The First Peace Treaty Between Israel and Egypt

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The recent peace treaty between Egypt and Israel may have a historical precedent from almost 3000 years ago. Then too, these two nations wisely decided that peaceful co-existence was better than military confrontation.

The peace accord in ancient times is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. The Bible was not written, however, for the purpose of recording history, but rather to record God’s relationship with a particular people. The Biblical historian is not concerned with facts in the same way as the modern historian. The Biblical writer’s world-view was such that he could not conceive of a Davidic-Solomonic empire in a “global” context. Even so, the modern historian can often reconstruct political events and the history of Biblical times from the traces and clues in the Biblical text.

The first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was concluded about 960 B.C. At that time, the “cosignators” were King Solomon of Israel and most likely Pharaoh Siamun of Egypt. Since the Bible does not mention the existence of the treaty, naturally it does not allude to the circumstances leading to this singular event. But many of the facts can be ascertained from a sensitive reading of the text, supplemented by external sources, some of them archaeological, as well as from the modern historian’s analytical conceptualizations.

The two key facts recorded in the Bible are (1) the marriage of King Solomon to a Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 3:1), and (2) Pharaoh’s presentation of Gezer to Solomon as part of his daughter’s “dowry.”

The marriage of a Pharaoh’s daughter to a king of Israel was not simply the result of a youthful love affair. It was obviously a diplomatic marriage intended to have an important effect on the political relations between the two states.

Diplomatic marriages were common throughout the ancient Near East. The Bible is rife with such marriages at this time. While King David was still ruling at Hebron (before his capture of Jerusalem), he married the daughter of the King of Geshur, whose kingdom lay north of Israel (2 Samuel 3:3; 1 Chronicles 3:2). At that time, the northern kingdom of Israel had not yet recognized David as king. By this diplomatic alliance, sealed with a royal marriage, David wedged Israel between Geshur and Judah, a most precarious position for the northern tribes.

David devised political foreign marriages for his sons as well as for himself. He married Solomon off to an Ammonite princess called Naamah, from whose union Rehoboam^a; the heir to the throne, was born (1 Kings 14:21, 31).

Of all the kings of Israel and Judah, Solomon is most renowned for his widespread use of international marriages which formed the cornerstone of his foreign policy. This style of foreign diplomacy is not unlike that practiced by the Austrian Hapsburg Dynasty (1282–1918). The Bible recounts Solomon’s many marriages with Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite princesses—and of God’s disapproval of their foreign influences (1 Kings 11:1–13). Indeed, political marriages were a means of “ratifying” peace treaties between nations in the ancient Near East.

One of the most significant of these diplomatic matches was the one between Solomon and Pharaoh’s 059daughter. In every other one, as well as those of other Israelite kings, the wife came from a second-rank state. None of these marriages was as important as Solomon’s marriage to a Pharaoh’s daughter.

The marriage of Solomon to Pharaoh’s daughter appears in five different, unrelated contexts in the Bible. Each of the references is of an archival nature. This fivefold repetition indicates the special importance this marriage carried in Israelite historiography and disposes of any question as to the historical veracity of the event.

The marriage was, without a doubt, as vital to Egypt as to Israel. When in the heyday of its greatness Egypt conducted an intensive policy of marriage alliances, it did so exclusively with the leading contemporary powers such as Mitanni, Babylonia, and Hatti, but not with lesser states.

Most importantly for our purposes, whenever Egypt entered diplomatic marriages, it always took the daughters (as well as sisters) of foreign potentates as wives; it hardly ever gave a Pharaoh’s daughter as a wife to a foreign king. Indeed, for the period between about 1400 B.C. (the Amarna Age) and the fifth century B.C. (the time of Herodotus), we have explicit evidence that no daughter of a Pharaoh was ever married to a foreigner.

The singular exception was the marriage of a Pharaoh’s daughter to King Solomon! Obviously, this was no ordinary event or even the simple cementing of an alliance, but a reflection of the real power status of the United Monarchy of Israel.

The only Biblical reference to the land which Pharaoh ceded to Solomon as part of the dowry is as follows:

“Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up and captured Gezer and burnt it with fire and had slain the Canaanites who dwelt in the city, and had given it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon’s wife” (1 Kings 9:16).

We may assume that at this time Egypt was weaker than Israel and that the transfer of this important fortress city of Gezer was actually a territorial concession made in the guise of a dowry.

During the twenty-first dynasty (c. 1085–945 B.C.) Egypt split in two, with the kingdom of Tanis in the north and the theocracy of Thebes in the south. The split was politically crippling. On the other hand, Israel was at the peak of her strength in the early years of Solomon’s reign. Although a new monarch, he skillfully and profitably assumed command of his father’s military and political achievements.

The Bible does not tell us exactly when the Egyptians conquered Gezer or the political circumstances of this episode; nor does it mention the name of the Pharaoh in question, or that of his daughter.^b

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The Egyptians probably conquered Gezer in the very early years of Solomon’s reign, just after David died. Solomon ascended the throne—perhaps as coregent with his father—two or three years before David’s death. As often happens, after the long reign of a monarch whose death offers his enemies a good opportunity for attack, Pharaoh used the favorable opportunity for launching an Egyptian invasion of Palestine; he may have sensed a particularly propitious moment since Solomon was occupied with liquidating his domestic rivals.

