Did Pharaoh Sheshonq Attack Jerusalem?

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“In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt marched against Jerusalem.”

(1 Kings 14:25)

Did he really? If he did, this would be the earliest event in Biblical history for which we have a contemporaneous reference in an extrabiblical source.

And if he did, that can tell us, based on an extrabiblical source, when King Solomon ruled over a United Kingdom of Israel and Judah, for Rehoboam was Solomon’s son and king of Judah. And if we know when Solomon ruled, we would know when his father, King David, ruled (as well as when Rehoboam and the other kings of Israel and Judah ruled after him).^a

One thing almost all scholars agree on: The Egyptian ruler that the Bible refers to as Shishak is in fact Pharaoh Sheshonq I (explained in “How Sheshonq Became Shishak”). The problems arise in tallying the information we know about Sheshonq with the references in the Bible to Shishak. Based on the Egyptian records, can we say that Sheshonq marched against Jerusalem? Maybe Sheshonq was making up all his claims about a campaign to the north. (Not so silly; Egyptian pharaohs often did that.)

Sheshonq was the founding monarch of the 22nd Dynasty and ruled for 21 years. His reign lasted from about 945 to 925 B.C.E.¹ during what modern Egyptologists call Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. 044 He was of Libyan descent and his dynasty is sometimes referred to as the Libyan dynasty—he was not a “true” Egyptian. It was a time of turmoil in Egypt when a foreign military venture to the north, emulating the great pharaohs of Eygpt’s bygone imperial age, might be a means to consolidate power.²

To celebrate his supposed military victories in the Levant (including the area of Judah and Israel), Sheshonq erected a great colonnaded forecourt to the temple of Amun in Karnak, a gate of which is the famous Bubastite Portal (named for a city in the Delta). This portal features a large 20-foot-high engraving of Sheshonq smiting his Asiatic enemies. The Egyptian gods, especially Amun, are shown supporting him. A speech by the god Amun written in hieroglyphic calls Sheshonq “my son” and expresses divine support for Sheshonq’s conquests (see “Egyptian God Amun Welcomes His Son”).³

Finally, and for our purposes most importantly, 045 the Bubastite Portal portrays rows of tiny figures of bound prisoners with little cartouche-like ovals (or rings) below the neck and covering most of the body. These ovals are called name-rings. In each name-ring is a toponym (place-name) that Sheshonq presumably conquered on his military campaigns—if he wasn’t inventing his victories.

There are at least 11 rows of these name-rings containing toponyms on the Bubastite Portal. Many of them have been partially or wholly obliterated. Some are so worn that they are difficult or impossible to read. More than 100, however, remain largely intact.

The name Sheshonq was identified on the Bubastite Portal shortly after Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in the 1820s. The identification of the toponyms in the name-rings took a little longer—and there are still scholarly arguments about many of them. But the question naturally arose as to the relationship between the Bubastite inscriptions and the Biblical reference to Shishak at the gates of Jerusalem. This debate consumed scholars for much of the 20th century.

This debate is indeed a parade example of the difficulties that can arise in aligning a Biblical text with an archaeologically recovered text. Some scholars, like the American Biblical archaeologist William F. Albright, argued that Sheshonq had simply copied some of the names from older lists inscribed by previous kings on other parts of the Karnak complex in order to give the impression that he, too, was a great conqueror.⁴ The great German Biblical authority Martin Noth, on the other hand, refuted this by showing that many of the place-names included in the list had not been named in earlier inscriptions and that even those that had were sometimes written differently.⁵

One problem, however, is that Jerusalem, which is the only city mentioned in Kings, is not among the surviving toponyms on the Bubastite Portal. Perhaps it was obliterated by the ravages of time. Or perhaps it was omitted because it, unlike the other toponyms, had no claim to being destroyed. The Bible itself tells us that Shishak/Sheshonq “carried off the treasures of the House of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace … He even carried off all the golden shields that Solomon had made” (1 Kings 14:25–26). Rehoboam apparently saved Jerusalem and his throne by this tribute to the Egyptian monarch. That may well be why Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Bubastite Portal.

