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

by Finkelstein, Israel

  Indeed, when we attempt to reconstruct the demographic conditions much closer to the time of the historical David, the general setting of the biblical narrative meshes closely with the archaeological evidence. In the tenth century BCE, Philistine Gath seems to have been the most important regional power. The Judahite hill country, especially to the south of Hebron, was sparsely settled, with only a few small villages in the entire area. It was a wild and untamed fringe area, effectively outside government control. Could this be just a coincidence? Or are there additional indications that at least some parts of the story of David’s rise to power reflect a shared communal memory of actual historical events?

  IN THE REALM OF ABDI-HEBA

  Settlement patterns provide only the physical template. They may offer us a date and spatial distribution of sites in a given period, but they give only indirect evidence of political, social, and economic context. Archaeologists working in various parts of the world, however, have attempted to link certain settlement patterns with particular social formations and modes of existence. In the case of the Judean highlands in the period before the rise of the kingdom of Judah, we can indeed recognize a characteristic way of life. Because of the limitations to agriculture, due to the rocky, wooded terrain and the limited rainfall, the number of sedentary communities was relatively small. 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. This contrasts sharply with the lowland territories to the west; there, the major Canaanite and later Philistine city-states each contained dozens of towns and villages, with a large settled population in the main centers and outlying agricultural lands.

  Since the primeval landscape of rocky terrain and a thick cover of woods in the Judean highlands could accommodate only limited cultivation, it appears that the proportion of the nonsedentary groups—shepherds and stock raisers—in the overall population was relatively high. Extensive archaeological surveys in the southern highlands have identified evidence for this mobile population of herders in the form of several Late Bronze Age cemeteries, located far from permanent settlements, that probably served as tribal burial grounds.

  The Judean hill country was hospitable to this special mix of settled and pastoral groups because of the variety of landscapes and opportunities it offered. The marginal lands of the Judean Desert and the Beer-sheba Valley could be used for winter pasture and seasonal dry farming, while the central ridge offered land for fields and orchards, and pastureland for the flocks in the summer when the other areas were parched.

  Sparsely settled rural societies with a mix of sedentary and pastoral populations are often organized in what anthropologists describe as “dimorphic” chiefdoms, denoting a single community stretching over a significant territory, in which two forms of subsistence, farming and herding, exist side by side. They generally rely on a kin-based political system in which the settled villagers and mobile herders are loosely ruled by a chieftain or a strongman, who resides with his small entourage in a central stronghold.

  The characterization of early Judah as a dimorphic chiefdom has some suggestive historical confirmation in an era several centuries before David’s time. A collection of almost four hundred cuneiform tablets was discovered by chance in the late nineteenth century by local peasants digging at the site of el-Amarna in Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo. Written in cuneiform script in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, they form part of the diplomatic correspondence between Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV (the famous Akhenaten), on the one hand, and rulers of Asiatic states and Canaanite city-states, on the other, in the fourteenth century BCE. At this time the Egyptians administered all of Canaan as a province and maintained garrisons in a few major cities, but left most of the country under nominal local control. The lowlands were divided between a number of relatively densely settled territories ruled from city-states, while the highlands comprised much larger but sparsely inhabited territories. The information contained in the Amarna archive conforms quite closely with the archaeological evidence, and its personal and political details offer us a unique glimpse at the structure of society and its inner tensions in the area that would later be called Judah—and that would some centuries later become the scene of David’s rise.

  In the time of the Amarna archive, Jerusalem was ruled by a certain Abdi-Heba. The six letters he dispatched to Egypt and the letters of his neighbors provide valuable information on his city, his territory, and his subjects. The territory under his control stretched from the area of Bethel, about ten miles to the north of Jerusalem, to the Beer-sheba Valley in the south, and from the Judean Desert in the east to the border between the hill country and the Shephelah in the west—a rough approximation of the core area later controlled by the kingdom of Judah. This area contained a small number of villages and groups of pastoral nomads—called Shosu, or “plunderers,” in the Egyptian records—who were found in all parts of the country but were especially dominant in the relatively empty regions of the steppe and the highlands. On the basis of the archaeological evidence, we can assume that they formed a relatively large portion of the population of Abdi-Heba’s realm.

  Abdi-Heba’s activities and influence extended over a much larger area—all the way to the Jezreel Valley in the north. A particular flash point of tension was the border with the more populous city-states in the lowlands to the west. In light of possible comparisons to the time of David, it is significant that control of the crops and lands of the border towns located between the hill country and the Shephelah was a matter of constant contention between Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem and his rival Shuwardata, the ruler of the city-state of Gath.

