In many ways this process repeated the story of imperial disintegration and the emergence of new peoples and states that had taken place many times in history before. As we have seen earlier, the collapse of New Kingdom Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age was also accompanied by the movements and crystallization of peoples on the historical stage.
The rise of David in the highlands of Judah was one such development that spawned a long-lasting tradition. Based on the memories of a unique leader who emerged in a time of political and social crisis, it would be expanded and altered to serve as the focus of identity for an ever-changing community as it developed through the stages of chiefdom, kingdom, imperial vassal, and religious community. And as Christian missionaries spread through the peoples of Europe, bringing the good news of salvation to the Roman imperial subjects at a time when the empire was in an advanced state of disintegration, the tradition of David and Solomon was prominent in their sermons and their biblical tales.
The images of the great king and warrior—and psalmist—and of the wise and wealthy king who built the great city and the Temple lay in the background of the gospel stories. Yet it came increasingly to the fore as the bold and sometimes bloody tales of biblical Israel had greater impact on pagan proselytes than the parables of the gospels and the metaphorical interpretations of early Christian literature. Here and there bandit leaders gathered their coteries of followers around them, slowly and gradually seeing the advantage of the conversion to Christianity. Jesus himself remained seated in heaven, replacing the protecting gods that they had all previously known. David and Solomon, however, emerged as more tangible models for the kingdoms that they were building themselves.
And so new Davids arose to battle their people’s fearsome enemies and snatch divine anointment from other contenders. New Solomons built rustic towns and imposing castles and churches across Europe, in which the biblical images of Jerusalem’s kings were attractive, if impossibly dreamlike ideals. The story of David and Solomon thus inherited a place at the very heart of the new civilization of European Christendom. As the very model of righteous kingship with its human frailties and complexities, visions of grandeur and forgiveness, apocalyptic hopes, and its vivid moments of struggle and triumph, the images of David and Solomon—painted, sculpted, and placed in soaring stained-glass windows—would become as much a part of medieval and modern western traditions as the heroic folktales and legends of Europe itself.
EPILOGUE
Symbols of Authority
Medieval and Modern Images of David and Solomon
THE IMAGES OF DAVID AND SOLOMON IN MEDIEVAL European art are countless. The scenes of their lives and imaginative portraits exist in illuminated manuscripts and on frescoes, stained glass, stone, ivory, enamel, mosaic, textiles, and metalwork. In 2002, The Index of Christian Art published a catalogue of 245 scenes in which David regularly appears, in over five thousand examples from all across Europe, spanning every episode of the biblical story from his birth to his death. A similar accounting of the medieval artistic representations of Solomon would certainly add thousands more to the list. What is it about these two ancient figures that captured the imagination of so many generations of medieval craftsmen and so transfixed their patrons, both royal and ecclesiastical? To put it most simply, David and Solomon had come to represent a shared vision of pious Christian rule.
The story of the spread of this vision can now be traced only in surviving artworks and scattered literary references. Each represents a moment of self-reflection and recognition, in which the biblical stories of anointment, conquest, wealth, judgment, lust, and regret struck a deeply familiar chord. As we have seen, the David and Solomon tradition is by no means an accurate chronicle of tenth-century BCE Judah, but in its accumulated layers and reinterpretations it encompassed the collective wisdom and experience of centuries of observation and reflection about the nature of kingly power and national identity.
Carried to Europe in the stories and biblical manuscripts that accompanied Christian missionaries, and preserved by the scribes of monasteries and builders of cathedrals, the legend of David and Solomon beckoned to kings and prelates as a guidebook of church-crown relations. Great monarchs like Charlemagne could revel in David’s stunning military achievements and in Solomon’s incomparably wealthy and wisely ruled realm. The bejeweled crown of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II bore the cloisonné images of both David and Solomon. Bishops and prelates could call princes and monarchs all over Europe to repentance and contrition for impious behavior by evoking the lessons of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba and Solomon’s apostasy. In a delicate balance of earthly grandeur and spiritual submission, the David and Solomon saga both reflected and shaped a uniquely complex vision of the world.
That vision was not restricted to Europe. As Islam spread through the Near East, North Africa, and the Balkans, the image of David and Solomon also exerted a lasting impact in the consciousness of caliphs, sultans, and imams. The Quran had adopted a great deal from the biblical tradition, and both Daoud and Suleiman appear in the Islamic lore as noble kings and judges who precociously expressed the will of Allah. Suleiman, in particular, was regarded as one of the four greatest leaders in history, along with Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, and Alexander the Great. His magical powers and his encounter with the queen of Sheba (known in Arabic as Bilqis) were celebrated from Persia to Morocco in elaborate artworks, extensive literature, and popular folklore. As in their Jewish and Christian incarnations, Daoud and Suleiman personified the larger-than-life standards by which contemporary leaders would be judged.
