Assessing David & Solomon

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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 Pinsky. Now archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and writer Neil Silberman have written an engaging, yet flawed book focusing on David and his son Solomon.

The Bible itself is our only primary source for David. He is not mentioned in any contemporaneous non-Biblical source. The Bible presents David in all his complexity, and the different Biblical texts are themselves complex, dating from various periods in the history of Israel and early Judaism. Each layer of Biblical tradition must therefore be interpreted. This process is similar to that used to interpret archaeological strata, especially in a city like Jerusalem, continuously occupied for thousands of years.

Jerusalem and David are inseparably linked; Jerusalem is the “City of David” (see 2 Samuel 5:9). Finkelstein and Silberman appropriately draw on the history of Jerusalem as it is known from texts and excavations to shed light on the contexts in which the various Biblical accounts of David were written. With their characteristically lively style, they synthesize Biblical and non-Biblical sources with the archaeological data in an ingenious reconstruction. In their view, David, who lived in the tenth century B.C.E. (they are not among the so-called “minimalists”), was a bandit who eventually gained control of the small, unfortified village of Jerusalem in the backwater region known as Judah. His immediate successors (including Solomon) were little more than chieftains. In the ninth century B.C.E., a dynasty founded by Omri came to power in the northern kingdom of Israel, built its capital at Samaria and, by marriage and diplomacy as well as by sheer force, incorporated into its ambit the tiny Judean entity formerly ruled by David. Only at that time—contrary to the Bible—was a “united monarchy” founded. This, in our authors’ view, was the origin of the oral traditions behind the Biblical accounts, mainly in 2 Samuel, of David’s establishment of a kingdom with a wide reach: “The founder of the dynasty of Judah in the tenth century is credited with the victories and the acquisitions of territory that were in fact accomplished by the ninth-century Omrides.” As internal 057and external pressures weakened the northern kingdom, however, the rulers of the southern kingdom of Judah saw their opportunity, and revised the earlier legends about David the bandit hero to make him the actual founder of the United Monarchy; that made David’s descendants “the only worthy contenders for rule over the once-great [northern] kingdom of Israel,” according to Finkelstein and Silberman.

The authors then develop increasingly elaborate scenarios: The first written version of the earlier oral legends concerning David’s rise to power and the establishment of his dynasty occurred only in the late eighth century B.C.E., after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians. This narrative was then elaborated during the reign of the Judahite king Manasseh in the seventh century B.C.E. According to this narrative thus elaborated, Manasseh, not Solomon, was involved in the international trade recounted in 1 Kings 9:26–28 and 10:28–29. Finkelstein and Silberman even imply that it was Manasseh, not Solomon, who built the First Temple. Still another revision of the Davidic story occurred in the late seventh century B.C.E., in the reign of King Josiah, in the first edition of the Deuteronomistic History, the great history of Israel in the Promised Land comprising the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The authors give more perfunctory attention to subsequent reworkings of the traditions, from the period of the Babylonian exile after 586 B.C.E. and beyond.

In broad terms, what Finkelstein and Silberman are doing is what every interpreter must do: carefully consider data from a variety of sources in reconstructing the past. There are serious problems, however, with their reconstruction. It is rooted in Finkelstein’s low chronology, according to which strata at sites such as Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, thought by most scholars to belong to the tenth century B.C.E.—that is, to the time of David and Solomon—actually date to the ninth century B.C.E. But what of Jerusalem? Here, relying on a selective reading of the evidence, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that there is scant, if any, proof of urbanization in Jerusalem prior to the ninth and probably not until the eighth century B.C.E., nor are there signs of literacy or of central state control during the tenth century B.C.E. elsewhere in Judah. So the Biblical accounts, we are told, must be wrong, dating as they do from later eras, whose realities they reflect.

Yet the authors are aware, as the bibliography tucked away at the back of the book shows (the book has no footnotes), that their views are at the very least 058debatable and in fact are not accepted by the majority of archaeologists and Biblical scholars.^b

Let’s look, for example, at Finkelstein and Silberman’s treatment of Jerusalem. During the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), there is little evidence from Jerusalem excavations of public architecture or even of significant occupation. Nor is there evidence of literacy from the site. On the basis of the archaeological evidence alone—or rather, the absence of archaeological evidence—it would be reasonable to conclude that Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age was at best an unimportant rural village. Yet there is other evidence, notably a half dozen or so Amarna letters from the Late Bronze Age found in Egypt in the late 19th century. These letters are part of an archive of several hundred clay tablets consisting largely of correspondence sent to Egyptian pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, especially Akhenaten (Amenophis IV), by kings of 059such major powers as Babylonia, Assyria and Hatti, and from Egyptian vassal rulers in city-states, including Byblos, Tyre, Akko, Megiddo, Gezer, Lachish, Shechem, Ashkelon, Damascus—and Jerusalem. Jerusalem in the 14th century B.C.E. was significant enough for its ruler, Abdi-Heba, to correspond with the pharaoh. It was, in fact, the most important city-state of the southern hill country, and it had an established scribal tradition. We would guess at none of this if we look only at the archaeological evidence from Jerusalem.

Finkelstein and Silberman need the lack of evidence from Late Bronze Age Jerusalem as a parallel to tenth-century Jerusalem. Although they are aware of the Late Bronze Age letters of Abdi-Heba to the pharaoh, they emphasize instead the lack of archaeological evidence at Jerusalem. In this way they characterize Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age as a “highland hamlet,” with a modest yet rustic palace and perhaps a similarly modest temple, along with “a few houses for the ruling elite, mainly the family of the king. Certainly it was no more significant than this.”

