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King David and King Solomon: History or Myth?

  http://prophetess.lstc.edu/~rklein/Doc6/dsmyth.htm

 Monday, October 11, 1999

David appears in Egypt?

King David, the killer of Goliath, the Philistine giant, and founder of the Jewish state, is such a part of our own mythology of the western world after 2000 years of enforced reading of the Hebrew scriptures we have in the Christian Old Testament, that it might surprise people to know that the main evidence we have that he ever lived is… the Jewish scriptures! Philip R Davies of Sheffield University says bluntly, "King David is about as historical as King Arthur."

Surely this is a surprise, after all David is supposed to have become a noted person in the Ancient Near East, setting up what was briefly a substantial empire stretching from Egypt to Anatolia under his son King Solomon. Surely then, the records and correspondence of nearby nations must have said more about him, and the evidence left in his own country must have been substantial. In fact, the evidence outside the bible of most of what is in it is hard to find. The bible is the only written source concerning the so-called United Monarchy, and so it is the source of any historical presentation of the period. No one until recently has been bold enough to question the bible!

So far, archaeology has confirmed the existence of only the following kings of Israel and Judah: Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Jeroboam II, Pekah, Hoshea, Ahaz, Hezekiah and Manasseh—a mere nine out of 43, or ten if David is included. Many are minor figures in a minor country but David was the founder of an empire and a house that supposedly still could be traced a thousand years later. More of even the minor figures might have been expected to have been mentioned in Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian records.

Recently, some "scholars" of biblical "history" claim that archaeological discoveries verify that David, king of Israel, was historical. The name of king David has been found on an Egyptian inscription from the tenth century BC. In conventional terms, in the 15th century BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III initiated the practice of carving on the walls of the great temple of Amun in Karnak, Upper Egypt, the names of territories he conquered, or over which he claimed dominion. The last of the Egyptian rulers to follow this custom was the tenth-century BC pharaoh Sheshonq I, who biblical scholars believe is the Pharaoh Shishak of the Bible (1 Kings 14:25 and elsewhere). Sheshonq campaigned in Palestine in 925 BC. In the following year, he had a vast triumph-scene, including over a hundred place-names, carved on the exterior south wall of the temple of Amun.

Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool, says David is the likely reading of a name in Sheshonq's hieroglyphic list. Yet, even if genuine, this is only the third time king David has been found mentioned in ancient inscriptions. Chronological revisers place Sheshonq almost 200 years after Kitchen's date, so even if the appearance is true, it is not close to the time of the biblical David, but 300 years later, time for legends to be arising.

Kitchen jeers that this dating of Shoshenq puts David in the middle of the long and successful career of Rameses II, and to extend his empire to the Euphrates, David would also have been up against Hattusil III of the Hittites, who concluded a peace with Rameses with whom he had been warring for a long time. Thus the land between, Palestine, would have been hardly the place to found an empire. Kitchen asks:

Is it even remotely conceivable that these two formidable rulers should just sit idly by, cowering with armies in mothballs, while some upstart prince from Jerusalem's hills calmly carved out three-quarters of their hotly-disputed territories (and revenues) for himself? This is sheer fantasy…

"It's the way you tell 'em." Er, no. But Kitchen cannot even begin to imagine that David is a mythical and not a real man. In fact, the abolition of Jewish mythical history and its consequences in Egyptian Chronology brings Merenptah within a few decades of Omri, the historical founder of Israel. His boasting stele, conventionally dated to about 1200 BC, would better be put about 950 BC. He was putting down the Israelites, it seems, but not long after, they succeeded in forging their own little kingdom under Omri. 

Lack of Sure Evidence that David Existed

Much vaunted as the clearest is in the ninth century BC Tel Dan inscription found in fragments of a monument in 1993 by Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran. Needless to say, information about the place of discovery of the first Tel Dan fragment is contradictory. Was it part of a wall or part of the adjacent pavement?—important information for dating since the pavement seems to be older than the wall. R Chapman says the stele, historically dated to 825-800 BC, came from a level conventionally dated to the 10th or 11th centuries BC. If so, Israelite dates will have to be reduced by two centuries, making David a contemporary of Jehu—unless he is a myth, that is.

