An important clue to the nature of the building that originally stood on top of the Stepped Stone Structure—and was obliterated by later occupations—may have been found immediately to the north. In the 1950s the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon uncovered a pile of ashlar blocks there, including a beautiful proto-Aeolic capital, characteristic of the distinctive architectural decoration at the royal compound of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom. These blocks were found at the foot of the Stepped Stone Structure and may have collapsed from a building that stood on the platform farther up the slope. Indeed, David Ussishkin proposed that a Samaria-like government compound, which included a palace and a temple, was built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in the ninth century BCE. Similar to Samaria’s, it must have featured massive operations of leveling and especially filling in order to create a flat platform for a royal quarter, surrounded by a casemate wall.*
Unfortunately, that hypothesis cannot be confirmed archaeologically, as the huge Herodian podium for the Second Temple built in the Roman period has completely eradicated or buried any sign of earlier structures on the Temple Mount. Yet it remains an intriguing possibility that the domination of the royal house of Judah by the northern kingdom was expressed in Jerusalem by architectural imitation—with the construction of an elaborate royal compound on the Temple Mount, on the model of the Samaria acropolis.
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. According to the Bible, the marriage of the Davidic king Jehoram to the Omride princess Athaliah produced a royal heir named Ahaziah, who was a product of both royal lines. With Ahaziah’s succession to the throne—and even more so after his death, when Athaliah eliminated the surviving Davidic heirs and ruled in Jerusalem alone as a queen mother (2 Kings 11)—the Israelite nobility was more close-knit than ever, representing what must have been functionally a single polity, dominated by Samaria.
Despite the contention of some biblical scholars that David’s “Court History” was composed in tenth-century Jerusalem by David or Solomon’s personal spin doctors, we will soon see that the world described in the biblical stories of David’s conquests and court politics far more accurately evokes the social and political landscape of Omride and post-Omride times in the ninth century BCE. Those stories, in their vividness and wealth of detail, profoundly altered the image of David. Why was this done?
RESHAPING THE PAST
In a detailed study of the biblical stories of David’s wives Bathsheba and Michal, and the later Queen Athaliah, the German biblical scholar Axel Knauf underlined the importance of the art of storytelling in the inner life of the Judahite court. He pointed out that official feasts and gatherings were important occasions for social and political interaction between the ruling family and the lineages associated with it. They provided an opportunity for boasting, critique, and competition, expressed in stories, legends, and folktales.
We have already suggested that the earliest stories of David as an outlaw were the product of his followers’ eagerness to celebrate the courage and cunning of their chief. We have also suggested that the interlocked cycle of David and Saul stories was the expression of an imaginative counterattack by the supporters of David against the damning accusations of betrayal by the supporters of the fallen Saul. But in the “Court History” and other chapters in the second book of Samuel there is another, entirely different kind of tale. Its stories are about court politics, royal rivalries, internal uprisings, and foreign conquests, played out on the stage of royal bedrooms and throne rooms,* and in pitched battles between royal armies equipped with specialized units of infantry, cavalry, and chariotry.
A biblical passage relates that after clearing the Philistines from the Jerusalem area and securing his rule in his capital city, David ordered that the holy Ark of the Covenant be brought to Jerusalem in a joyous procession to mark the establishment of the nation’s eternal core.* David’s wild, ecstatic behavior at the head of the marchers—“leaping and dancing before the Lord” (2 Samuel 6:16)—revealed his unkingly demeanor and enraged his royal wife Michal, daughter of King Saul. As Knauf pointed out, the story of Michal’s harsh rebuke to the dancing David ended with the cryptic statement “And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death” (2 Samuel 6:23)—a classic dynastic jibe, explaining why the Saulide line died out in Jerusalem.
Yet the sarcastic words of the aristocratic Michal to David—“How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” (2 Samuel 6:20)—are hardly conceivable in the context of a rustic highland chiefdom where social bonds, rather than social differences, needed to be stressed. Whether there was a real woman named Michal, daughter of Saul, who was married to the historical David, we may never know. But we can be safe in assuming that the story did not take its present form—and certainly its meaning—before the rise of a class-conscious aristocracy in Jerusalem.
Likewise, the complex love story of David and Bathsheba hardly makes any sense outside a distinctly courtly atmosphere. In the midst of the fierce fighting against the neighboring kingdom of Ammon, the biblical narrative described how King David, remaining in his palace in Jerusalem, is ensnared by his own lust.