Watch out for the word “certainly” in scholarly writing. Like “no doubt,” it often means the opposite: Authors use such qualifiers when they have no hard evidence and must rely on the power of assertion. There is, however, a considerable body of discussion to the contrary, as the authors are aware, since they list some of it in their bibliography. They essentially ignore it.

Jerusalem of the Amarna age does indeed offer a parallel to the city of David and Solomon. There is evidence both of literacy and of public buildings in tenth-century Jerusalem—in the Biblical record. Biblical scholars generally agree that the traditions about David and Solomon were repeatedly revised over the course of many centuries. They also agree that many of the most gripping parts of the narratives about those kings have fictional qualities, such as invented dialogue. But this does not necessarily mean that the narrative is historically unreliable, as Finkelstein and Silberman assert. Although they did have their own agenda, the Deuteronomistic Historians also included in their work material that has no ideological purpose and thus can be considered authentic. For example, 060take the lists of David’s and Solomon’s officials, in 2 Samuel 8:16–18, 20:23–26, and in 1 Kings 4:1–6—all three, part of the Deuteronomistic History. The first two lists are for David’s reign, but these two different lists make little sense in a fictional creation of a later time: One would have been sufficient if the writer simply wanted to give the impression of a royal bureaucracy. An alternate explanation, then, is that the three lists are what they appear to be: genuine archives from the tenth century B.C.E. The differences in the names and order of the officials when the lists are compared reflect changes in royal administration during the reigns of David and Solomon. Especially important, all three lists also include individuals holding the positions of “recorder” and “secretary,” evidence for scribal activity in David and Solomon’s courts. Another detail, mentioned only in passing, is that David built a palace (2 Samuel 5:11); again, if such a detail were important to the Deuteronomistic Historians, why didn’t they make more of it? And, finally, there is the lengthy description of Solomon’s building projects in 1 Kings 5–7 (see also 1 Kings 9:15–19). So, just like the Amarna letters for 14th-century Jerusalem, the Bible provides data for 10th-century Jerusalem that has not (yet) surfaced in the archaeological record.

To put it somewhat differently, Biblical writers knew how to write internally consistent fiction without repetitions, extraneous details or inconsistencies. We find such fiction, for example, in the books of Ruth and Esther, but the narratives about David are not internally consistent. Rather, they are a composite in which the Deuteronomistic Historians of the late seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. not only presented their own developing and changing view of Israel’s first kings, but also preserved ancient traditions that were at odds with their own perspectives.

Finkelstein and Silberman consider Biblical data reliable when they support their reconstruction, but when the Biblical accounts are in conflict with their reconstruction, they judge them as unreliable or simply ignore them. Telltale evidence of the tenuous nature of their reconstruction is their inconsistent designations of David: He is simultaneously a bandit chief, a bandit king and a ruler.

Their argument from silence—the absence of evidence—is especially dangerous in a discipline where new discoveries are continually coming to light. In Jerusalem, for example, significant new remains have been uncovered by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron,^c and by Eilat Mazar.^d Evidence for literacy is also increasing, most recently in the discovery in 2005 of an alphabet preliminarily dated to the tenth century B.C.E. at Tel Zayit (Tell Zeitah) in excavations directed by Ron Tappy. These new finds will of course need to be fully published and interpreted, but at the very least they are a caution against conclusions presented as certain about Jerusalem and Judah in the tenth century.

As their argument moves along, Finkelstein and Silberman move from the hypothetical to the improbable to the absurd. Consider their treatment of the Goliath story. While correctly noting that David’s defeat of Goliath is a legend probably originally belonging to Elhanan (see 2 Samuel 21:19), a similar story in which Elhanan is the hero and transferred to David secondarily, Finkelstein and Silberman place this change in the late seventh century B.C.E., the time of the religious reform of the Judahite king Josiah. Why? Because the armor worn by Goliath resembles that worn by Greek hoplites (a military specialty) of the seventh through fifth centuries B.C.E. Greek mercenaries were indeed in the region then, especially in Egypt. Moreover, the theme of armor is similar to that in the Iliad, where almost an entire book is devoted to the making of the armor of Achilles, and the same epic has several accounts of champions in single combat. So, according to the reconstruction of Finkelstein and Silberman, someone in Josiah’s kingdom, reading Homer, used the Greek bard as a source for his invented account of the combat between David and Goliath. Of the many problems with this scenario, some are even unwittingly pointed out by the authors. Thus, they note that:

The biblical description of Goliath’s armor is not simply a fanciful creation; every single item has clear parallels to archaeologically attested Aegean weapons and armor from the Mycenaean period [13th–12th centuries B.C.E.] to classical times [fifth century B.C.E. onward]. In all periods within this general time frame, one can find metal helmets, metal armor, and greaves [leg armor]. Yet until the seventh century B.C.E., these items were relatively rare in the Greek world.

Let me see if I have this right. Armor like Goliath’s fits into almost any period, but the Greeks (the mainland Greeks, I suppose) did not use it until the seventh century B.C.E. So the elaborated version of the Goliath story in 1 Samuel 17 must date to the seventh century B.C.E. But is it really likely that someone in Manasseh’s court was reading Homer? And who at that time would have been convinced by the reworking? Not, I suspect, the Greeks, nor the “remnant of the Philistines” (Amos 1:8), nor the Egyptians, nor anyone in Judah either.

After a while, Finkelstein and Silberman’s reconstruction almost resembles a conspiracy theory: Think The Da Vinci Code or the identification of Shakespeare as Edward de Vere. Like these and similarly imaginative scenarios, Finkelstein and Silberman’s reconstruction is based on a highly selective and tendentious use of evidence. I find it unconvincing.

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 […]