David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (8 page)

DAVID’S CAREER AS A BANDIT IN THE HIGHLANDS OF
Judah is only part of the story of his rise to power. His biography, in the biblical narrative, is deeply intertwined with the tragic story of the northern Israelite hero Saul. For Saul—not David—was anointed as the first king of Israel. It is Saul who initially claims the spotlight in the first book of Samuel. David’s entrance to the drama comes only after it is apparent that Saul is too humanly flawed and impulsive to deliver the people of Israel from their enemies and to lead them piously. God’s favor—and Israel’s kingship—shifts from the northerner Saul to David, the man of the south.

Saul was, to all appearances, the greatest of his generation. He was imposing, charismatic, and courageous; “there was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he” (1 Samuel 9:2). Born of the tribe of Benjamin, he appeared on the stage of Israel’s history at a time of great crisis. At the battle of Ebenezer, the mighty Philistine armies routed the Israelite forces and captured the Israelites’ sacred relic, the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 4). In the wake of this national catastrophe, the elders of Israel traveled to Ramah, the home of Israel’s spiritual leader, the aged prophet Samuel, to demand that he appoint for them a king, that “we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). Despite his misgivings, Samuel followed divine instruction and, ceremoniously pouring a vial of oil over Saul’s head, announced: “Has not the
LORD
anointed you to be prince over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the
LORD
and you will save them from the hand of their enemies round about” (1 Samuel 10:1). He thereby declared Saul to be Israel’s first king and “messiah”—in the original sense of the Hebrew word
mashiach,
“anointed one.”

The chiefdom of Saul and Ish-bosheth

What went wrong in this original selection? How and why did David, a humble shepherd from Bethlehem, come to inherit the role of king of Israel? Those are the central questions that the biblical narrative answers, and as we will see, they are deeply connected to a basic conflict of later Israelite history—over the relative righteousness and power of the south as against the north. While David is the preeminent man of Judah and the southern hill country, Saul is the very personification of the righteous fury of the northern Israelite highlands. Once anointed, Saul became the greatest of holy warriors, leading the Israelites to stunning victories over the Ammonites, Amelekites, and Philistines. Yet even though Saul and his son Jonathan subsequently routed the Philistine invaders and continued to fight Israel’s enemies “on every side,” delivering Israel “out of the hands of those who plundered them” (1 Samuel 14:47, 48), Saul’s cultic missteps and madness grew, ultimately disqualifying him from his role as the true savior of Israel.

As David gains fame throughout Israel for his heroic toppling of Goliath and the women of Israel sing his praises—“Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7), Saul’s rage against David grows murderous. David has no choice but to flee for his life.

We have already described David’s bandit days in the wilderness, his growing fame throughout Israel, and his close escapes from the revenge of the increasingly unstable Israelite king. Yet the sudden end of Saul’s tragic reign comes not in a violent confrontation with David, but in a showdown with a formidable Philistine force far to the north. With his madness steadily building and with the Philistines victorious, he takes his own life in a tragic act of desperation on the battlefield (1 Samuel 31:4).

Saul’s tragic fall and David’s rise are thus inseparable in the biblical narrative. But is there any way to separate history from legend? What can archaeology tell us about the very beginnings of kingship in ancient Israel?

WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE?

The biblical story of King Saul raises some difficult questions. Was Saul a historical figure? If so, can archaeology help us determine exactly where and when he ruled? Still more complex is understanding the Bible’s contradictory depiction of Saul as hero, sinner, and tragic, tormented figure—being chosen by God as the savior of Israel and then unforgivingly condemned by him. Considering that both Saul and David were, on occasion, sinners, why was Saul singled out and utterly rejected for kingship while David was given an unconditional divine promise of eternal rule?

First, about his historical existence. Saul is not mentioned in any source outside the Bible, that is, in any ancient inscriptions or chronicles of neighboring countries. That absence of contemporary evidence is not surprising and should not lead us to conclude that Saul’s life story is entirely fictional. As we have already mentioned, writing was extremely rare in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel and their neighbors until the later Iron Age, and the exploits of an early local highlands ruler were unlikely to be recorded in public inscriptions or in the chronicles of Egypt or Mesopotamia, which are limited and fragmentary during the crucial centuries between the end of the Late Bronze Age and the ninth century
BCE
. The absence of contemporary confirmation outside the Bible is thus no reason to deny that an early Israelite leader named Saul
could
have existed. Indeed, as we will soon see, there are intriguing archaeological and historical indications that parallel the main points of Saul’s biblical biography.

The question of
when
Saul would have ruled is, as we have seen, difficult to answer. It hangs on a single, garbled biblical verse describing Saul’s age at the time of his anointment and the length of his reign: “Saul was…years old when he began to reign; and he reigned…and two years over Israel” (1 Samuel 13:1). Most biblical scholars have come to the reasonable conclusion that the text is defective and he must certainly have ruled for more than just a couple of years. Considering the long sequence of events attributed to Saul’s reign, in particular his military exploits across the Jordan, against the Philistines, and against the Amalekites—and taking into account the number two, which does appear in the text—scholars have speculated that the original number might have been twenty-two. Calculating backward from the sequence of later monarchs, for whose reigns we have some external chronological confirmation—and accepting at face value the biblical testimony of a forty-year reign for both Solomon (1 Kings 11:42) and David (2 Samuel 5:4)—most biblical historians have traditionally placed the reign of Saul in the late eleventh century, around 1030–1010
BCE
.

