Such is the case with David and Solomon, who are depicted in the biblical narrative as founding fathers of the ancient Israelite state. 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 the following chapters we will present archaeological evidence to show that there was no united monarchy of Israel in the way that the Bible describes it. Although it seems probable that David and Solomon were actual historical characters, they were very different from their scriptural portraits. We will show that it is highly unlikely that David ever conquered territories of peoples more than a day or two’s march from the heartland of Judah. We will suggest that Solomon’s Jerusalem was neither extensive nor impressive, but rather the rough hilltop stronghold of a local dynasty of rustic tribal chiefs. Yet the point of this book is not simply to debunk stories from the Bible. Alone among the great legends of Near Eastern and classical antiquity, the Bible retains its power to inspire hopes and dreams for living communities around the world even today. Our goal is to show how the legends of David and Solomon developed, and how they came to guide western thinking and shape western religious and political traditions in important ways.
As we proceed through the following chapters, we will analyze and attempt to date the various layers of the biblical story, describing the main issues in the now-bitter scholarly disagreements about its historical reliability, and presenting new archaeological evidence that is central to that debate.* We will show, step by step, period by period, how the historical reality of ancient Judah—as revealed by archaeological research—gave rise both to a dynasty and to a legend that was transformed and expanded in a process of historical reinterpretation that continues even today.
For the now-familiar biblical story of David and Solomon is neither a straightforward historical record nor a wholly imaginary myth. It evolved from a variety of ancient sources, adding details, garbling contexts, and shifting its meaning as the centuries rolled on. It contains a complex stratigraphy of folktales, ballads, and dramatic narratives, which, taken as a whole, have little to do with the actual lives of the main characters and almost everything to do with the changing concept of the nation and the king. As we will see, the recognition of this complex process of literary and historical evolution, backed by archaeological evidence, is the key to understanding the true character of the biblical David and Solomon story—and to appreciating its timeless insights about the nature of kingly power and national identity.
The discovery of the real lives and roles of David and Solomon in the tenth century bce is therefore just the beginning. The question of how and why their legends survived the vicissitudes of antiquity to become one of the strongest images of western civilization—and what values and dreams they reflected in every successive period—is, as we hope to show, a story no less fascinating than the biblical narrative itself.
PART I
RECOVERING HISTORY
Area of David’s activity as a bandit in southern Judah and the Shephelah.
CHAPTER 1
Tales of the Bandit
The Rise of David in the Hill Country of Judah
—TENTH CENTURY BCE—
THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE OF DAVID’S RISE TO POWER (1 Samuel 16:14–2 Samuel 5)—the vivid drama of the rise of a nobody from Bethlehem to the throne in Jerusalem—has been praised as a masterpiece of western literature and one of the earliest prose epics known. It is filled with acts of daring, bold surprises, bloody violence, and adoring popular acclaim. David enters the stage as a humble young shepherd, sent to the battlefield camp of the Israelites to bring provisions to his three older brothers. There, fired with divine inspiration, he fells the mighty Goliath, and the Philistines are routed. Yet in becoming the new hero of Israel, David must soon flee from the jealous envy and fury of King Saul. During his adventures among the villages and remote wildernesses of Judah, David’s story takes on the character of a classical bandit tale—and thereby reveals its earliest threads. 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.
As the Bible tells it, after fleeing from Saul, David is refused shelter in Philistine territory and escapes to the cave of Adullam, where he gathers around himself a sizable outlaw band. “And every one who was in distress, and every one who was in debt, and every one who was discontented, gathered to him; and he became captain over them. And there were with him about four hundred men” (1 Samuel 22:2).
As a guerrilla force, David’s men are quick and mobile. They come to the rescue of beleaguered villagers, humiliate an arrogant local strongman, outsmart the ruler of a powerful neighboring Philistine city, and evade the relentless pursuit of King Saul again and again. Extortion, seduction, deception, and righteous violence are David’s methods. His story is filled with larger-than-life ironies, comic episodes, and entertaining events. It is a classical bandit tale of a type known all over the world, then and now, in which popular rebels—like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and Pancho Villa—use bravado and cunning to challenge the corrupt, brutal powers that be. The exploits of some bandits have been gradually forgotten, but the tales of others have grown steadily more vivid over time. Modest events are transformed into astonishing achievements; unique personal traits are exaggerated to a mythic scale. In the case of the biblical narrative, the tales of David’s early bandit days merge into the national history of Israel. When King Saul dies on the battlefield, David is proclaimed king of Judah and proceeds to conquer Jerusalem and establish it as his seat of power. His destiny is to become king of all Israel, yet his days of banditry remain an essential part of the legend of the man.