It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers, and took her; and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am with child.” (2 Samuel 11:2–5)
The woman’s husband, Uriah, was engaged in the fierce battle for Rabbah, the capital of Ammon. Immediately David recalls him to Jerusalem, but all of his attempts to persuade the good soldier Uriah to sleep with his wife, Bathsheba (and thereby provide a cover for her adulterous pregnancy), fail. In an act of cold calculation that would forever cast a shadow on David’s reputation, he sends Uriah back to the front with a letter to his commander, ordering Joab to “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die” (2 Samuel 11:15). In the bitter fighting beneath the walls of Rabbah, Uriah perishes and after a brief period of mourning the beautiful Bathsheba becomes David’s wife. But David soon faces the consequences of his actions. Reproached by the prophet Nathan, he bitterly repents his actions and watches helplessly as the child born of Bathsheba dies. This reversal of fortune proves to be a passing episode, for then “David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon” (2 Samuel 12:24).
Every detail of the story—from the king spying the bathing beauty from the roof of his palace to the notes dispatched by messenger from the royal palace, to the death of the cuckolded husband in the fierce siege of the heavily fortified city of Rabbah, capital of Ammon—is drawn from the scenes and events of royal life of a type that emerged only in the ninth century BCE. We cannot know if David actually had an affair with a woman named Bathsheba, but the story of how David repented for his sin and how Bathsheba’s son, Solomon, succeeded to his father’s throne was, as many scholars have noted, a powerful political statement legitimizing Solomon’s line.* That legitimation is argued in a detailed and realistic setting that only those who were familiar with the life of a royal court and the field procedures of a standing, professional army could possibly recognize.
So too, the tragic story of Absalom’s rebellion is deeply dependent on the morals and etiquette of a royal court. The Bible relates that despite great wea
lth, stunning military victories, and vast armies of conscripted royal laborers, all is not well in the closed circles of David’s court. Rivalries begin among the princes. The rape of Tamar, David’s daughter, by his hotheaded eldest son, Amnon, initiates a chain of events that reveals David’s growing weakness, if not as a king then as a man. Enraged by the crime, Tamar’s brother Absalom murders Amnon and flees northward to spend years in exile with the Arameans. Upon returning to Jerusalem he hatches a conspiracy to overthrow his father’s increasingly rigid rule. David, growing emotionally weak, is forced to flee Jerusalem for his life. The revolt is finally suppressed, David returns to his capital, and Absalom is hunted down and killed by David’s forces. Yet this victory is at the same time David’s greatest personal disaster.
Learning of Absalom’s death, “the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son’” (2 Samuel 18:33).
The deadly rivalry of princes and the conflict and defection of trusted royal advisers all bespeak a far more complex social background than was apparent in tenth-century BCE Jerusalem. There are many more examples—King Hiram of Tyre’s provision of building supplies for David’s palace (2 Samuel 5:11); David’s diplomatic marriage to the daughter of the king of Geshur (2 Samuel 3:3); David’s bestowal of an agricultural fiefdom to Saul’s surviving grandson, the crippled Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9); David’s stationing of garrisons in the territory of Aram of Damascus and in Edom in southern Transjordan (2 Samuel 8:6, 14); and Joab’s detailed royal census of David’s far-flung domains (2 Samuel 24:1–9). All these vivid details seem out of place for the context that the historical David, ruler of a modest chiefdom in the southern highlands, would have known.
MORE GEOGRAPHICAL CLUES
But why date these stately descriptions specifically to the ninth century and not later? In this case the answer again lies in geography. Take the kingdom of Geshur as an example. It is mentioned as an ally of David (2 Samuel 3:3) and as the place where Absalom (the son of the Geshurite wife of David) found refuge after the killing of Amnon. 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 description of the extent of the census carried out by Joab toward the end of David’s reign offers additional ninth-century geographical evidence:
So Joab and the commanders of the army went out from the presence of the king to number the people of Israel. They crossed the Jordan, and began from Aroer, and from the city that is in the middle of the valley, toward Gad and on to Jazer. Then they came to Gilead, and to Kadesh in the land of the Hittites; and they came to Dan, and from Dan they went around to Sidon, and came to the fortress of Tyre and to all the cities of the Hivites and Canaanites; and they went out to the Negeb of Judah at Beer-sheba. (2 Samuel 24:4–7)
According to this description, David’s kingdom encompassed all of the central highlands as well as the Transjordanian plateau from Aro‘er in the south to the Golan in the north. Aro‘er is located on the northern cliff of the deep valley of the Arnon River in Moab, and the only possible historical reality for the mention of this place is the conquests of the Omrides in Moab. Jazer and Gilead apparently refer to the northern areas of Transjordan. To the west of the Jordan, the northern boundary extends from Dan to the border of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. And in the south, it extends to the Beer-sheba Valley, where the first evidence of royal control appears only in the ninth century. Some minimalist scholars have argued that this description of the borders of the Davidic state is a late and completely imaginary creation, yet it uncannily retraces the combined territories of the emergent kingdoms of Israel and Judah together, at the time when their royal lines were at least temporarily merged.
