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

by Finkelstein, Israel

  The prophet Zechariah links Zerubbabel with the successful completion of the Temple, using Jeremiah’s poetic metaphor “righteous Branch” to refer to the Davidic heir:

  Behold, the man whose name is the Branch: for he shall grow up in his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD. It is he who shall build the temple of the LORD, and shall bear royal honor, and shall sit and rule upon his throne. And there shall be a priest by his throne, and peaceful understanding shall be between them both. (Zechariah 6:12–13)

  It is noteworthy that Zechariah sees the leadership of restored Jerusalem as shared by king and priest. The Jerusalem Temple was completed and dedicated by about 516 BCE, after which Zerubbabel disappears from history. Whether his disappearance was due to unrest caused by these messianic expectations, or the fear of the Persian authorities (or hostile neighbors) that the growing prestige of a Davidic leader might endanger imperial interests, or some other forgotten reason, we cannot be sure. What is clear is that after the end of the sixth century BCE, the earthly house of David vanished as an element in Yehud’s contemporary political life. Never again would a lineal descendant of David seek to rule Jerusalem. And never again would the David and Solomon tradition serve the political aims of a family dynasty whose continuous existence could be traced back for five hundred years. David and Solomon now belonged to the ages. And a dramatically different vision of these founding fathers would be born.

  FROM KINGS TO PRIESTS

  Throughout the fifth century BCE, Jerusalem slowly revived as Temple city and capital of a small, remote imperial province. The archaeological remains of this period are modest: they are limited mainly to the ridge of the City of David, where the Early Iron Age settlement had stood. It is reasonable to assume, as suggested by archaeologist David Ussishkin, that the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem described in the book of Nehemiah (3:1–32) refers to the renovation of fortifications first established by Hezekiah, though the population of the city had dwindled greatly. From a relatively large city of about sixty hectares before the Babylonian destruction, Jerusalem shrank in the Persian period to a settlement less than one-tenth that size.

  At its center—its main reason for existence—was the restored Temple and the cultic activities carried out in its sacred precincts. With no king to lead the nation, a dual system of rule was established in the province of Yehud. The Persian-appointed governor dealt with secular matters such as collection of tax and imperial administration, while the Temple priesthood, led by a high priest, supervised ritual sacrifice and oversaw the collection of offerings. This duality is already evident in the division of power between the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua in the late sixth century BCE (Haggai 1:1). The priests’ religious activities included responsibility for the sacred writings of the community, editing and revising them over the course of generations—but also producing new works as well. Among the most important of the new historical works are the books of Chronicles, in which—despite the disappearance of the Davidic dynasty—David and Solomon play central roles.

  Most biblical scholars agree that Chronicles (a single work of two books) was written in Jerusalem Temple circles, but the precise time of its composition is less clear. Since it mentions the edict of Cyrus about the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple in its closing verses, it must have been written after 539 BCE. Another clue places it still later: a reference to the Persian coin called the daric in connection with contributions to the Temple (1 Chronicles 29:7) could not have been written before the initial minting of that coin during the reign of Darius, in 515 BCE. Estimated dates for its composition range from the very late sixth century BCE all the way up to the early Hellenistic period, around 300 BCE. Yet Chronicles does not show any influence of Greek culture or Greek language, so it likely dates from before the Hellenistic period. Unlike the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles does not show much concern for the characteristic institutions of the Persian empire, which disappeared from Yehud with its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.* Considering these and other clues, most scholars opt for a mid-to-late-fourth-century BCE date, with the possibility that Chronicles includes somewhat earlier materials.

  In any event, the books of Chronicles were written in Jerusalem, a long time—possibly three centuries—after the compilation of the Deuteronomistic History. These books were written under very different circumstances: there were no more Davidic kings in power; Yehud was part of a world empire; and the Jerusalem community was led by priests. No wonder these literary works express different goals and ideals than those of the earlier books of Samuel and Kings. With no Davidic king to lead the community, and no hope of independence in an era of world empires, the Temple became the center of community identity. Its priests took over Yehud’s spiritual and social leadership. Yet despite all these changes, David and Solomon remained central to the Chronicles narrative. Why?

