The Oxford History of the Biblical World (42 page)

With varying degrees of reliability, several other biblical works may also be related to the early monarchic period. Classical historical-critical study of the Bible postulates that the Pentateuch in its present form weaves together four major literary strands, assembled in the first five biblical books to tell the story of preterritorial and prenational Israel from the creation of the world to the moment of entry into the Promised Land. One, perhaps the corporate work of many talented storytellers, is called the Yahwist because of the prominence of the name
Yahweh
for God in the book of Genesis. This source, or its author(s), is also known as J, from the German spelling of God’s name, “Jahweh.” The existence, nature, and dates of four sources of the Pentateuch are continually debated by biblical scholars. Thus, in considering J as a creation of the early monarchy, which is the dominant historical-critical judgment, the larger issue of the formation of the Pentateuch must be kept in mind.

Scholars favor placing J in the mid-tenth century
BCE
primarily because of the way it favors Judah, the eponymous progenitor of the tribe from which the Davidic dynasty is said to have come, as well as the territory that became the monarchy’s geographical core. In this interpretation, the successes of the first Israelite kings kindled nationalistic fervor and led to the composition of an epic that recounted the period before the monarchy, culminating in the glorious establishment of a territorial state whose dynastic ancestor was Judah. Thus, the promise to Abraham (in Gen. 15.18–21), for example, provides an etiology for later Davidic conquests of the peoples surrounding Israel’s tribal core. Whatever its origin, J represents a powerful and artful presentation of the proto-Israelite story, and it is plausible that the royal court of tenth-century Jerusalem, which probably produced monumental architecture of world-class quality, also gave birth to a superb work of literature.

Both David and Solomon are also traditionally associated with significant blocks of material in the Ketubim, or Writings, section of the Bible, a product of the postexilic
period. David’s musical abilities are highlighted in several legendary vignettes in Samuel, so it is no surprise that the superscriptions of seventy-three psalms name the king himself as their author; thirteen of them even report the situation under which the psalm was composed. Similarly, Solomon’s legendary wisdom links him with the authorship of the wisdom books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and the report of his extensive marital liaisons similarly connect him with the Song of Solomon. Such claims for Davidic and Solomonic authorship of significant portions of the Writings are clearly late and unreliable. Yet some of the materials in the putative Davidic and Solomonic compositions may have tenth-century features. Davidic charisma and Solomonic diplomacy, characteristics integrally connected to the sociopolitical roles these men played, make it reasonable to trace the beginnings of Israelite psalmodic and sapiential traditions back to the early court in Jerusalem.

Given the extent and grandeur of the early monarchy as depicted in biblical writings, it is striking that absolutely no references to Saul, David, Solomon, or the new Israelite kingdom appear in any ancient Near Eastern documents of the late eleventh or tenth century
BCE
. The first nonbiblical text that mentions a political entity in Iron Age Palestine comes from just after the split of the monarchy into two kingdoms at Solomon’s death. Around 925
BCE
, Pharaoh Shishak (Shoshenq I) marched into Palestine and, according to inscriptions on the wall of the Amun temple at Karnak, devastated a series of Palestinian towns or cities. At one of these, Megiddo, a fragment of a monumental stele bearing Shishak’s name has been uncovered, thus supporting the inscriptions’ claims about conquest. Unfortunately, the list of fallen sites does not name their national setting, nor is the configuration of the named sites particularly helpful in drawing the borders of late tenth-century Israel.

Two ninth-century inscriptions may attest to an Israelite monarchy in Palestine. One, an Aramaic inscription recently found at Tel Dan in northern Israel, was probably part of a basalt victory monument erected by a conqueror of Dan. It refers to the “king of Israel” and the “[king of] the house of David,” the two monarchies that existed in Palestine by the ninth century, and in so doing names “David.” The second inscription, discovered in 1868 in Moab, is known as the Mesha Stela because it was written to commemorate a victory by the Moabite king Mesha over Israel. A recent reevaluation of its lengthy text, which refers explicitly to Omri as the “king of Israel,” suggests that this monument also mentions the “house of David.”

