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Digging Themselves Deeper

Reviewed by Raanan Eichler

David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition
by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman
Free Press, 2006, 342 pages


Since the dawn of archaeology in the land of Israel and the Near East, people have wondered whether archaeological findings may prove or disprove the stories contained in the Bible. Rarely, however, have archaeological findings proved decisive: Different scholars, though working with the same data, have reached widely different conclusions. Nevertheless, if we organize schematically the Bible’s basic historical narrative into discrete time periods, we can reach a partial consensus. Most scholars would agree, for example, that regarding the periods of the patriarchs and the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt, archaeology can neither prove nor disprove the events described in the Bible. Nor is it likely to be able to do so in the future, since not only are these events not the sort to have left the kind of evidence archaeologists might discover today, but the lack of such a discovery is not sufficient proof that these events did not take place.

Most scholars also acknowledge that the Bible’s description of the periods of the divided kingdom and the exile are, by and large, accurate. The reason is simple: A short time into the divided kingdom period (about 850 B.C.E.), the neo-Assyrian—and later, neo-Babylonian—empire began to expand westward toward the land of Israel. Both the Assyrians and the Babylonians set down accounts of their exploits on clay tablets and stone stelae, which have withstood the vagaries of time. These accounts of interactions with the Israelites and Judahites largely conform to the Bible’s narrative.

Thus, the controversy in biblical archaeology today centers mainly on those periods that lie in the middle: The time of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness and their conquest of Canaan; the premonarchic period of the Judges; and the united kingdom of David and Solomon. Whether scholars like it or not, the question of how similar these periods were to the biblical narrative—if they were indeed similar at all—is one with enormous religious, cultural, and political implications. This means that the debate is often fierce, and always interesting.

In 2001, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman entered this fray with their popular book The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Free Press). Finkelstein is a controversial Israeli archaeologist who, at the time of his book’s publishing, served as the director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology. Silberman is a Belgium-based expert on the history of archaeology and a frequent writer on archaeological topics. In The Bible Unearthed, the authors went beyond the issue of the historicity of the Bible, asking moreover what archaeology can tell us about the context of and motivations for the biblical stories. Their original (and rather extreme) answer to these questions was that most of the biblical historical narrative is political propaganda composed in Judah at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., during the reign of King Josiah. Consequently, it contains very little historical value for the earlier periods it purports to describe, though it can illuminate the period in which it was composed.

David and Solomon, Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s second joint project, is a natural continuation of The Bible Unearthed, and focuses on the biblical narrative for the period of the united kingdom of Judah and Israel (the tenth century B.C.E.) under David and his son, Solomon. The books of Samuel and Kings describe these figures as leading the kingdoms of Judah and Israel out from under the yoke of Philistine domination and into a vast, powerful, and wealthy monarchy whose influence reached as far as the Euphrates River. Finkelstein and Silberman ask: Did this narrative in fact originate in the tenth century B.C.E., and is it accurate? And if not, when was it composed, and why?

  

 


The thesis presented here is somewhat more subtle than that of their previous book. It argues that the biblical narrative of David and Solomon has a small but significant historical core whose origins lie in the realia of the tenth century B.C.E. During the following few centuries, however, this core became shrouded in successive layers of Judahite political propaganda that was either invented out of whole cloth, adapted from the realities of these later periods, or co-opted from situations that existed in the neighboring kingdom of Israel.

 

The historical core consists, according to the authors, of orally transmitted tales that derived from the tenth century B.C.E., but that were written down and compiled over 200 years later. They attempt to identify these tales by searching for geographical-demographic clues: If a story contains background elements that characterize reality in the tenth century B.C.E. but not later, the story likely has authentic origins.

Interestingly, the stories they so identify tend to deal with the earliest period of the David and Solomon narrative. They include many of the stories known in biblical research as “The History of David’s Rise,” which depicts future-king David and his band of outlaws roaming the wilderness of Judah while fleeing David’s predecessor and tormentor, the Israelite king Saul. Clues here include the prominence given to the Philistine city of Gath, which was destroyed in the ninth century B.C.E. Also included is the basic description of the kingdom of Saul himself: Saul’s territory is described as being centered in the Benjaminite highlands north of Jerusalem and extending to the Jabbok River area in Transjordan. The authors believe that this description matches demographic trends reflected in the archaeological record, and is backed up by a careful reading of the famous stele of the Egyptian king Sheshonq I, commemorating his campaign in Canaan.

Finkelstein and Silberman continue by arguing that the rest of the David and Solomon narrative does not make sense in a tenth-century-B.C.E. context: David’s supposed conquests in and control over the land of Israel are not reflected in the archaeological record, and the soldiers required for his far-flung battles—battles as far away as Aram-Damascus—could not have been supplied by Judah, which was, at the time, no more than a “sparsely settled hinterland.” Moreover, it is inconceivable that Solomon’s supposedly vast wealth and international power could have been centered in Jerusalem, which was then no more than a “highland village,” nor could he possibly have ruled over a large kingdom in the land of Israel, which lacked the level of literacy and urbanization necessary for such an administration. 

In order to explain when (and why) these descriptions were composed, the authors turn to the archaeological data. By splitting the biblical narrative into different strata, they are able to assign each stratum a context in some later period over the next 400 years. Thus, it emerges that the stories of David’s conquests and kingdom were more likely composed in ninth-century-B.C.E. Judah, then a vassal state of neighboring Israel, the far more powerful of the two kingdoms. The Judahite court, the authors explain, sought to show that the “united kingdom” of Israel and Judah had actually originated a century earlier, under the leadership of Judah, and not Israel. So, too, do the descriptions of Solomonic grandeur originate in early-seventh century-B.C.E. Judah, with the goal of providing a precedent for King Manasseh’s integration of Judah into the Assyrian international economy, and the grandiose depiction of the Temple in Jerusalem is actually from the late eighth century B.C.E., when Jerusalem’s authority needed shoring up in the face of an incoming flux of refugees from nearby Israel.

  

 


On the one hand, the thesis presented in David and Solomon takes a considerably less minimalist stance toward the Bible than might be expected from the authors of The Bible Unearthed. While in their earlier book, Finkelstein and Silberman classified most of the Bible’s historical writing as late-seventh-century-B.C.E. political propaganda, speaking only of vague “nuggets” of original material, the nuggets in the David and Solomon narrative have now solidified and enlarged to include the basic narrative of Saul and that of David’s rise to power. On the other hand, this is still a far more minimalist position than that of traditional biblical scholars and biblical archaeologists, the former of whom tend to attribute most of the writing about David’s court to the time of Solomon, and both of whom would balk at the rejection of the very existence of the united kingdom. Overall, the claims presented in this book as compared with the mainstream view can be summarized thus: (i) Most of the David and Solomon narrative has been proven by archaeology to be fictitious; (ii) archaeology can point to later contexts within which the various strata of this narrative may have been composed; and (iii) even those elements with tenth-century-b.c.e. origins could not have been written down until the late eighth century b.c.e., when literacy in the land of Israel became widespread. Let us evaluate each of these claims.



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