David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (5 page)

As archaeological surveys have shown, this area had begun to be developed as early as the ninth century
BCE
. Two Judahite forts—at Beer-sheba and Arad—were established in the Beer-sheba Valley to control the roads from Hebron to the desert regions to the south. It was in this period that the Shephelah also came under centralized royal control. Excavations at two important Judahite sites in this region—Lachish and Beth-shemesh—show significant building activities in the ninth century, when they became the most important administrative centers for Judahite rule in the west. It is significant that none of these places is mentioned in the cycle of David stories, not even as a geographical aside.

Thus the description of a “wild south”—of lawlessness and banditry in the fringe areas of Judah, so central to the David story—does not fit the situation in the earliest possible period when “The History of David’s Rise” was put into writing. A scribe who lived in Jerusalem in the late eighth century
BCE
(or later) would not have described such a reality and had no reason to invent it. In fact, there is another important clue that takes us back another century and a half, suggesting that the story must have originated even before the end of the ninth century
BCE
—only a few generations after David’s time.

That clue is the prominence of the Philistine city of Gath in the David stories. It is there that David twice seeks refuge from Saul’s vengeance; and its king, Achish, is described as a powerful ruler, controlling territories and villages well beyond his city. The central role that Achish plays in the gathering of the Philistine forces before the climactic battle with Saul (1 Samuel 29) suggests a prominent role for Gath in a wider coalition, described in the Bible, of five Philistine cities that extended up the coast, which also included Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron. That coalition appears in some other accounts of the Philistines in the Bible, such as Joshua 13:3 and 1 Samuel 6:17, which refer to the political organization of the five Philistine cities. Interestingly, in late monarchic and exilic texts (those parts of the Bible written in the late seventh and sixth century
BCE
), such as Jeremiah 25:20 and Zephaniah 2:4, only
four
Philistine cities are mentioned, and Gath is left off the list. Likewise, seventh century Assyrian royal records refer only to Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron in their descriptions of Philistine territory. Gath is not mentioned at all.

What happened? According to 2 Kings 12:17, during the reign of King Jehoash of Judah (around 830
BCE
), Hazael, the king of Damascus, campaigned in the Shephelah and conquered the city of Gath.
*
This biblical report has now been confirmed by archaeological excavations at Tell es-Safi, the site of ancient Gath, which show that the city suffered a major destruction toward the end of the ninth century
BCE
. Though it had previously been the most important city in the Shephelah and possibly the largest in the entire country, Gath dramatically declined in size and importance in the following centuries. We know from Assyrian records that a century later it was no more than a small town under the control of the coastal city of Ashdod. It is unlikely, therefore, that anyone living after the late ninth century
BCE
would have chosen Gath to be such an important locale in the stories of David if there had not at least been a memory or a folk tradition of its lost greatness.

Indeed, when we attempt to reconstruct the demographic conditions much closer to the time of the historical David, the general setting of the biblical narrative meshes closely with the archaeological evidence. In the tenth century
BCE
, Philistine Gath seems to have been the most important regional power. The Judahite hill country, especially to the south of Hebron, was sparsely settled, with only a few small villages in the entire area. It was a wild and untamed fringe area, effectively outside government control. Could this be just a coincidence? Or are there additional indications that at least some parts of the story of David’s rise to power reflect a shared communal memory of actual historical events?

IN THE REALM OF ABDI-HEBA

Settlement patterns provide only the physical template. They may offer us a date and spatial distribution of sites in a given period, but they give only indirect evidence of political, social, and economic context. Archaeologists working in various parts of the world, however, have attempted to link certain settlement patterns with particular social formations and modes of existence. In the case of the Judean highlands in the period before the rise of the kingdom of Judah, we can indeed recognize a characteristic way of life. Because of the limitations to agriculture, due to the rocky, wooded terrain and the limited rainfall, the number of sedentary communities was relatively small. Only a handful of permanent sites, including Jerusalem, have been recorded in archaeological surveys of the entire territory throughout the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (c. 1550–900
BCE
). Most were tiny villages. There was no real urban center, and not even a single fortified town. In fact, the small sedentary population of the southern highlands can be estimated, on the basis of settlement size, at no more than a few thousand. This contrasts sharply with the lowland territories to the west; there, the major Canaanite and later Philistine city-states each contained dozens of towns and villages, with a large settled population in the main centers and outlying agricultural lands.

Since the primeval landscape of rocky terrain and a thick cover of woods in the Judean highlands could accommodate only limited cultivation, it appears that the proportion of the nonsedentary groups—shepherds and stock raisers—in the overall population was relatively high. Extensive archaeological surveys in the southern highlands have identified evidence for this mobile population of herders in the form of several Late Bronze Age cemeteries, located far from permanent settlements, that probably served as tribal burial grounds.

The Judean hill country was hospitable to this special mix of settled and pastoral groups because of the variety of landscapes and opportunities it offered. The marginal lands of the Judean Desert and the Beer-sheba Valley could be used for winter pasture and seasonal dry farming, while the central ridge offered land for fields and orchards, and pastureland for the flocks in the summer when the other areas were parched.

Sparsely settled rural societies with a mix of sedentary and pastoral populations are often organized in what anthropologists describe as “dimorphic” chiefdoms, denoting a single community stretching over a significant territory, in which two forms of subsistence, farming and herding, exist side by side. They generally rely on a kin-based political system in which the settled villagers and mobile herders are loosely ruled by a chieftain or a strongman, who resides with his small entourage in a central stronghold.

