David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (3 page)

Unfortunately, scholars have generally taken these round numbers as precise indications for the dates of the early kings:

The truth is that we can take these symbolic biblical descriptions only as a general indication of the time period when David and Solomon would have lived rather than a precise chronological reckoning of the date and extent of each of their reigns. The problem is compounded by the fact that we cannot even presume that Saul and David reigned in a neat chronological sequence, one after the other, rather than having overlapping reigns. To make a long story short, we simply do not know the exact number of years that David and Solomon each ruled. The most we can say with some measure of security is that they probably both reigned sometime in the tenth century bce.

THE SEARCH FOR DAVID AND SOLOMON BEGINS

The tenth century bce must therefore be our starting point for a search for the historical David and Solomon. As we know from the archaeological remains excavated all over Israel during the last hundred years, the tenth century bce was a time of upheaval. At city sites and villages, there is evidence of a great transformation. The disintegration of the old palace-based civilization of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–c. 1150) had given way to the rise of new territorial entities and ethnic groups throughout the eastern Mediterranean region and much of the ancient Near East. The independent Phoenician city-states along the northern coast were growing in commercial power. The Philistines in the southern coastal cities were expanding their territory and maintaining close links with a weakened Egypt. Some of the old Canaanite cities in the valleys, like Megiddo, were experiencing a brief Indian summer of prosperity. And in the highlands long remembered as the birthplace of Israel and home of its royal traditions, a dense network of rustic hilltop farming villages in formerly sparsely inhabited regions marked the emergence of a culture and a society whose members would later identify themselves as “Israelites.”

Archaeology is today the most important tool at our disposal for reconstructing the evolution of ancient Israelite society. Elsewhere in the ancient world, archaeological research has also transformed our vision of the past. The early history of Greece can now be told without resort to the mythic biographies of Minos, Theseus, or Agamemnon as primary sources. The rise of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations can be understood through inscriptions, potsherds, and settlement patterns rather than simply in tales of ancient wonders and semidivine kings. The discrepancies between art and literature, on the one hand, and documented, verifiable history and archaeological evidence, on the other, have made us see the founder myths of antiquity for what they are: shared expressions of ancient communal identity, told with great power and insight, still interesting and worthy of study, but certainly not to be taken as literal, credible records of events.

Such is the case with David and Solomon, who are depicted in the biblical narrative as founding fathers of the ancient Israelite state. Yet we can now say—as we will argue in considerable detail throughout this book—that many of the famous episodes in the biblical story of David and Solomon are fictions, historically questionable, or highly exaggerated. In the following chapters we will present archaeological evidence to show that there was no united monarchy of Israel in the way that the Bible describes it. Although it seems probable that David and Solomon were actual historical characters, they were very different from their scriptural portraits. We will show that it is highly unlikely that David ever conquered territories of peoples more than a day or two’s march from the heartland of Judah. We will suggest that Solomon’s Jerusalem was neither extensive nor impressive, but rather the rough hilltop stronghold of a local dynasty of rustic tribal chiefs. Yet the point of this book is not simply to debunk stories from the Bible. Alone among the great legends of Near Eastern and classical antiquity, the Bible retains its power to inspire hopes and dreams for living communities around the world even today. Our goal is to show how the legends of David and Solomon developed, and how they came to guide western thinking and shape western religious and political traditions in important ways.

As we proceed through the following chapters, we will analyze and attempt to date the various layers of the biblical story, describing the main issues in the now-bitter scholarly disagreements about its historical reliability, and presenting new archaeological evidence that is central to that debate.
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We will show, step by step, period by period, how the historical reality of ancient Judah—as revealed by archaeological research—gave rise both to a dynasty and to a legend that was transformed and expanded in a process of historical reinterpretation that continues even today.

For the now-familiar biblical story of David and Solomon is neither a straightforward historical record nor a wholly imaginary myth. It evolved from a variety of ancient sources, adding details, garbling contexts, and shifting its meaning as the centuries rolled on. It contains a complex stratigraphy of folktales, ballads, and dramatic narratives, which, taken as a whole, have little to do with the actual lives of the main characters and almost everything to do with the changing concept of the nation and the king. As we will see, the recognition of this complex process of literary and historical evolution, backed by archaeological evidence, is the key to understanding the true character of the biblical David and Solomon story—and to appreciating its timeless insights about the nature of kingly power and national identity.

The discovery of the real lives and roles of David and Solomon in the tenth century bce is therefore just the beginning. The question of how and why their legends survived the vicissitudes of antiquity to become one of the strongest images of western civilization—and what values and dreams they reflected in every successive period—is, as we hope to show, a story no less fascinating than the biblical narrative itself.

Area of David’s activity as a bandit in southern Judah and the Shephelah.