How can we assess the historical reliability of this tale of the rise of a bandit? On literary grounds, many scholars have seen the entire narrative of David’s rise as a single composition, written during or soon after David’s reign as a kind of royal propaganda to legitimate and celebrate the establishment of the Davidic dynasty. Others, while agreeing that it is a single composition, place its writing centuries later, as a fanciful folktale with virtually no historical value at all. 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.
LIFE ON THE HIGHLAND FRONTIER
Detailed descriptions of environment and settlement patterns are perhaps the most important evidence for dating the Bible’s historical texts. The sheer weight of geographical information and long lists of place-names interwoven in its stories testify to a familiarity with the ancient landscape of Judah and Israel. The many biblical geographical descriptions that today appear to us as tedious lists of obscure villages and natural features interrupting the flow of the narrative were once essential components of its tales. They were intended for particular audiences who would recognize the names of the various places mentioned and evoke admiration for the achievements of the various biblical characters in a physical setting that they knew well. A reference to a place known to be in the heart of the wilderness would evoke images of freedom from the tedious routines of peasant life. The mention of a city known to be the seat of regional power—or corruption—would make the hero’s triumphs or evasions there seem all the more memorable. The mention of villages known to be especially poor or endangered by marauders would heighten admiration for the stories of their rescue or relief.
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 biblical clerk’s insistence for detail. They speak in a coded language of familiarity with contempo
rary landscapes of power, whose details, once so vivid, might gradually lose their significance as generations succeed one another and new constellations of cities, wilderness, and farmland emerge. Like preserved fossils embedded in the rock of biblical tradition, they are identifiable in their unique patterns and can be placed in quite specific historical periods. They offer us a key to dating some of the story’s key elements.
Geographical zones and main archaeological sites in the Land of the Bible: (A) Mediterranean Sea; (B) Sea of Galilee; (C) Dead Sea; (D) Galilee; (E) Jezreel Valley; (F) northern highlands (highlands of Samaria); (G) Coastal Plain; (H) Jordan Valley; (I) southern highlands (Judean hill country); (J) Shephelah; (K) Beer-sheba Valley; (L) Judean Desert; (M) highlands of Transjordan; (N) Negev highlands. (1) Jerusalem; (2) Samaria; (3) Megiddo; (4) Hazor.
The Judahite hill country where David rose from shepherd to national leader is an isolated highland bloc, largely cut off from the rest of the country, with only a narrow north-south plateau linking its traditional main towns of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. Its topography today as then is rugged, it soils are rocky and poor, its rainfall unpredictable. Its people survived by adopting a difficult, if highly adaptable, way of life. In recent years, archaeologists working in Israel have undertaken wide-ranging surface surveys throughout the country to study the array of settlements in each historical period and to identify archaeological sites with localities mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts. 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.
Isolation profoundly influenced Judah’s history.* Its natural geographical boundaries shaped its relations with the outside world. To the west, the hill country drops steeply through a series of narrow, rocky ridges with steep slopes, separated by deep ravines, to an area of foothills called the Shephelah. It was on those slopes of the eastern Shephelah that David reportedly found shelter in the cave of Adullam (1 Samuel 22:1) and won his first great victory with his band of mighty men in defending the villagers of Keilah from Philistine attack (1 Samuel 23:5). Communication and travel from the hill country to the more heavily populated Shephelah and the coastal plain beyond is difficult and dangerous. The main routes descend steeply, dropping more than fifteen hundred feet in altitude in the distance of just a few miles. To the west, the Shephelah forms an utterly different landscape—moderate, fertile, and densely settled with villages. David’s adventures as the unlikely protégé of the Philistine king Achish of Gath occurred along this border between the hill country, the Shephelah, and the coastal Philistine cities beyond.
In the east, the hill country drops into the Judean Desert. An arid zone starts abruptly as the winter rain clouds from the Mediterranean are emptied of all their moisture on the central plateau of the highland ridge. Within just a few miles to the east, the landscape grows increasingly arid and rugged. Twisting ravines carry torrents of winter runoff eastward into the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley. In a few places close to the Dead Sea, like En Gedi, they form rough, deep canyons pocked with caves in their sheer cliffs. It was here that the biblical narrative places David’s dramatic escapes from a pursuing Saul.
In the south, the Hebron hills slope more gradually down to the Beer-sheba Valley; the transition from the arable land to the arid zone is much less abrupt. Here, still-existing place-names evoke associations with the David stories; many of the villages and ruins preserve the names of the ancient, biblical settlements. Khirbet (“the ruin of” in Arabic) Ma‘in is the site of biblical Ma‘on. Khirbet Karmil, less than a mile to the north, is the place of biblical Carmel—both are mentioned in the Abigail affair (1 Samuel 25). Khirbet Zif is biblical Ziph—a hideout of David on the run from Saul (1 Samuel 23:14–15). Es-Samu‘ is the site of biblical Eshtemoa, and Khirbet ‘Attir of Jattir—both villages listed among the places that received a share of David’s spoils in his great victory over Amalek (1 Samuel 30:26–27).