Written in Aramaic, the find seems to be a victory stele celebrating the victory of an Aramean king over Judah and Israel. It does not speak of David but to bytdwd, interpreted as Beit David or the House of David. The supposed name of David in the Egyptian inscription is a hundred years earlier, less than 50 years after David's death.

The Tel Dan fragments are suspiciously fresh in their clarity. Unlike other old stelae in which the cuts are damaged, there seems little sign of such natural wear even though the monument had been broken into pieces and incorporated into a wall where it had lain weathering for almost three millennia.

The stone was reused in a temple complex that was destroyed about 733 BC by the Assyrian, Tiglath Pileser III. Pottery suggests it was put in place in the wall about 850 BC. It could only have been written by Aramaeans then destroyed by Israelites in this time if it had a short life of only a decade or so (Omri to Ahab). Yet the palaeographic date is a century later according to Professor Giovanni Garbini.

Garbini notes several other anomalies in the language of the text all of which suggest to him that a forger has been at work, though he does not suggest it is the archaeologist. Why does it speak all about Israelites though it is an Aramaic inscription? Hadad is mentioned once but Israel three times and, of course, bytdwd too. That it is written as one word by an Aramaean is odd. For a small fragment, it is peculiarly informative when such stelae are usually hard to place and interpret. Garbini considers these peculiarly fortunate elements as not conducive to accepting it as genuine.

Even the content is strangely parallel to the Moabite inscription as if it formed a template, except that no suitable towns in Dan were known to replace the towns of the Moabite stone. There are other similarlities with the Zakur inscription, that the style seems to copy, even down to punctuation.

Garbini summaries: It isn't the first time that we have been faced with epigraphic forgeries, all characterised by a precise ideological matrix: that of giving an extra-biblical foundation to the facts and people found in the Old Testament, when its essentially religious and ideological nature does not necessarily entail that those people and events described there really occurred in history, as we conceive history now. It is unlikely that it is by chance that the production of epigraphic forgeries has intensified in inverse proportion to the progressive decline of Albrightian optimism regarding the confirmation that facts provided by "biblical archaeology" bring to the text of the Bible.

The French palaeographer, André Lemaire, claims an even less clear reference to the House of David in the long-known (discovered in 1868) but still not completely deciphered stele of king Mesha of Moab (also called the Moabite Stone), which is contemporaneous with the Tel Dan Stele. This also might refer to the House but the reading is unclear. Worse, the reading of David depends on a reconstruction of the initial letter of the name. It is likely to be d but no one can be sure—except Lemaire! House of David could mean, not a dynasty, but those (people) who owe allegiance to the God David and worship him at his temple (house). In a similar way, Israel could be an Egyptian word meaning sons of the God El.

The new evidence from Sheshonq's lists is that a place name in the lists is h(y)dbt dwt. The first word means "highland" or "heights." The question is how we should read the second term, dwt.

The first letter is d. The second letter seems to be w, the equivalent of the Hebrew letter waw, which can be read as the vowel o or as the consonant v. Both usages are found in the Sheshonq list (and in Hebrew generally). The third letter is clearly a t. Thus the word could theoretically be read doot or dvt enunciated as davit. Neither makes any sense except as a proper name.

Could the reading davit really be "David?" Kitchen makes the case that it can—and that it is. He has found a reference in another Semitic language in which t replaces the final d in the name of King David. This occurs in a sixth century AD Ethiopic inscription from South Arabia. The reference is unmistakably to the Biblical king David. It appears in a victory inscription by an Ethiopic ruler from Axum who had invaded South Arabia. In celebrating his triumph, the ruler cited two psalms (19 and 65) and named David in this connexion. David is spelled Davit exactly as in the Sheshonq list.