If Sheshonq campaigned elsewhere in Judah and Israel and destroyed the places mentioned on the Bubastite Portal, why isn’t this mentioned in the Bible? The answer could well be that the Biblical author of Kings was interested only in Jerusalem; he was writing a religious, not a political, tract. Moreover, the story was later picked up by the Chronicler, who tells us that Shishak indeed “took [or captured] the fortified towns of Judah” (2 Chronicles 12:4). The Chronicler also adds some information on the makeup of the Egyptian army. Was the Chronicler citing an independent source to which he had access, or was he simply expanding on the story in Kings?⁶

Many of the cities mentioned on the Bubastite Portal were in the northern kingdom of Israel ruled by Jeroboam, who had rebelled against Solomon and Rehoboam. The Biblical text (1 Kings 11:40) seems to indicate that Jeroboam was an ally or vassal of Shishak’s—so why was the Egyptian king now attacking his ally Jeroboam?

And why are neither Rehoboam nor Jeroboam, nor their kingdoms, mentioned on the Bubastite Portal? From the way Sheshonq describes it, one would think that the Levant was a land of independent city-states, not one of national kingdoms. Perhaps this was because the Egyptians, who considered their king a god, simply refused to recognize 048 the legitimacy of other sovereign states. Like the Biblical text, the Karnak text is also a religious text, not only a political one.

These are the kinds of questions scholars debated.

A critical find in convincing many scholars that Sheshonq’s campaign was indeed real came from the site of Megiddo, which is mentioned in a name-ring on the Bubastite Portal. In 1925, American archaeologists from the University of Chicago were preparing for their new excavation of Megiddo. In this connection, they naturally examined the records and work of the German archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher who had excavated there 20 years earlier. One of the Chicago workmen came upon a fragment of an inscription in the dump of Schumacher’s excavation that contained cartouches of Sheshonq! The fragment was part of a victory stela that once stood at the site. Stelae like this were customarily set up as victory monuments at places Egyptians had conquered and occupied. Such stelae have been found at Beth-Shean and Tel Sahhib (erected by Sethos I) and at Byblos, Tyre and elsewhere (erected by Ramesses II).⁷

Today the vast majority of scholars believe that the Bubastite Portal records a real Egyptian campaign north by Pharaoh Sheshonq in the mid-to-late tenth century B.C.E. As concluded by Israel’s leading Biblical geographer Anson Rainey (who passed away last year^b): “This inscription can only 049 be based on intelligence information gathered during a real campaign by Pharaoh Shoshenq.”⁸ Kenneth Kitchen has called the reality of Sheshonq’s campaign during the reign of Rehoboam “beyond reasonable doubt.”⁹

If this campaign occurred in 925 B.C.E. and, as the Bible says, this was the fifth year of Rehoboam’s rule in Judah, this would place the end of Solomon’s reign in 930 B.C.E. and his father David’s reign in the early part of the tenth century B.C.E. These are considered the traditional dates for the early Israelite monarchy.

Another issue that scholars debate is the trail or itinerary of Sheshonq’s campaign in Judah and Israel.

The toponyms in the name-rings of the Bubastite Portal include an upper and lower register of five rows each. Each of the five rows in the upper register contains 13 name-rings. The lower register also has five rows; each row has room for 17 name-rings, although not all have the full number. Below these two registers is a group of about 30 more name-rings to the far right of the bottom line, of which only five are legible, however.

The toponyms in these name-rings generally fall into geographical configurations. The toponyms in the upper register seem to be towns in the central and northern part of Israel. They include Ayalon, Gibeon, Beth-Shean, Rehov, Shunem and Taanach, as well as Megiddo. The names in the lower register seem to be located in the Negev, Israel’s southern desert. For example, two places are named Arad, a town in the eastern Negev. Unfortunately, many of the names, especially in rows 4 and 10, are so badly preserved that they are unreadable. 050 And even those we can read do not always identify places we can geographically locate.

The first ten names in the first row of the upper register are the customary symbolic introduction in inscriptions like this—the “Nine Bows” or traditional enemies of Egypt. The list changed over time as the enemies changed, but in this case they include Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, Nubians, Libyans, dwellers of the oases, the nomads of Asia, the nomads of the eastern desert, Upper Nubia and the northerners—perhaps referring to the Greek Isles.