  Jerusalem, mentioned in the Amarna letters as Abdi-Heba’s seat of power, could not have been more than a small village located on the same ridge that David’s Jerusalem later occupied. Over a century of modern archaeological investigations in Jerusalem have revealed no significant remains from Abdi-Heba’s era. Only isolated tombs and a few Late Bronze pottery sherds have been found on the ridge of the later City of David—especially in the vicinity of the city’s only permanent source of freshwater, the Gihon spring. Abdi-Heba’s Jerusalem was probably no more than a highland hamlet, with a modest palace a great deal more rustic than the ornate princely residences in the main lowlands cities. A modest temple may have stood next to it, perhaps surrounded by a few houses for the ruling elite, mainly the family of the regional chief. Certainly it was no more significant than this.

  The Amarna letters cover only a short period of time—a few decades in the fourteenth century BCE. Does the situation they describe apply to the centuries that followed, or was it an exception? If we look over the millennia of human settlement in this region, the same pattern emerges time after time. In the marginal southern highlands the proportion of herders and shepherds in the overall population was always significant. Towns and even settled villages were few in number, existing as isolated outposts in an ever-shifting landscape of herding and stock raising in the forests and throughout the desert fringe. 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. These archaeological and anthropological observations can provide us with a reconstruction of the human landscape in his time—and perhaps an explanation of his rise to power as well.

  OUTLAWS AND KINGS

  The repeated appeals of Abdi-Heba for help
from the Egyptian administration indicate that the political situation in the highlands was turbulent and unstable. 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 from a small stronghold with a scribe at his side, Abdi-Heba could do little more than complain to the pharaoh about raids from the lowland city-states on his own already hard-pressed peasantry. And the threats were not only external. There is evidence that even within highland regimes like Abdi-Heba’s, economic and social pressures were building among the population. A potentially dangerous form of resistance to the established order was on the rise.

  The Amarna letters refer repeatedly to two groups that acted outside of the sedentary system of the Egyptian-controlled towns and villages. We have already mentioned the Shosu, the mobile communities of herders in the highlands and the steppe. The second group, mentioned more frequently, is more important for our discussion: the Apiru. This term, sometimes transliterated as Habiru, was once thought to be related to the term “Hebrews,” but the Egyptian texts make it clear that it does not refer to a specific ethnic group so much as a problematic socioeconomic class. The Apiru were uprooted peasants and herders who sometimes turned bandits, sometimes sold themselves as mercenaries to the highest bidder, and were in both cases a disruptive element in any attempt by either local rulers or the Egyptian administration to maintain the stability of their rule.

  In his dispatches to Egypt, Abdi-Heba—like many other contemporary Egyptian vassals—accuses his opponents of joining the Apiru, or giving their land to the Apiru, who were perceived as hostile to Egyptian interests. Many were probably uprooted peasants, displaced or escaping from the brutal feudal system in the towns and villages of the lowlands. There, the peasants formed the lowest level of the social hierarchy, subject to heavy taxation, forced labor, and harassment by the local authorities. Married peasants with families had little to do except try to survive on their land. But when the pressures built and desperation became widespread, young peasants, especially those who had not yet established families, could seek freedom by escaping to areas where the power of the local and foreign rulers was weak. There they could join bandit gangs or live by their wits as roving soldiers for hire. For this way of life, the Judean highlands provided an almost ideal locale.

  The British social historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his examination of the worldwide phenomenon of social banditry, showed that bandits and rebels have always been attracted to marginal mountainous environments, and that mountain villages and pastoral communities have often been the scene of their most famous exploits. Hobsbawm also demonstrated that the characteristic bandit unit in a highland area is likely to consist of young herdsmen, landless laborers, and sometimes ex-soldiers. Tracing the phenomenon in the Balkans, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Hungary, and China, he noted that mountainous regions are most susceptible to this type of activity, since governments are always hesitant to act in these rugged and remote regions and the bandit groups can become a law unto themselves. This was certainly the case in Canaan, where the Apiru operated outside the system, unwilling to be docile peasants and shepherds. To the local rulers, they were a turbulent underclass who had to be bought off, killed off, or somehow controlled.

  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.

  DAVID AS APIRU?