But these finds are the exceptions. The biblical sources contain authentic political, economic, administrative, and topographic details of a tenth-century nation-state in much of Palestine and adjacent parts of Transjordan. Why then do other Near Eastern polities not acknowledge its existence? The answer probably resides in the circumstances of Israel’s emergence. During precisely these years a power vacuum existed in the eastern Mediterranean. Until the end of the Late Bronze Age, Egypt had maintained some degree of hegemony over Palestinian city-states. But after the collapse of Egypt’s Dynasty 20 around 1069
BCE
, the Tanite kings of Dynasty 21 presided over a protracted economic and political decline. This period of Egyptian weakness, lasting over a century (1069–945
BCE
), meant a relative paucity of monumental inscriptions. The kings had nothing to boast about in the usual fashion of royal texts; none would
have reported Egypt’s loss of its long-standing control over parts of the Palestinian corridor to Asia.

Similarly, the uncharacteristic silence of Assyrian sources of the late eleventh to early ninth centuries about the western territories it had long dominated can only mean that Assyrian control of the northern Levant had lapsed. Assyria, we know, suffered from the death of Tiglath-pileser I (ca. 1076
BCE
) until its revival as the Neo-Assyrian empire under Ashur-dan II (934–912
BCE
). Whether Assyria tried and failed to gain ascendancy over Syria-Palestine in the intervening years, or whether internal difficulties precluded foreign expeditions, is not clear. Babylonia likewise did not venture far beyond its borders for centuries after a raid on Assyria in 1081
BCE
, and thus its records would hardly have mentioned a new dynastic state to the west. The emergence of a national state in Palestine is thus related to the weaknesses in the traditional centers of power in the Near East at the end of the second millennium
BCE
.

Important information about the early Israelite monarchy does, however, appear in nonwritten material remains. Since the beginnings of archaeological research in Palestine in the nineteenth century, sites and regions mentioned in the vivid biblical stories of Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon have figured prominently in field projects. Yet this activity has not yielded a commensurate amount of information about the relatively short period of time represented by the early monarchy. Indeed, pinpointing that era in the archaeological record has proved to be fraught with controversy. Walls, artifacts, and buildings that some archaeologists assign to the time of David or Solomon are dated by others to earlier or later periods. In the absence of artifacts such as coins or inscriptions that allow for absolute chronology, the precise date of materials from the early Iron II period has been difficult to establish. Nonetheless, a tentative consensus now exists, and various structures and material objects of the late eleventh and early tenth centuries that throw light on the early monarchy will be discussed below.

What can the material remains tell us about the sociopolitical changes related to state formation? What environmental and technological features either determine or reflect a transition to a more complex sociopolitical organization? What sort of unity in the material culture suggests the advent of a centralized government with controls over an extensive territory? Not all of the reports of the older excavations contain the details needed to answer these questions. Thus the promise of archaeology to help us understand and reconstruct any period of biblical antiquity rests on more recent excavation projects—some that reexcavate the famous sites to which earlier archaeologists had been attracted, and others that investigate smaller sites that rarely can be identified with biblical place-names but that are representative of the village settlements inhabited by the majority of the population. Ultimately, establishing a fuller picture of the distribution and size of Iron IIA sites and their subsistence bases will contribute as much if not more to our knowledge of the early monarchy than all the past investigations of the major urban sites.

In answering the questions we have posed, techniques other than excavation are clearly valuable. One is archaeological survey, by which a region is systematically explored in order to locate and record its archaeological sites, their features, and relative sizes. By carefully sampling the surface finds of each site, the periods in which
they were occupied can be determined with reasonable confidence. The formation of a monarchy is inextricably related to fluctuations in population and also to the arrangement of population on the landscape. Because surveys allow us to estimate population size and density, they provide information that can be related to what we know about population patterns in emergent states generally. Furthermore, settlements of varying sizes in particular configurations—such as a town site surrounded by smaller “satellite” villages—provide evidence of the centralization of economic and social functions that correlate with political centralization.