  THE CHRONICLES VERSION

  The books of Chronicles present an entirely different David and Solomon, shorn of complex personality traits and stripped of all human frailties. At a superficial glance, one may think that the description in Chronicles repeats the account of the books of Samuel and Kings in different words, merely omitting some original material and elaborating certain other themes. Yet the story of the founders of the Jerusalem dynasty as portrayed in Chronicles is far from being a dutiful repetition. Major parts of the story that appear in Samuel and Kings—such as the description of David’s rise to power, the succession of Solomon to the throne of David, and the apostasy of the aged Solomon—simply do not appear in Chronicles. There is no mention of David’s service as a Philistine vassal; not a word about all the murders and conflicts in the course of his rise to power; no reference to his adulterous affair with Bathsheba and its tragic aftermath, or to Absalom’s rebellion. There is no discussion of Solomon’s pagan ways or his foreign wives. This is not simply a matter of abridgment. All critical or unflattering stories about David and Solomon have been intentionally and selectively omitted. Every story that could have shed negative light on David and Solomon is carefully excised in order to depict them as flawless, almost saintly monarchs. The material added by Chronicles—which does not appear in the Deuteronomistic History—deals almost exclusively with the Temple and its personnel.

  In the books of Chronicles, the Temple is the fulfillment of God’s promise to David, not a distant hope but a living reality. Over half of the historical chapters of the two books of Chronicles (if one excludes the genealogies in the beginning of 1 Chronicles) are devoted to the time of the united monarchy. The account is almost entirely preoccupied with the construction of the Temple, its furnishings, and its rituals. This is not merely a matter of elaborated detail. The significance of David’s election and Solomon’s reign is shifted from earthly power and territorial conquest to the establishment of the Temple cult. David and Solomon’s dynastic prestige is now placed entirely in the service of ecclesiastical legitimation: showing the people of the province of Yehud and the communities of their kinsmen scattered throughout the Near East—now increasingly known as “Yehudim,” or Jews—that the long-awaited redemption should be sought not in dynastic restoration but in the rituals and laws of the Temple of Jerusalem.

  For the authors of Chronicles, the Temple was the very heart of Israelite existence, an essential fulfillment of God’s eternal plan. David plays a far more significant role in the building of the Temple and the activities of its personnel than he had done in the earlier Deuteronomistic History. The story of his bringing the holy Ark to Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 15–16) is filled with detailed instructions about the proper roles of priest and levites in ritual activities of music making, sacrifices, and psalm singing, which are utterly lacking in the account of the same event in 2 Samuel 6. Moreover, David takes a far more active role in the building of the Temple. While the earlier scriptural version had disqualified him from this action “because of the warfare with which his enemies surrounded him” (1 Kings 5:3), the David of
Chronicles dedicates himself wholeheartedly to the project, as organizer, architect, and master engineer. In short, he is depicted as the founder of the Temple cult.

  David summons a great assembly to announce the beginning of the project and to hand over a detailed blueprint:

  Then David gave Solomon his son the plan of the vestibule of the temple, and of its houses, its treasuries, its upper rooms, and its inner chambers, and of the room for the mercy seat; and the plan of all that he had in mind for the courts of the house of the LORD, all the surrounding chambers, the treasuries of the house of God, and the treasuries for dedicated gifts…. All this he made clear by the writingfrom the hand of the LORD concerning it, all the work to be done according to the plan. (1 Chronicles 28:11–19)

  All these elaborated elements were part of the Temple ground plan and ritual as it was carried out in postexilic Jerusalem. The account of David’s central role in its construction directly linked the authority of the priesthood and the sanctity of the cult with the actions of the founding father. Its effect was to substantially elevate and empower the priesthood as the true bearers of the Davidic promise—in place of the now-discontinued monarchy.