By the high middle ages in Europe, the lineage of David and Solomon—depicted in the spidery “Trees of Jesse” ascending upward and entwining generations of biblical monarchs, Christian saints, and medieval princes on façades of soaring Gothic cathedrals and rising luminously in stained-glass windows—had come to express the divine right of kings and universalize the principle of hereditary rule. As in every stage of the evolution of the David and Solomon tradition, and in every place where it developed, the present was seen as the culmination of God’s eternal plan and the defining models for European kingship itself.
Yet the story continued. In the Renaissance, a new vision of individual action and destiny changed the image of David from pious king to the muscular, aspiring youth, so familiar in Michelangelo’s David. Still later, in the somber biblical paintings of Rembrandt and the other Old Masters, David and Saul become embodiments of personal conflict and introspection, whose virtues and vices would be left for final assessment by the viewer, rather than by the dogma of an established church. The images of David and Solomon have, in fact, never ceased evolving; they remain enigmatic but ever-present founding fathers for every generation’s dreams of a golden age. Their story’s power lies, ultimately, in its anticipation of a utopian future, whose meaning and form has been deeply shaped by the particular historical situation in which the David and Solomon story was ever sung, painted, or read.
Our challenge in this book has been to search for the historical David and Solomon and to utilize the tools of archaeology and history to trace the evolution of their biblical images through the millennia. Step by step we have suggested a reconstruction of complex historical processes by which the figures of David and Solomon became the focus of a complex and adaptable foundation legend that began in ancient Judah and ultimately spread throughout the western world. We have shown how the memories of the founders of Judah’s Iron Age dynasty were reshaped to serve changing economic and social conditions. And we have described the centuries-long process in which the David and Solomon tradition was used to bolster the authority of Jewish and Christian religious ideologies—with David and Solomon ultimately becoming deeply ingrained western models for royal leadership and paradigms of the nation and the individual.
Archaeology’s new vision of David and Solomon has allowed us to separate historical fact from its continuous reconstruction. History is full of accidents, and insistent
quests for survival in the face of external threats and domestic upheavals. The accessibility and fluidity of the narrative elements in the David and Solomon tradition allowed it to be passed on and freely reinterpreted again and again. And there is no sign of an end to this process of veneration and transformation of their images.
We all live in a world of clashing nationalisms and global empire—the very themes that brought about the rise of the Davidic legend in eighth-and seventh-century BCE Judah, and two of the most important themes on which the David and Solomon story has been developed and reshaped time and again. Our perspective on those themes is uniquely modern. We no longer honestly hope for the resurrection of an Iron Age kingdom. We can no longer rely on messianic dreams to overcome our shared nightmares. And we can no longer rely on the divine right of kings as the justification for the acts of our leaders. And yet—because of our need for historical identity and our continuing quest to believe that noble leadership is possible—the David and Solomon story retains its power.
Understanding the process of the mythmaking about David and Solomon in no way questions the value of the tradition. On the contrary, it is of vital importance to appreciating our shared history and its role in shaping the biblical tradition of Judaism and Christianity. The figures of David and Solomon embody the foundation of the evolving civilization we live in, in its attempt to reconcile dreams of golden ages and ideal leaders with ever-changing political, social, and religious realities. In that sense—and in light of all the discoveries we have presented—archaeology has not destroyed or even dimmed the value of the ancient David and Solomon tradition. It has merely reshaped it once again.
APPENDIXES
Appendix 1
Did David Exist?
THE MINIMALISTS AND THE TEL DAN INSCRIPTION
According to a certain school of thought within biblical studies—sometimes described as historical minimalism—the various David and Solomon stories, as well as the wider Deuteronomistic History, are late and largely fictional compositions motivated entirely by theology and containing only vague and quite unreliable historical information about the origins and early history of Israel.
Opinions differ among the minimalists about when ancient scribes wrote the Bible—from the Persian to the Hellenistic period (sometime between the fifth and the second centuries BCE)—but in any case they are confident that it took place many centuries after the kingdom of Judah ceased to exist.
The British scholar Philip Davies put the composition of the story into a clear political context. In his book In Search of Ancient Israel (1992), he sees the creation and compilation of the Deuteronomistic History as a long process, with the final form of the narrative probably being created in Hasmonean Judea during the second century BCE. “As an historical and literary creation,” writes Davies, “the Bible…is a Hasmonaean concept.” Davies depicted the authors of the biblical text as ideologues in service of the Temple establishment. Other minimalist scholars traced their ideology back to the political goals of the Judean priests and nobles who had returned from the Babylonian exile in the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE. These new leaders, the theory suggested, were loyal agents of the imperial power but they were also eager to bolster their position among the population that had remained in the land during the exile. As an imposed elite that had ousted the local leadership of Judah, they needed to create a history to legitimate their role. The Jerusalem scribes of the postexilic period thus supposedly collected folktales and vague memories and skillfully wove them into a wholly imaginary history that stressed the centrality of Jerusalem, its Temple, its cult, and its priests. It was a complete innovation, designed to establish a “national” myth of origin where none existed before. According to this premise, the Bible’s story is not only historically baseless, but powerful, focused propaganda that sold an essentially made-up narrative of patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and the glorious golden age of David and Solomon to a credulous public in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.
