What Difference Does a Century Make?

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Recently some archaeologists have been saying that the tenth century B.C.E. is really the ninth century B.C.E. I asked a visiting archaeologist what this means: How could archaeologists have misplaced an entire century? He told me that it had to do with the relative dating of pottery assemblages, the imprecision of radiocarbon tests, and the lack of absolute dates or synchronisms. He also confessed that archaeologists do a lot of guessing. This confirmed my suspicion that sometimes scholarly consensus is buttressed by wishful thinking. Since qualified archaeologists disagree among themselves on whether we should move the archaeological chronology downward, I will leave them to their potsherds and carbonized olive pits. (On a hopeful note, I am told that more precise radiocarbon testing will someday resolve this debate.)

As a biblical scholar, I ask a slightly different question: What difference does it make? Does it matter if what the textbooks call tenth-century sites are really ninth-century sites, and if the remains traditionally associated with David and Solomon are really the work of later kings?^a What if the so-called Solomonic gate at Megiddo dates to post-Solomonic times?

At first I thought that this would make a huge difference in our understanding of the United Monarchy of the tenth century. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe a century or so in the archaeological record doesn’t make as much difference as I first imagined.

Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that the lower chronology is correct. This would make one important difference—it would mean that the last three words of 1 Kings 9:15 are incorrect. The statement that Solomon built (among other things) “Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer” would be a projection of the building activities of later kings (perhaps Ahab or Jeroboam II) onto Solomon. This would not be at all surprising, since other aspects of the story of Solomon are clearly late additions projected back to Solomon’s times. For example, the description of South Arabian trade in gold, spices and precious stones transported on camels (see the Queen of Sheba story in 1 Kings 10) almost certainly refers to conditions in the late eighth or seventh century, not the tenth.¹

If these fortified cities were not Solomonic, Solomon’s kingdom would not be as strong or as centralized as the Bible portrays, but this doesn’t mean that Solomon wasn’t king or that his kingdom didn’t exist. It just means that it was a kingdom on a smaller scale, like many such kingdoms in the ancient world. It was a tribal kingdom, not a massive institutional state.

Scholars have long concluded that many aspects of the Solomon story are later projections or fanciful fictions. The statements that in Jerusalem of his day silver was as plentiful as stones (1 Kings 10:27) and that Solomon had a thousand wives and concubines (1 Kings 11:3) are clearly legendary (what would he do with so many wives anyway?). There are also internal contradictions in the story. Compare, for example, the statement that Solomon had peace on his borders (1 Kings 5:4) with the statements that King Hadad of Edom (or possibly Aram) and King Rezon of Damascus were adversaries throughout Solomon’s reign (1 Kings 11:14–25). In sum, the story of Solomon is compounded of early and late materials, historical and legendary, woven together to give a portrait of the ideal king who in his old age is seduced by foreign gods (and wives).

What difference does a century make? It makes some difference, for if the low chronology is correct, we could add the last three words of 1 Kings 9:15 to the list of later accretions to Solomon’s story. But this is incremental knowledge, since we already knew that much of the story was legendary and post-Solomonic. It has long been established that the story of Solomon is a pastiche of history, myth and sheer exaggeration. The Solomon of history was a somewhat less imposing figure than the Solomon of the biblical story. But I think we already knew that.²

Recently some archaeologists have been saying that the tenth century B.C.E. is really the ninth century B.C.E. I asked a visiting archaeologist what this means: How could archaeologists have misplaced an entire century? He told me that it had to do with the relative dating of pottery assemblages, the imprecision of radiocarbon tests, and the lack of absolute dates or synchronisms. He also confessed that archaeologists do a lot of guessing. This confirmed my suspicion that sometimes scholarly consensus is buttressed by wishful thinking. Since qualified archaeologists disagree among themselves on whether we should move the archaeological chronology downward, […]