  Solomon, too, serves as a founding patron for later Temple practice, even more than in the earlier scriptural account. In Chronicles, Solomon’s wealth, power, and wisdom are almost entirely directed to his involvement with the Temple. The intrigue surrounding his succession to the throne is omitted. He reigns with one overarching mission: to complete the building of the Temple and initiate the complex plan for its operation in much the same way that Joshua inherited the leadership over the children of Israel to put into action the laws that Moses had received at Sinai. For the authors of Chronicles, the Temple and the Dynasty are inseparably intertwined; the promise to David is conditional on the completion of the Temple and its proper functioning according to law. The inheritance of the people of Israel is no longer just an earthly Davidic kingdom but—through the laws and rituals of the Jerusalem Temple—a kingdom of God.

  Thus by the time of the writing of the books of Chronicles in the fourth century BCE, we see a fundamental reversal of the significance of the David and Solomon tradition. Whereas the Temple and its cult had served to boost the political prestige of the Davidic dynasty during its rule of the kingdom of Judah, nostalgic memories of independent kingship now served as support for the centrality of the Temple and its rituals in the life of postexilic Yehud and in the spiritual imagination of communities of Yehudim—Jews—all over the ancient world.

  SAMARIA, AGAIN

  Many biblical scholars have suggested that the transformation of the image of David and Solomon in the books of Chronicles is based not only on the efforts of the Jerusalem priesthood to secure their position within Yehud, but also to overcome political and religious rivalry from the north. The Persian kings retained the administrative division established by their predecessors the Babylonians and Assyrians and they organized the territory immediately to the north of the province of Yehud, the core of the former northern kingdom of Israel, as the province of Samaria. Its mixed population of former Israelites who did not go into exile and of foreign groups resettled in the area by the Assyrians were now known as Samaritans.

  The Persian provinces of Yehud and Samaria

  In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, we hear of continual Samaritan hostility to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Temple. That hostility was abundantly returned. The inhabitants of Samaria saw themselves as the successors of the northern kingdom—specifically as members of the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim who had not been deported by the Assyrians. The Jerusalem priesthood, by contrast, saw them as aliens and pagans, descendants of the foreign peoples who had been brought in and resettled in this area by the Assyrian kings.

  The historical truth undoubtedly lies somewhere between these opposing visions. Whatever their precise genealogical connection to the inhabitants of the northern kingdom of Israel, the people of the northern highlands maintained their attachment to the traditions of the people of Israel through the adoption of a distinctive and eventually sectarian version of the Five Books of Moses—the Samaritan Pentateuch. The biblical traditions connected with northern localities like Shechem and Bethel, and important biblical personalities like Jacob, Joseph, and Joshua, are explicitly connected with the north.

  At the time of the writing of Chronicles, the northern kingdom was no more than a vague memory, having been destroyed by the Assyrians four centuries before. Yet the continuing political and religious power of Samaria was of great concern to the leaders of Yehud. Archaeological surveys in the highlands of Samaria have noted a substantial continuity of settlement from the end of the Assyrian period through the succeeding centuries. The discovery of an archive of inscribed fourth-century BCE papyri in a cave on the desert fringe of Samaria has revealed the complexity of political and social life and legal activity in the province during the later Persian period.

  For centuries there had been a natural rivalry between the northern and southern highlands; this expressed itself in matters of religious practice and political strategy. The establishment of the province of Yehud and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple brought those tensions once again into focus and resulted in a final schism between Jews and Samaritans. The construction of a single, central Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim near Shechem posed a northern religious alternative—and a severe threat—to the Jerusalem ideology.