Kitchen explains that the mention of the "Heights of David" makes sense in the Sheshonq list of toponyms. Before he became king, David was a fugitive active in this area. He fled from King Saul and was joined by his fellow tribesmen and fugitives until he had a force of 400 men. His first stop was at Philistine Gath, whose ruler he would later serve. From Gath, David went to Mizpeh of Moab. From there he returned to Judah, by which time his force had increased to 600 men. He roamed about in the wilderness of Ziph, including the Hill of Hachilah, in the wilderness of Maon, in the wilderness and heights of Engedi, near the Dead Sea, and in the Arabah, the valley south of the Dead Sea, always escaping from Saul's men. Finally, David made an alliance with the Philistine king of Gath, who gave David the city of Ziklag (1 Samuel 21-30). No one knows were Ziklag was, but it must be near the Negev if not in it.

The eleven rows of Sheshonq's list of conquests is divided into three main sections, differentiated geographically. The apparent reference to David occurs in the second block of rows which are sites in south Judah and the Negev. Another name in this row is "the Terrain of Tilwan (or Tilon)." So "the Heights of David" seems to follow this structure. However, for a long time scholars thought they also saw a "field of Abraham" in the list but that is now rejected. Interpretations are far from certain.

Nevertheless, Kitchen thinks it is not surprising that a place in this region would be named the "Heights of David," given David's importance and his association with the place. Kitchen concludes:

I do not claim certainty, but there is at least a high degree of probability. David here is nothing too spectacular.

  



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David as Legend

That then is a summary of the latest and earlier bits of archaeological evidence for the existence of king David. Because the saga of David occurs in the Holy Book it has rarely been understood as anything less than true history, but the curious lack of concrete evidence for such an amazing soldier casts doubt upon its historical truth.

The situation is quite like that of Jesus—everyone believes it is true yet the evidence amounts to some books written by people with a keen interest in propagating the truth of the myth. Indeed the bible is full of similar myths unsupported by historical or archaeological evidence that no "scholars" bother to question because they are committed religionists, bound by their own faith, fears and paymasters.

There is no unequivocal evidence outside the scriptures for Moses and the events of Mount Sinai where he received the Ten Commandments; none even for the flight from Egypt by the Israelites; none for a battle of Jericho where the walls came tumbling down because any town there at the time had no walls; indeed none for the military conquest of Canaan.

Not that David is necessarily purely mythical. He is possibly a legend rather than a myth, but either way, his exploits are much larger than his life. This is typical of myth and legend. No one knows who king Arthur was, yet volumes of astonishing mythology have been built around this romantic figure. The same applies to William Tell and Robin Hood, both likely to be entirely mythical figures of romantic legend. If there is a real man at the core of any of these myths, he has been quite hidden by all that has accreted about him.

Isn't it likely that David is the same? Possibly some Hebrew bandit, got a local name for himself and songs were written about him. Over the years the songs and the exploits grew and the central figure achieved god-like proportions. Perhaps, he began as a god, then became personified, just as the Hebrew Almighty God was also much more human in the ancient stories than the more refined Ormuzd figure of the post-exilic Jewish Priesthood.

Hershel Shanks in Biblical Archaeology Review tells us that few scholars take seriously the suggestion by Philip Davies that dwd in the Dan stele should be read Dood, referring to a hitherto unknown deity. Kenneth Kitchen, the discoverer of the putative Egyptian reference to the Heights of David treats the suggestion in the bent scholar's typically puerile manner:

Surely the time has now come to celebrate Dod's funeral—permanently! There is not one scintilla of respectable, explicit evidence for his/her/its existence anywhere in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern world. No ancient king ever calls himself beloved of Dod; no temple of Dod has ever been found, and clearly identified as such by first-hand inscriptions. We have no hymns to Dod, no offering-lists for Dod, no published rituals in any ancient language for Dod, no statues of Dod, no altars, vessels, nor any other ritual piece or votive object dedicated to Dod as a clear deity. Why? Because he/she/it never existed in antiquity ... Dod is a dud deity, as dead as the Dodo—so let's dump him/her/it in well-deserved oblivion, now and henceforth!

