anticipated the Omrides’ later victories and had never suffered their crushing defeats. David, they said, conquered and completely subdued all the bitter enemies of Israel, enemies that defeated and humiliated the northern kingdom in the mid–ninth century. He crushed Damascus, slew many Moabites, and conquered the capital of Ammon. In the tales told in court circles—and later put into writing—the founder of the Jerusalem dynasty was pictured as strong as, in fact much stronger than, the greatest of the northern kings. The power and logic of these stories indicated that David’s descendants were the only worthy contenders for rule over the once-great kingdom of Israel.

In short, Judah in the early eighth century BCE was still in a relatively low state of economic and social development.

The political landscape had suddenly shifted. In the wake of the conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel, Judah became the only autonomous state in the highlands. Its long life in the shadow of the larger, wealthier kingdom of Israel was over. Judah emerged from this great historical watershed transformed almost beyond recognition. By the end of the eighth century BCE, it had all the hallmarks of a proper kingdom: massive building activity, mass production of commodities, centralized administration, literacy, and, most important, a new understanding of its own historical destiny.

A rough estimate of the demographic growth that took place in this period, based on a ratio of people to the size of the built-up area, would suggest that Jerusalem’s population skyrocketed from around one thousand inhabitants to approximately twelve thousand.

A well-known class of storage jars from this period, produced in large quantities, bears distinctive seal impressions on the handles. They contain an emblem in the shape of a winged sun disc or scarab beetle (which may have been a royal Judahite insignia), a short Hebrew inscription reading lmlk (“belonging to the king”), and the name of one of four cities: Hebron, Socoh, Ziph, and a still unidentified place designated by the letters mmst.

In any case, the evidence seems to converge on the southern part of the northern kingdom and the vicinity of Bethel as the source of many of the refugees who swelled the population of Judah and Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century BCE. This is precisely the area where there is evidence for a tenth century BCE highland polity related to the biblical traditions of Saul.

The grandiose descriptions of Solomonic wealth and unchallenged royal power are absurdly discordant with the historical reality of the small, out-of-the-way hill country kingdom that possessed no literacy, no massive construction works, no extensive administration, and not the slightest sign of commercial prosperity.

Yet this interpretation has been conclusively disproved both on stratigraphic and chronological grounds.II The supposedly Solomonic gates date to different periods of time, in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, and strikingly similar city gates have been found outside the borders of the kingdom of Solomon, even according to a territorially maximalist view.

The fact that the book of Kings speaks about the visit of a queen (rather than a king) lends an additional note of credibility, for Assyrian records of the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE (until c. 690 BCE) attest to the phenomenon of Arabian queens.

All things considered, we have a situation where the conditions described in the great kingdom of Solomon closely resemble those of King Manasseh’s realm.

Many biblical scholars argue that the composite narrative from 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 11—from the anointment of David to the death of Solomon—is part of a longer saga, which spans the book of Joshua through the second book of Kings, and is known as the Deuteronomistic History. This sweeping chronicle of the people of Israel, from wandering to conquest to golden age to exile, has a clear connection with (in fact it clearly illustrates) the ideology expressed in the book of Deuteronomy.

It was in the fateful reign of King Josiah that the mystique of the Davidic dynasty was suddenly, dramatically transformed from a collection of dynastic legends into a messianic faith that would long outlive the independence of the tiny Iron Age kingdom, to become the irreducible basis for Judeo-Christian religious belief.

Yet there is an obvious problem in establishing a direct connection between the Philistine king Ikausu (who ruled close to the time of King Josiah) and David’s Philistine patron Achish. Ikausu was the king of Ekron, not Gath. Mighty Gath had been destroyed two centuries earlier; at the time of Ikausu, Gath was little more than a village; Ekron was by far the most powerful Philistine city-state. Perhaps the biblical authors simply used Achish as a convenient name for a powerful Philistine king. But in the seventh century BCE, the name Ikausu-Achish would have been too well known throughout Judah, with a clear contemporary significance. So the story of the alliance between David and an ancient Achish may have aimed at legitimizing the relationship between the “new David”—Josiah—and the city of the new Achish: Ekron. There is clear archaeological evidence for this: the excavations at Tel Miqne have revealed an impressive period of urban development that transformed Ekron from a small town to one of the most important cities in the region by the time of Josiah. From the late eighth century BCE, and especially in the first half of the seventh century, under Assyrian domination, Ekron grew in size to become the most impressive olive oil processing facility known anywhere in the ancient Near East.

Yet the biblical description of Goliath’s armor is not simply a fanciful creation; every single item has clear parallels to archaeologically attested Aegean weapons and armor from the Mycenaean period to classical times. In all periods within this general time frame, one can find metal helmets, metal armor, and metal greaves. Yet until the seventh century BCE, these items were relatively rare in the Greek world.

Homeric influence on the biblical authors is highly unlikely before the very late eighth century, but it grows increasingly probable during the seventh century, when Greeks became part of the eastern Mediterranean scene.