Surveys also investigate environmental factors that have a bearing on ancient historical changes. The study of the landscape and ecology of a region is necessary to understand human exploitation of the environment. Geological, hydrological, climatic, and topographic variables all help determine the subsistence base of a given site. Did environmental conditions allow local populations in the past to produce enough food to supply the needs of the number of people who are estimated to have lived at a site in a given period? Or did the ecosystem impose limitations that required the populations there to augment their food supply by trade? Is the environment especially suited for the production of one kind of commodity, thus making it possible to accumulate surpluses that can be exchanged for goods produced at other sites? The answers to such questions have great potential for identifying the economic patterns that figure in the state systems’ mechanisms of control and exchange of goods.

Whether we can answer such questions depends not only on the presence and reliability of the data but also on the strategies we use to interpret them. Interpretive strategies drawn from ethnoarchaeology can help here. Ethnoarchaeology assumes that, in traditional societies, human beings today within a given environment relate to their material culture and their structures in ways similar to the manner in which the people of past societies in similar niches acted. With this assumption archaeologists can suggest how an ancient society may have functioned given the particular configuration of artifacts that they left behind. Much of the value of the social-science models and theories to which we shall next turn rests on the results of ethnographic research, which has amassed a considerable body of cross-cultural information about state formation and its relationship to the material world.

Especially since the 1960s, as a rich array of new data has become known about precolonial African sociopolitical systems, anthropologists’ ethnographically based models have become highly relevant to the question of Israelite monarchic beginnings. Although there are pitfalls in the anthropological discussions of state formation, such as the way ideas about the early state are colored by the familiarity of theorists with precapitalist, occidental (European) nation-states, the heuristic value of models that generalize behaviors and structures across cultures is considerable. These models authenticate the biblical presentation of an emergent monarchy, and they correct the traditional historical-critical tendency to see the monarchy as both a foreign institution and yet one that became uniquely Israelite. The anthropological work that has most influenced assessments of the early monarchy sees an evolutionary development of societies: from simple bands and/or tribes, to chiefdoms, and ultimately
to states. In this scheme, Saul’s rise to power and David’s early reign constitute the chiefdom stage. Thus, the fact that the texts designate both Saul and David with the Hebrew term
nãgîd
(1 Sam. 9.16; 10.1; 13.14; 25.30; 2 Sam. 5.2; 6.21; 7.8), translated “prince” or “ruler,” may characterize each man as a charismatic premonarchic or protomonarchic military leader, that is, as the head of a chiefdom—rather than as a dynastic
melek,
or “king,” as head of a state.

We may not, however, be entirely justified in associating Saul, and to some extent David, with chiefly office. Part of the problem lies in the difficulty of precisely dating the archaeological evidence for a chiefdom. Similarly, material evidence suggestive of Solomon and a full-fledged state may well originate in Davidic planning. Correlating different terminology—
nagid
and
melek
—with different kinds of sociopolitical leadership is also problematic, coming as it does from the much reworked Deuteronomic History of 1 and 2 Samuel. Furthermore, the critical aspect in identifying a chiefdom seems to be the number of levels of bureaucratic or administrative organization—in other words, how far the chief is structurally removed from the common folk. No means have yet been discovered to assess those levels in either the archaeological or the textual record. Finally, anthropologists themselves, in critiquing the evolutionary model, suggest that a chiefdom may be an alternative to a state system rather than precursor of it. Hence the question remains open whether we are justified in seeing the first two Israelite kings as chiefs. Fortunately, the answer does not seem to have serious consequences in assessing ancient Israel’s path to statehood.