Prior to its conquest by the Egyptians, Gezer had been a Canaanite outpost in Philistia. A closer examination of the Biblical sources reveals that, although David broke the military power of the Philistines, he did not, for some reason, conquer their country. Nothing is said in the Bible about the occupation of Philistia by David, or the establishment of an Israelite governing authority within its borders. The silence on these details is particularly significant in light of the contrast with the Biblical account of David’s conquest of other countries. In the cases of Moab, Aram, and Edom, the form of their subjection to Israel is explicit in the fragmentary Biblical annals: “And the Moabites became servants to David and brought tribute” (2 Samuel 8:2); “Then David put governors in Aram Damascus; and the Arameans became servants to David, and brought tribute” (2 Samuel 8:6); “And he put governors in Edom, and all the Edomites became servants to David” (2 Samuel 8:14). The absence of any such details about the Philistines speaks for itself.

The Bible does, indeed, extol the great deliverance wrought by David for his people in freeing them from the Philistine yoke (2 Samuel 3:18; 19:9) and even lists the Philistines among the defeated nations from whom David carried off spoils (2 Samuel 8:12). These verses, however, couched as they are in the most general terms, refer to David’s victories over the enemy outside the confines of Philistia or—at the very most—in its border regions.

The Egyptian conquest and burning of Gezer, on the northern extremity of the Philistine area, must have been part of an Egyptian campaign against Philistia and a threat to the Israelite kingdom lying to the north and east.

In this context, to regard the ceding of Gezer as no more than the Egyptian demonstration of friendship for Israel is difficult. Is it not much more reasonable to suppose that the annexation of Gezer was in fact a clear territorial and political concession by Egypt to Israel? Not only must the Egyptian advance into Philistia have upset the delicate political balance in this area, but the capture of Gezer undoubtedly constituted a direct Egyptian threat to the kingdom of Israel proper. Therefore, it is only natural that this move would have been vigorously opposed by Solomon, who had at his disposal the vast resources which he had inherited from David. Moreover, at the time, Solomon’s northern and eastern flanks were secure, so that he could ward off any impending clash with the Egyptians with full force. Under such conditions, the invader was no doubt forced to abandon his designs of conquest in favor of a political rapprochement with Israel, whereby the Pharaoh was compelled to hand over to Israel at least part of his conquests in Philistia. The postulated treaty between the two rulers was confirmed by a marriage alliance, a practice not infrequently used in other diplomatic relations of the time, while the territorial concession took the form of a dowry given by the Pharaoh to his daughter.

A careful reading of the Biblical text indicates that in addition to Gezer, Israel acquired other Philistine territory at this time. I have elsewhere noted the independence of Gath, a center of the Philistine Pentapolis, at least until the third year of Solomon’s 061reign.^c By the reign of his successor, Rehoboam, Gath had become an Israelite city, as is shown by its inclusion in the list of the cities which Rehoboam fortified (2 Chronicles 11:8). In other words, Gath’s independence came to an end at some time between the third year of Solomon’s reign and the time when Rehoboam began to fortify the Judean border. This change of status was most likely related to the events which took place during the course of Solomon’s marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh and the subsequent handing over of Gezer to him.

In an interesting study of this time period, Professor Benjamin Mazar^d suggests that Philistine territory surrounding Ekron was not annexed to Israel until King Solomon’s time. He bases this conclusion on a careful study of the list of cities in the territory of Dan in Joshua 19:40–46, the compilation of which he assigns to the time of the United Kingdom. Among the cities which Solomon rebuilt was not only Gezer, but also Baalath (1 Kings 9:18; 2 Chronicles 8:6). This is probably the same Baalath in the territory of Dan (Joshua 19:44) which lies about six miles west of Ekron.

This would mean that Solomon fortified a second city in Philistine territory, which like its neighbor Gezer, Egypt probably destroyed during a Philistine campaign. This campaign at the beginning of Solomon’s reign threatened Israel too.

In my view, Gezer’s annexation to Israel, although officially given as a dowry, should be regarded as only one incident of a large scale transfer of Philistine areas to Solomon’s rule. In this light, the statement of the extent of Solomon’s empire in the south takes on new significance:

“Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the River (Euphrates), the land of the Philistines [note that Philistia is mentioned as a separate and distinct unit], and unto the border of Egypt … For he had dominion over all eber hannahar (the region west of the Euphrates) from Tiphsah unto Gaza” (1 Kings, Masoretic Text 5:1, 4; English Versions 4:21, 24).

Taken together, these two passages amount to an explicit statement that all Philistia as far as (but excluding) Gaza was within the boundaries of the Israelite empire. This expansion to the south is not, as generally taken, a retrospective reflection of the territorial expansion of Israel in David’s reign but rather a result of Solomon’s own political achievements.

This analysis leads us to re-evaluate the personality of Solomon somewhat differently from the generally stereotyped image of a static ruler who developed a purely defensive foreign policy. Solomon was not merely the son of a dynamic conqueror, content to retain what he had inherited and gradually to fritter away his father’s far-flung conquests. Such neat labels do not agree with the historical situation. Solomon not only extended Israelite rule in the south but also strengthened it in the north in the region of central Syria (2 Chronicles 8:3–4). The Israelite empire evidently reached the apogee of its power in the first years of Solomon’s reign, particularly after the treaty with Egypt was sealed by the marriage of King Solomon to Pharaoh’s daughter. Only in the second half of his reign, did the process of deterioration begin.

(For further details, see Abraham Malamat, “Aspects of the Foreign Policies of David and Solomon,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 22 (1963), pp. 1–17 and a forthcoming paper “David and Solomon—Emergence of Empire.”)

The recent peace treaty between Egypt and Israel may have a historical precedent from almost 3000 years ago. Then too, these two nations wisely decided that peaceful co-existence was better than military confrontation. The peace accord in ancient times is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. The Bible was not written, however, for the purpose of recording history, but rather to record God’s relationship with a particular people. The Biblical historian is not concerned with facts in the same way as the modern historian. The Biblical writer’s world-view was such that he could not conceive of a Davidic-Solomonic empire […]