Thus the biblical geography closely matches the actual landscape of the highlands of Judah. But that fact does not necessarily offer us chronological help. The geographical conditions have existed for millennia and this setting would have been familiar to storytellers and mythmakers throughout all of antiquity. Yet if we are to believe that the David stories are not purely imaginary tales imposed on a familiar landscape, we must look to archaeology to discover if the specific constellation of place-names and geographical conditions reflect a unique tenth century BCE situation—which later generations would not have known and could not have made up.
THE CLUE OF CHANGING SETTLEMENT PATTERNS
In recent decades, intensive archaeological surveys have provided an entirely new perspective on the evolution of society in the Judean highlands over thousands of years. The painstaking work of surface exploration—carefully examining all traces of ancient settlement over large blocs of territory, dating them by the indications of characteristic pottery types, and plotting them on maps arranged according to successive chronological periods—has offered us a dramatic picture of cyclical demographic expansion and retraction. We know when many of the ancient sites in the area were established and we know when certain regions were thickly settled and when they were not. This information offers us an important tool for dating the possible historical background of the biblical narrative.
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. 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. First and foremost, in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the fringe areas of Judah where David is described as fleeing from Saul and conducting his raids and bandit activities were densely settled; they could hardly have been chosen as an appropriate setting for free movement and daring escapes. The area south of Hebron was filled with large villages in easy reach of the central authority in Jerusalem. Even farther south, in the arid zone of the Negev and the Beer-sheba Valley, where David reportedly conducted lightning raids against the neighboring desert peoples (1 Samuel 27:10), a dense network of walled towns, forts, and villages protected the southern borders of the kingdom and offered security for the caravan trade.
As archaeological surveys have shown, this area had begun to be developed as early as the ninth century BCE. Two Judahite forts—at Beer-sheba and Arad—were established in the Beer-sheba Valley to control the roads from Hebron to the desert regions to the south. It was in this period that the Shephelah also came under centralized royal control. Excavations at two important Judahite sites in this region—Lachish and Beth-shemesh—show significant building activities in the ninth century, when they became the most important administrative centers for Judahite rule in the west. It is significant that none of these places is mentioned in the cycle of David stories, not even as a geographical aside.
Thus the description of a “wild south”—of lawlessness and banditry in the fringe areas of Judah, so central to the David story—does not fit the situation in the earliest possible period when “The History of David’s Rise” was put into writing. A scribe who lived in Jerusalem in the late eighth century BCE (or later) would not have described such a reality and had no reason to invent it. In fact, there is another important clue that takes us back another century and a half, suggesting that the story must have originated even before the end of the ninth century BCE—only a few generations after David’s time.
That clue is the prominence of the Philistine city of Gath in the David stories. It is there that David twice seeks refuge from Saul’s vengeance; and its king, Achish, is described as a powerful ruler, controlling territories and villages well beyond his city. The central role that Achish plays in the gathering of the Philistine forces before the climactic battle with Saul (1 Samuel 29) suggests a prominent role for Gath in a wider coalition, described in the Bible, of five Philistine cities that extended up the coast, which also included Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron. That coalition appears in some other accounts of the Philistines in the Bible, such as Joshua 13:3 and 1 Samuel 6:17, which refer to the political organization of the five Philistine cities. Interestingly, in late monarchic and exilic texts (those parts of the Bible written in the late seventh and sixth century BCE), such as Jeremiah 25:20 and Zephaniah 2:4, only four Philistine cities are mentioned, and Gath is left off the list. Likewise, seventh century Assyrian royal records refer only to Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron in their descriptions of Philistine territory. Gath is not mentioned at all.
What happened? According to 2 Kings 12:17, during the reign of King Jehoash of Judah (around 830 BCE), Hazael, the king of Damascus, campaigned in the Shephelah and conquered the city of Gath.* This biblical report has now been confirmed by archaeological excavations at Tell es-Safi, the site of ancient Gath, which show that the city suffered a major destruction toward the end of the ninth century BCE. Though it had previously been the most important city in the Shephelah and possibly the largest in the entire country, Gath dramatically declined in size and importance in the following centuries. We know from Assyrian records that a century later it was no more than a small town under the control of the coastal city of Ashdod. It is unlikely, therefore, that anyone living after the late ninth century BCE would have chosen Gath to be such an important locale in the stories of David if there had not at least been a memory or a folk tradition of its lost greatness.
David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition Page 3