But we have already noted that these dates are not as precise as they seem. Generations of historians and biblical scholars have become accustomed to accepting them quite literally; at best they should be taken as only a very rough approximation. The dating of Saul, David, and Solomon is based on the Bible’s own chronology, and the numbers of years given for the reigns of David and Solomon—a “generation” of forty years each—seem suspiciously round. The garbled chronological information given about Saul compounds the problem. If the reigns of David and Solomon were shorter (closer to that of most of the later kings of Israel and Judah) and Saul ruled less than the hypothesized twenty or twenty-two years, the century made by the calculation of forty plus forty plus twenty could be considerably reduced. It is also possible that Saul and David’s reigns overlapped. If we follow this line of thought, Saul, David, and Solomon would all have lived sometime in the tenth century
BCE
. We can safely say no more than that. This chronological change might not seem to be so important, but as we will see later in this chapter, the
literal
acceptance of the biblical dates has led generations of archaeologists and historians to misinterpret the evidence about the early history of Judah and Israel.

How large was Saul’s kingdom? Despite the biblical claim that Saul was king of all Israel, the text is not completely precise on the extent of the territory that he ruled. Of course we must be extremely careful when we use the terms “king” and “kingdom.” For just as Rembrandt depicted Saul as an Oriental despot and medieval artists portrayed David and Solomon as contemporary European monarchs, the biblical authors, living centuries after the time of Saul, David, and Solomon, described them in royal terms appropriate to their own eras. Yet leaving aside for the time being the question of the nature of Saul’s kingship, the biblical text clearly localizes the traditions about him.

We are told that Saul was a Benjaminite by birth, and much of the described activity of his reign takes place in his tribal territory and the area immediately to its north. The places most prominent in the Saul stories—Ramah, Mizpah, Geba, Michmash, and Gibeon—are all located in the Benjaminite highlands immediately to the north of Jerusalem. Saul’s fateful search for the lost asses of his father (1 Samuel 9) takes him slightly farther north—from Benjamin, to the land of Shalishah, to the land of Sha’alim, and to the land of Zuph in the hill country of Ephraim. It is an area of isolated highland villages, extending north from Judah into the richer and more fertile hill country west of the Jordan.

After his anointment by the prophet Samuel, Saul’s activity extends to the hill country
east
of the Jordan, with his rescue of the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead. This area seems to have become an integral part of the territory associated with Saul and his family. After the death of Saul and his sons at the hands of the Philistines, it is the people of Jabesh who come to rescue their bodies and bury them “under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh” (1 Samuel 31:11–13). Even more significant is the fact that Saul’s heir, Ish-bosheth, was brought to the town of Mahanaim in the same region and was proclaimed “king over Gilead and the Ashurites and Jezreel and Ephraim and Benjamin and all Israel” (2 Samuel 2:9). “Gilead” refers to the northern part of the Transjordanian plateau, in which the towns of Mahanaim and Jabesh-gilead were located. All the other terms refer to the central hill country west of the Jordan, reaching to the Jezreel Valley in the north. This combination of peoples and areas on both sides of the Jordan River does not correspond to any later territorial unit in the history of Israel. Indeed the biblical description of Saul’s territorial legacy does not apply the geographic terms used for these regions in late monarchic times.

So how can we summarize the biblical evidence? Although the text declares that Saul was king of “all Israel,” his activities were restricted to the northern highlands to the west of the Jordan, with an extension across the Jordan to Gilead to the east. It is important to note that the biblical narrative records no independent actions taken by Saul anywhere in the highlands of Judah. All of the detailed descriptions of the settlements south and southwest of Jerusalem are contained exclusively in the stories connected with Saul’s pursuit of David or in the exploits of David alone. Saul, then, apparently did not rule over
all
Israel. The memories embedded in the Bible seem to suggest that he was a tenth-century
BCE
northern highland leader who claimed a large area on both sides of the Jordan, with a special core in the hill country of Benjamin,
north
of Jerusalem. So, what kind of “kingdom” was that?

THE RISE OF THE NORTHERN HIGHLANDS

If Judah of the tenth century
BCE
was a remote and isolated chiefdom, the highlands to the north were very different. We get a quite remarkable picture from the large-scale archaeological surveys that have been conducted in the hill country to the north of Jerusalem and from excavations of some important Iron I sites in that area. We now know that in the later phase of Iron I—the late eleventh and tenth century
BCE
—the territory in which the Bible localizes Saul’s territory was relatively
densely
inhabited as the result of a major settlement shift. A dramatic demographic expansion is evident in the number and distribution of settlement sites, and in their growing size. From only about twenty-five recorded sites in the area between Jerusalem and the Jezreel Valley in the preceding Late Bronze Age, the number skyrockets to more than 230 in the late Iron I period. Their estimated population was just over forty thousand, compared to less than five thousand in the entire hill country of Judah.

Environment obviously played a major role in the area’s economic difference from rugged, semiarid Judah. Large parts of the highlands north of Jerusalem are well suited for extensive agriculture. The plateau of Benjamin, the small fertile valleys to the south of Shechem, the larger ones between that city and the Jezreel Valley in the north, as well as the less arid eastern flank of the highlands, offered their inhabitants wide areas for the cultivation of grain. Even the more rugged parts of the western side of the northern hill country were extensively terraced for vineyards and olive groves. Indeed, excavations in some of the more important mounds in this area revealed evidence for public construction and clues for significant administrative activity: an elaborate storage facility at Shiloh (reported in the Bible as a central shrine in the later days of the period of the judges) and a possible continuity of activity in the ancient monumental temple of Shechem.