Such is also the case with the biblical accounts of David’s great military victories against the neighboring powers, detailed in 2 Samuel 8, 10, and 12. Moab is the first foreign conquest, a foreshadowing of the conquests of the Omrides in the same area:
And he defeated Moab, and measured them with a line, making them lie down on the ground; two lines he measured to be put to death, and one full line to be spared. And the Moabites became servants to David and brought tribute. (2 Samuel 8:2)
Next comes the war with the Arameans of Syria in the north:
David also defeated Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he went to restore his power at the river Euphrates. And David took from him a thousand and seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand foot soldiers; and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but left enough for a hundred chariots. And when the Syrians of Damascus came to help Hadadezer king of Zobah, David slew twenty-two thousand men of the Syrians. Then David put garrisons in Aram of Damascus; and the Syrians became servants to David and brought tribute. (2 Samuel 8:3–6)
In addition to the mention of massive forces of chariotry and infantry that recall Ahab’s contingents at the battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE, the general perspective is of the ninth century, as noted by the Israeli biblical historian Nadav Naaman. First of all, the stories describe Aramean states, whose independent existence was short-lived, ending with their annexation to the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Aramean states that are mentioned in the story, except for Damascus, are missing from the eighth-and seventh-century BCE records. More important, these were areas that were fought over and at least partially controlled by the Omrides at the height of their power in the mid–ninth century BCE. Lastly, the main figure in the story, Hadadezer, corresponds to the Aramaic name Adad-idri, who was the king of Damascus in the mid–ninth century BCE. Adad-idri appears in the monolith inscription of Shalmaneser III as one of the prominent figures in the coalition of Levantine states that faced the Assyrians at Qarqar. Another powerful king in that coalition, as we mentioned earlier, was Ahab the Israelite.
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. But why would a Judahite author model the achievements of his kingdom’s founding father on the wars of the later Omride kingdom of Israel?
THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF THE DAVIDIC DYNASTY
As things turned out, the dynastic marriage of the house of Omri and the house of David had a violent and unhappy ending that, at least briefly, threatened the survival of the Davidic dynasty. By the mid–ninth century BCE, the heyday of the Omride kingdom was already passing. One by one, its imperial possessions were falling away. By this time, there are enough external historical sources that, with due caution, we can confirm at least the main historical outlines of the biblical accounts. The Mesha inscription (and 2 Kings 3:5) records an armed uprising in Moab that swept away its control by the kingdom of Israel after Ahab’s death. The major blow is recorded in the Tel Dan inscription (described in Appendix 1)—the earliest nonbiblical evidence for the name David—which confirms the defeat of the Omrides by Hazael, king of Damascus. With differences in circumstances and detail from the biblical account in 2 Kings 9, it reports the killing of the Judahite king Ahaziah and his more powerful contemporary, the Israelite king Joram. Destruction layers in many sites in the north may provide gloomy evidence for the subsequent Aramean assault. Within the northern kingdom itself, a new pretender, the army commander Jehu (whose name also appears in contemporary Assyrian records), arose to oust and exterminate the surviving members of the Omride line.
What happened in Judah, after Israel was attacked? According to 2 Kings 11, in Jerusalem things took their own violent turn. The queen mother, Athaliah, the Omride princess sent south in a diplomatic marriage, seized power. To ensure her position against her most dangerous local rivals, she ordered the massacre of all surviving Davidic heirs. We have no independent evidence of the historical reliability of this report. But we do know from subsequent historical developments that the Davidic line survived. The biblical account credits the dedication and quick thinking of a Davidic princess in the midst of Athaliah’s bloodbath:
But Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram,* sister of Ahaziah, took Joash the son of Ahaziah, and stole him away from among the king’s sons who were about to be slain, and she put him and his nurse in a bedchamber. Thus she hid him from Athaliah, so that he was not slain; and he remained with her six years, hid in the house of the LORD, while Athaliah reigned over the land. (2 Kings 11:2–3)
The loyalists of the house of David eventually gain their revenge. Jehoiada the priest secretly reveals the existence of a surviving Davidic heir to the still-loyal palace guards in Jerusalem, and conducts a well-planned coup d’etat:
Then he brought out the king’s son, and put the crown upon him, and gave him the testimony; and they proclaimed him king, and anointed him; and they clapped their hands, and said, “Long live the king!” When Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the people, she went into the house of the LORD to the people; and when she looked, there was the king standing by the pillar, according to the custom, and the captains and the trumpeters beside the king, and all the people of the land rejoicing and blowing trumpets. And Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried, “Treason! Treason!” Then Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains who were set over the army, “Bring her out between the ranks; and slay with the sword any one who follows her.” For the priest said, “Let her not be slain in the house of the LORD.” So they laid hands on her; and she went through the horses’ entrance to the king’s house, and there she was slain. (2 Kings 11:12–16)
David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition Page 10
