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Assessing David & Solomon

From the Hypothetical to the Improbable to the Absurd

By Michael D. Coogan

056 David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (New York: Free Press, 2006), 343 pp. $26.00 David son of Jesse—warrior, king, poet, sinner—has fascinated writers, artists and scholars for more than three millennia. More space is devoted to him and compositions attributed to him than to any other human being in the Hebrew Bible except Moses. In the last five years, eminent scholars such as Baruch Halpern and Steven McKenzie have turned their attention to David, as has the poet laureate Robert […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Nadav Na’aman, “Cow Town or Royal Capital? Evidence for Iron Age Jerusalem,” BAR 23:04, and Jane Cahill, “Jerusalem in David and Solomon’s Time,” BAR 30:06. For further details, see many of the essays in the following collections, to all of which Finkelstein himself has contributed and in which his views are challenged at length: A.G. Vaughn and A.E. Killebrew, eds., Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); W.G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003); John Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (London: T & T Clark, 2004); and T.E. Levy and T. Hingham, eds., The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text, and Science (London: Equinox, 2005).

2.

Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” BAR 25:01.

3.

Eilat Mazar, “Did I Find King David’s Palace?” BAR 32:01.