  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. David and his “mighty men” make their own rules and cynically form shifting political alliances for the interest of survival alone. They live and act in remote villages and on the fringe of the desert—in the rugged Judean wilderness and across the arid steppe land in the south—far from the easy reach of the central authority. Forced by expedience to find shelter with a neighboring Philistine ruler, they become his willing agents and mercenaries. Yet they are always conscious of their base of support and protection among the villagers and herders from whom they originated—making great demonstrations of protection against outside invaders and sharing their booty with them in order to gain more support. Such social bandits are always viewed with a mixture of contempt and admiration. While the Amarna letters depict the Apiru as treasonous, dangerous cutthroats, the Bible depicts David as a daring, sometimes mercurial figure who wins adulation from the people of the highlands as a protector and leader they can call their own.

  On closer comparison, some details of the biblical narrative are almost identical to descriptions of the Apiru bands in the Amarna letters. One of the most revealing is the description, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, of how a wide range of marginal elements in Judahite society flocked to David’s band:

  David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam; and when his brothers and all his father’s house heard it, they went down there to him. 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 22:1–2)

  The same holds true for the description of David’s tactics as he rescued the villagers of Keilah from the hands of the Philistines. David and his private army—fast, maneuverable, and deadly—smash an outside threat to the rural population, which the central administration was either too fearful or too weak to confront. David takes matters into his own hands and emerges as a local savior. Once the lightning victory is achieved and the booty carried off, the bandit gang withdraws to the safety of its wilderness hideouts again.

  And David and his men went to Keilah, and fought with the Philistines, and brought away their cattle, and made a great slaughter among them. So David delivered the inhabitants of Keilah. (1 Samuel 23:5)

  Then David and his men, who were about six hundred, arose and departed from Keilah, and they went wherever they could go…(1 Samuel 23:13)

  And David remained in the strongholds in the wilderness, in the hill country of the Wilderness of Ziph…(1 Samuel 23:14)

  In fact, we possess a direct geographical correspondence to this situation in the Amarna age. The village of Keilah, identified with the site of Khirbet Qeila, is located at the very eastern edge of the upper Shephelah—isolated and vulnerable to attacks from the rulers of the lower Shephelah and the coastal plain below. The Philistines had assumed control of this area after the retreat of the Egyptian regime from Canaan. Attacks by the powerful Philistine city-states upon the border of the hill country—to loot crops or terrorize the sparse rural population—could therefore have been expected in this period. But the biblical Keilah story also seems to reflect a long pattern of raids and counterattacks that had been going in this area at least since the Late Bronze Age.

  Indeed, it is significant that Keilah is explicitly mentioned in the Amarna archive as a town whose possession was hotly disputed, in this case between Shuwardata of Gath and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem. Shuwardata attacked the village (called Qiltu or Qeltu in the Amarna letters), which he considered as belonging to him. A sentence in one of the Shuwardata letters, stating that “I must go fo[rt]h to Qeltu [again]st the t[raitors],” may hint that local Apiru forces were also involved, this time on the side of Abdi-Heba. The David story, taking place in the same region under the same conditions some four hundred years later, is reported by the Bible in a similar way: the defense of Keilah is accomplished by a gang of armed men who repel the invaders, acting independently in place of an impotent central government.

  The frequent employment of Apiru as mercenaries underlined their rejection of conventional political loyalty. In the case of David, this could hardly be clearer. The Philistine city of Gath was a powerful, aggressive threat to the people of the highlands; its ruler, Achish, was a deadly enemy. Nonetheless, on two occasions David is described as taking shelter in Phi
listine territory. On the first (1 Samuel 21:10–15), he appeared alone in Gath and unsuccessfully sought asylum. But on the second occasion, David became a Philistine ally and was given a territorial fiefdom, from which he was free to raid non-Philistine territories:

  So David arose and went over, he and the six hundred men who were with him, to Achish the son of Maoch, king of Gath. And David dwelt with Achish of Gath, he and his men…. Then David said to Achish, “If I have found favour in your eyes, let a place be given to me in one of the country towns, that I may dwell there; for why should your servant dwell in the royal city with you?” So that day Achish gave him Ziklag…. Now David and his men went up, andmade raids upon the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites; for these were the inhabitants of the land from of old…. And Davidsmote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, but took away the sheep, the oxen, the asses, the camels, and the garments, and came back to Achish. (1 Samuel 27:2–9)

  In other circumstances, David and his gang do not shrink from an occasional attempt at extortion among their own people. David sends ten of his men to Nabal, a rich Judahite sheep owner in the village of Carmel, to “remind” him of the protection that his men had provided to Nabal’s shepherds and shearers, and to demand in return “whatever you have at hand.” Nabal’s angry retort to David could hardly have been more dismissive—or more revealing of the parallel to the Apiru phenomenon.