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Another View: Could the Edomites Have Wielded an Army to Fight David?

The Debate Goes On

By Hershel Shanks

Those who say “no,” led by Israel’s most quoted archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, argue that in David’s time Edom was not a state capable of mobilizing an army. Not until centuries later did Edom (or Judah, for that matter) become a state. Therefore, they reason, the Biblical story of David and his Edomite wars must be fiction, a story created centuries later by Judahites who wanted to give themselves a glorious past. This line of argument was contested in a path-breaking BAR article by archaeologists Thomas E. Levy of the University of California, San Diego, and […]

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Footnotes

1.

“Edom & Copper—The Emergence of Ancient Israel’s Rival,” BAR 32:04.

2.

See the review in BAR: Michael D. Coogan, “Assessing David and Solomon,” BAR 32:04.

Endnotes

1.

This report is based on Israel Finkelstein, “Khirbat En-Nahas and Biblical History,” Tel Aviv, vol. 32, no. 1 (2005), p. 119, and Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Some Thoughts on Khirbat en-Nahas, Edom, Biblical History and Anthropology—A Response to Israel Finkelstein,” Tel Aviv, vol. 33, no. 1 (2006). See also, Alexander Fantalkin and Israel Finkelstein, “The Sheshonq I Campaign and the 8th-Century-BCE Earthquake—More on the Archaeology and History of the South in the Iron I–IIA,” Tel Aviv, vol. 33, no. 1 (2006), pp. 24–26.