  The date of the construction of the Mount Gerizim temple has long been a matter of debate. The first-century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus dated its foundation to the early Hellenistic era in the time of Alexander the Great, yet Samaritan tradition maintained that their temple was constructed closer to the time of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, in the Persian period. These arguments rested solely on historical texts, as the site of the Samaritan temple was not investigated archaeologically. Finally, in the 1980s, large-scale excavations were carried out at the site by the Israeli archaeologist Yitzhak Magen. It is now clear that the Samaritan Temple was built in the Persian period, probably as early as the first half of the fifth century BCE; that it was devoted to the cult of the God of Israel; and that its layout was strikingly similar to the descriptions of the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the vision of David and Solomon in Chronicles represents a direct response to the Samaritan challenge by redefining the very notion of Israel.

  According to the Deuteronomistic History, the religious practices of the northerners were sinful. The cultic missteps of Saul, the reported construction by the first northern king, Jeroboam, of the idolatrous shrines at Bethel and Dan, and the Baal worship of the Omrides at Samaria were violations of divine command for which they would dearly pay. Although the northern kingdom and the northern kings were considered illegitimate, the inhabitants of the north were nonetheless still part of the people and land of Israel over which David and Solomon had ruled and which a righteous successor of their dynasty would rule again someday. Chronicles, on the other hand, does not deal with the conflict between David and Saul over the kingship or with Judah’s continuing conflict with the northern kings. The divine mission of David and Solomon is self-evident; in their version of history from Adam to Cyrus’s edict to rebuild the Temple, the books of Chronicles argue that God’s plan for his people centered on the giving of laws that could be fulfilled only in Jerusalem. Any other dynasty than the house of David and any other place of worship than the Jerusalem Temple was simply irrelevant—it was not part of the true history of the people of Israel.

  The people of Israel must therefore be defined by religious allegiance rather than geography or political institutions. The unity of Israel would not be achieved by territorial conquest or holy war but by a clear religious choice. Chronicles makes the reign of David and Solomon not merely a golden age that might someday be recaptured, but the standard of acceptable religious behavior that will last for all time. David and Solomon—and their united monarchy—became a m
odel and symbol for the unity of the nation, an archetype for a holy community of all Israel. Chronicles thus points the way for individuals from the north to join the community of God. The speech in Chronicles of Abijah, Solomon’s grandson, to the northern Israelites (which does not appear in Kings!) powerfully expresses this new vision:

  And now you think to withstand the kingdom of the LORD in the hand of the sons of David, because you are a great multitude and have with you the golden calves which Jeroboam made you for gods. Have you not driven out the priests of the LORD, the sons of Aaron, and the Levites, and made priests for yourselves like the peoples of other lands? Whoever comes to consecrate himself with a young bull or seven rams becomes a priest of what are no gods. But as for us, the LORD is our God, and we have not forsaken him. We have priests ministering to the LORD who are sons of Aaron, and Levites for their service. They offer to the LORD every morning and every evening burnt offerings and incense of sweet spices, set out the showbread on the table of pure gold, and care for the golden lampstand that its lamps may burn every evening; for we keep the charge of the LORD our God, but you have forsaken him. Behold, God is with us at our head, and his priests with their battle trumpets to sound the call to battle against you. O sons of Israel, do not fight against the LORD, the God of your fathers; for you cannot succeed. (2 Chronicles 13:8–12)

  Chronicles not only stresses that this standard of religious behavior was established by David and Solomon; it emphasizes the invitation of two later pious Davidic kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, to the northerners to come and worship in Jerusalem and become part of God’s people. In short, the books of Chronicles put the emphasis on the most Judahite figure, David; the most Judahite city, Jerusalem; and the most Judahite institution, the Temple, in order to show that the Samaritans’ attempts to usurp the traditions of Israel are folly. No kingdom, no people, and no individual can claim to be a part of Israel without Jerusalem and without following the righteous religious foundations established by David and Solomon. The Jerusalem Temple community of the time of Chronicles is presented as the only legitimate successor of the ideal, great Israel of the time of David and Solomon.