The first name after the “Nine Bows” begins with G, but that is all that is legible. It is probably Gaza. Gaza was the first major city that the Egyptian army would encounter along the main road from Egypt northward. The next name is even less legible. Most scholars assume that this ring originally read “Gezer,” a city on that same major international highway about 35 miles north of Gaza. According to 1 Kings 9:15–17, a previous, unnamed pharaoh had given Gezer to King Solomon, who then fortified it. So the conquest of Gezer would serve to open Sheshonq’s path into Israel and Judah.

In general, the first three rows of the upper register seem to be organized in logical self-contained groupings. The problem is that there seem to be significant gaps between the groups; they don’t connect into a reasonable itinerary.

In 1957, Israeli scholar Benjamin Mazar published what he considered to be a solution to this problem: the upper register was written in boustrophedon style—a Greek term that literally means “ox turning,” better rendered “as the ox plows” or, to most modern readers, “as the lawnmower mows”—with the first row being written from right to left, the second from left to right and then the third from right to left again. Mazar’s proposal was accepted enthusiastically by some scholars, but rejected out of hand by others. The main problem is that while boustrophedon writing was fairly common in archaic Greek texts and in Luwian hieroglyphic writings, it is almost unheard of in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Moreover, the convention in Egyptian is that the “figures” above each name-ring are drawn facing the beginning of the line, and in the Sheshonq inscription all of the figures in all of the rows are facing to the right. So the bottom line is we just don’t have enough data to reconstruct Sheshonq’s exact itinerary.

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As already mentioned, the toponyms in the lower register of name-rings appear to be in the Negev. Arad is mentioned twice, followed each time by another name-ring that is assumed to form a compound name, as Arad the Greater and Arad of Beth-Yeroham (or perhaps Jerahmeel, which was the name of a Judahite clan of the Negev mentioned in the Bible [1 Samuel 27:10]). Arad of course is mentioned several times in the Bible, clearly placed in the Negev.

In the Bible, the noun “Negev” often refers to the southern desert area of Israel. At other times, the term is simply used to mean “south,” even when it does not refer to the Negev. The Bible also refers to six different subregions of the Negev: the Negev of Judah, the Negev of the Jerahmeelites, the Negev of the Kenites (1 Samuel 27:10), the Negev of the 052 Cherethites, the Negev of Caleb (1 Samuel 30:14) and the Negev of Arad (Judges 1:16). In other words, in three different Biblical texts, all relating to the early history of Israel in the land, the broad area known as the Negev is said to be subdivided into smaller regions named for the tribes, clans or towns within them. The name-rings in the lower register of the Bubastite Portal also refer to three different Negevs, each time preceded by the Egyptian definite article and then followed in the next name-ring to complete the compound name. While none of the latter have been identified with certainty, they follow the same pattern as the Negevs mentioned in the Bible. In short, the Negevs in the Bubastite Portal seem to reflect a similar situation less than a century after the Biblical references.¹⁰

While there are many uncertainties, most scholars agree that Sheshonq’s campaign as reflected in the Bubastite Portal and the campaign of Shishak as mentioned in the Bible are one and the same. Taken together, the upper and lower registers of the Bubastite Portal seem to indicate that Sheshonq’s army marched from Egypt to Gaza and there split into two forces. One continued north to Gezer and from there through the Benjamin hills to the Jordan Valley, turning north to Beth-Shean, from there west to Megiddo and back south along the main coastal road. The other part of the Egyptian army went east from Gaza along the Nahal Besor and its tributaries all the way to Arad and perhaps across the Wadi Arabah to Khirbat en-Nahas in Edom,^{c 11} before returning home.

Sheshonq’s campaign in Israel and Judah brought an end to the many architectural, military and political achievements of the United Monarchy of David and Solomon and ushered in a new age—that of the nation divided.

In memory of my teacher and friend, Professor Anson F. Rainey (1930–2011).

“In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt marched against Jerusalem.”