The characterization of early Judah as a dimorphic chiefdom has some suggestive historical confirmation in an era several centuries before David’s time. A collection of almost four hundred cuneiform tablets was discovered by chance in the late nineteenth century by local peasants digging at the site of el-Amarna in Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo. Written in cuneiform script in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, they form part of the diplomatic correspondence between Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV (the famous Akhenaten), on the one hand, and rulers of Asiatic states and Canaanite city-states, on the other, in the fourteenth century
BCE
. At this time the Egyptians administered all of Canaan as a province and maintained garrisons in a few major cities, but left most of the country under nominal local control. The lowlands were divided between a number of relatively densely settled territories ruled from city-states, while the highlands comprised much larger but sparsely inhabited territories. The information contained in the Amarna archive conforms quite closely with the archaeological evidence, and its personal and political details offer us a unique glimpse at the structure of society and its inner tensions in the area that would later be called Judah—and that would some centuries later become the scene of David’s rise.

In the time of the Amarna archive, Jerusalem was ruled by a certain Abdi-Heba. The six letters he dispatched to Egypt and the letters of his neighbors provide valuable information on his city, his territory, and his subjects. The territory under his control stretched from the area of Bethel, about ten miles to the north of Jerusalem, to the Beer-sheba Valley in the south, and from the Judean Desert in the east to the border between the hill country and the Shephelah in the west—a rough approximation of the core area later controlled by the kingdom of Judah. This area contained a small number of villages and groups of pastoral nomads—called
Shosu,
or “plunderers,” in the Egyptian records—who were found in all parts of the country but were especially dominant in the relatively empty regions of the steppe and the highlands. On the basis of the archaeological evidence, we can assume that they formed a relatively large portion of the population of Abdi-Heba’s realm.

Abdi-Heba’s activities and influence extended over a much larger area—all the way to the Jezreel Valley in the north. A particular flash point of tension was the border with the more populous city-states in the lowlands to the west. In light of possible comparisons to the time of David, it is significant that control of the crops and lands of the border towns located between the hill country and the Shephelah was a matter of constant contention between Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem and his rival Shuwardata, the ruler of the city-state of Gath.

Jerusalem, mentioned in the Amarna letters as Abdi-Heba’s seat of power, could not have been more than a small village located on the same ridge that David’s Jerusalem later occupied. Over a century of modern archaeological investigations in Jerusalem have revealed no significant remains from Abdi-Heba’s era. Only isolated tombs and a few Late Bronze pottery sherds have been found on the ridge of the later City of David—especially in the vicinity of the city’s only permanent source of freshwater, the Gihon spring. Abdi-Heba’s Jerusalem was probably no more than a highland hamlet, with a modest palace a great deal more rustic than the ornate princely residences in the main lowlands cities. A modest temple may have stood next to it, perhaps surrounded by a few houses for the ruling elite, mainly the family of the regional chief. Certainly it was no more significant than this.

The Amarna letters cover only a short period of time—a few decades in the fourteenth century
BCE
. Does the situation they describe apply to the centuries that followed, or was it an exception? If we look over the millennia of human settlement in this region, the same pattern emerges time after time. In the marginal southern highlands the proportion of herders and shepherds in the overall population was always significant. Towns and even settled villages were few in number, existing as isolated outposts in an ever-shifting landscape of herding and stock raising in the forests and throughout the desert fringe. Dynasties may have changed; a village may have been abandoned and a new one may have been established; but the general picture of the southern highlands remained that of a sparsely settled dimorphic chiefdom, ruled from one of its main villages as a loose kinship network of herders and villagers. These overall settlement patterns remained quite constant until the rise of the kingdom of Judah in the ninth century
BCE
, a full century after the time of David. These archaeological and anthropological observations can provide us with a reconstruction of the human landscape in his time—and perhaps an explanation of his rise to power as well.

OUTLAWS AND KINGS

The repeated appeals of Abdi-Heba for help from the Egyptian administration indicate that the political situation in the highlands was turbulent and unstable. With its difficult environment and low population, the highlands provided little agricultural surplus with which a ruler could recruit substantial armed forces or maintain more than a symbolic appearance of authority. Working from a small stronghold with a scribe at his side, Abdi-Heba could do little more than complain to the pharaoh about raids from the lowland city-states on his own already hard-pressed peasantry. And the threats were not only external. There is evidence that even
within
highland regimes like Abdi-Heba’s, economic and social pressures were building among the population. A potentially dangerous form of resistance to the established order was on the rise.

The Amarna letters refer repeatedly to two groups that acted outside of the sedentary system of the Egyptian-controlled towns and villages. We have already mentioned the
Shosu,
the mobile communities of herders in the highlands and the steppe. The second group, mentioned more frequently, is more important for our discussion: the Apiru. This term, sometimes transliterated as Habiru, was once thought to be related to the term “Hebrews,” but the Egyptian texts make it clear that it does not refer to a specific ethnic group so much as a problematic socioeconomic class. The Apiru were uprooted peasants and herders who sometimes turned bandits, sometimes sold themselves as mercenaries to the highest bidder, and were in both cases a disruptive element in any attempt by either local rulers or the Egyptian administration to maintain the stability of their rule.

In his dispatches to Egypt, Abdi-Heba—like many other contemporary Egyptian vassals—accuses his opponents of joining the Apiru, or giving their land to the Apiru, who were perceived as hostile to Egyptian interests. Many were probably uprooted peasants, displaced or escaping from the brutal feudal system in the towns and villages of the lowlands. There, the peasants formed the lowest level of the social hierarchy, subject to heavy taxation, forced labor, and harassment by the local authorities. Married peasants with families had little to do except try to survive on their land. But when the pressures built and desperation became widespread, young peasants, especially those who had not yet established families, could seek freedom by escaping to areas where the power of the local and foreign rulers was weak. There they could join bandit gangs or live by their wits as roving soldiers for hire. For this way of life, the Judean highlands provided an almost ideal locale.