What is the minimalist reconstruction of the history of the land of the Bible before the Bible? In his book The Mythic Past (2000), the American biblical scholar Thomas Thompson not only accepted the idea of a very late and almost entirely fictional history of Israel but also reinterpreted the archaeological evidence to reconstruct a multiethnic society in Iron Age Palestine with no distinctive religion or ethnic identity at all. It was a heterogeneous population split between regional centers at Jerusalem, Samaria, Megiddo, Lachish, and other cities. Its people cherished their own local heroes and worshiped a wide panoply of ancient Near Eastern deities. The Bible falsified that reality with its uncompromising theology of national sin and redemption. That was why, the minimalists argue, there can be no archaeological evidence of the united monarchy, much less evidence of a historical personality like David, because they were part of a religious mythology wholly made up by Judean scribes in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.
This revisionist theory has both logical and archaeological inconsistencies. First of all, the evidence of literacy and extensive scribal activity in Jerusalem in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods was hardly greater—in fact much smaller—than that relating to the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. To assume, as the minimalists do, that in the fifth or fourth or even second century BCE, the scribes of a small, out-of-the-way temple town in the Judean mountains compiled an extraordinarily long and detailed composition about the history, personalities, and events of an imaginary Iron Age “Israel” without using ancient sources was itself taking an enormous leap of faith.
The sheer number of name lists and details of royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Judah that are included in the Deuteronomistic History seem excessive or even unnecessary for a purely mythic history. Yet if they were all contrived or artificial, their coincidence with earlier realities is striking. Archaeological surveys have confirmed that many of the Bible’s geographical listings—of the towns and villages of the tribes, of the districts of the kingdom—closely match settlement patterns and historical realities in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.
Equally important, a relatively large number of extrabiblical historical records—mainly Assyrian—verify ninth-to-seventh-century BCE events described in the Bible. And no less significant, much of the Deuteronomistic History is written in late monarchic Hebrew, different from the Hebrew of postexilic times.
Can archaeology show that David and Solomon are historical figures? Even as the scholarly debate raged on, a discovery at the excavations of the ancient site of Tel Dan in northern Israel, near one of the sources of the Jordan River, altered the nature of the debate over the historical existence of David and Solomon.
A STONE FROM TEL DAN
Tel Dan is a biblical site excavated for many years by the veteran Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran and has been conclusively identified with Dan, the northernmost city of the kingdom of Israel. The excavations there revealed extensive sections of the Middle Bronze and Iron Age cities and uncovered a massive platform on which, it was supposed, sacrifices had been offered by Israelite priests and kings. Located far from Jerusalem, Dan would not be expected to offer much new evidence for an increasingly acrimonious debate over the historical existence of David and Solomon. But on July 21, 1993, Gila Cook, the surveyor for the Dan project, was working in a large open plaza outside the outer city gate of the Israelite city. A wall built of cracked and tumbled stones taken from earlier buildings marked the edge of the plaza. In the late afternoon sun, as she glanced at the wall’s rough construction, she spotted ancient writing on the smooth surface of one of the reused building stones.
It was a fragment of a triumphal inscription written in Aramaic, its ancient letters chiseled in black basalt. In the following year, two more fragments of the stele were discovered, altogether preserving thirteen lines of a longer royal declaration that had been set up in a public square. The king it commemorates was most probably Hazael, ruler of Aram Damascus, who was known both from the
Bible and Assyrian records as an important international player in the late ninth century BCE. His battles against Israel are recorded in the book of Kings, yet here in a contemporary inscription, translated according to the epigrapher Joseph Naveh and Avraham Biran, the voice of King Hazael himself was heard once again:
1.[……] andcut […]
2.[…] my father went up [against him when] he fought at […]
3. And my father lay down, he went to his [ancestors]. And the king of I[s-]
4. rael entered previously in my father’s land. [And] Hadad made me king.
5. And Hadad went in front of me, [and] I departed from [the] seven […-]
6. s of my kingdom, and I slew [seve]nty kin[gs], who harnessed thou[sands of cha-]
7. riots and thousands of horsemen (or horses). [I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab]
8. king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [ Jehoram kin-]
9.g ofthe House of David. And I set [their towns into ruins and turned]
10. their land into [desolation…]
11. other […and Jehu ru-]
12. led over Is[rael…and I laid]
13. siege upon […]
Though highly fragmentary and heavily reconstructed by Naveh and Biran, this inscription offers a unique perspective on the turbulent politics of the region in the ninth century BCE. It records, from the Aramean side, the territorial conflict between Israel and Damascus that led to frequent attacks and devastation. It tells how Hazael (described as the “son of a nobody” in an Assyrian source) launched a punishing offensive against his southern enemies.
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