Doubtless this is the attempt of a clever man to be funny, but in truth it shows him up as a fool. Davies's proposal is not stupid and is probably the true explanation of the legend of David, and everything that Kitchen says to disparage Dod can be applied to David if the scriptures are taken to be romance not history.

Kitchen takes advantage of the silly sound of Dod, which we will inevitably pronounce with a short vowel, like the surname of another puerile comedian from Liverpool called Ken. The vowel represented by w is long, an oosound, doubtless the reason we call it double u which is uu pronounced oo. We find it in English in words like who which is pronounced oo, or in woman which is really the same word as human or ooman (cf Italian Uomo). So, the word dwd is not dod but dood.

Kitchen is a great Egyptologist and knows of no temple to the god, Dood, anywhere in the ancient near east, evidently giving no thought to the possibility that the Israelites or Canaanites who wrote about their hero or god, Dood, might have been pronouncing in their own fashion the name of a god known by a different pronunciation elsewhere. Since the scene is not far from Egypt and the area, as Kitchen points out, was often under Egyptian occupation, perhaps the god, Dood, was originally Egyptian.

The Egyptian god who immediately springs to mind with a similar name is, in Greek form, Thoth or originally Djehuty. The th is close in pronunciation to d and the Egyptian tells us it is hard rather than soft as the Greek suggests. We pronounce the vowel short but the Egyption tells us it was long—hu. The final consonant, from the Egyptian, is less lisped than the Greek suggests. It was probably pronounced as "jude" or "dude." Doubtless this is how "Dwd" was pronounced, and the country of "Dwd" would have been Judah. In Egypt, Thoth is often depicted as a scribe, perhaps leading to the idea that David was a cultured man who wrote psalms.

Thoth is also associated with the moon. perhaps Dood was also, so that Dood and Solomon represent the sun and the moon. And, yes, there is very little concrete evidence of a magnificent Hebrew king called Solomon, either. Both David and Solomon reigned for 40 years, but no one will deny that 40 is a magic number in the Hebrew mythology, indeed, in the mythology of the ancient near east. This alone shows that both these monarchs were being magnified in their legends, just as Arthur and Robin Hood were. 

Semantics of David

Kitchen identifies Dood with dwt on his Amun temple wall and elsewhere. Is it significant or merely a coincidence that the Egyptian for Divine was dwat. The identification of these two words with David, virtually cries out that David was originally a god.

It will be no accident that David and Divine look to have the same root. We are talking about a time in history when the Indo-Europeans had rampaged all around effecting everyone from Ireland to India. One of the marks they made everywhere was in language—they originally spoke Sanskrit, and this is the root language of many of the languages of this area until today.

Divine comes from the Sanskrit daiva, in Persian daeva or deva, originally meaning a shining one and therefore a god. Zoroaster made the devas into devils in the interests of monotheism, raising Ormuzd to the position of the Almighty God. The Hindus have devatas which also are gods or lesser gods—spirits and divyas which are supernatural powers.

Deva is related to the Sanskrit word dyaus which the Greeks propnounced as zeus and the Italians as deus or Jupiter because Dyaus Pitar was the Sanskrit God the Father.

No doubt our scholarly friends will tell us that the Hebrews were not Aryans but Semites, speaking quite a different language. Of course, the Semitic languages are different from the Indo-European group but many words were exchanged between the two groups at this time, especially in the ancient near east where the two sets of peoples had come into contact and rivalry.

The similarity between David and divine is reflected elsewhere in Hebrew. Davak means devoted to God and, in the related Semitic language, Arabic, Du'a or da'wa is to pray. Indeed, in Yiddish, davven is also to pray.

Kitchen makes a joke about the beloved of Dod presumably because it sounds daft and he knows that, in Hebrew, Dood (David) means beloved or lover. Who would be more beloved than your god or national hero? Or perhaps David began as a fertility god and was therefore literally a lover.

It is our habit to call our god by the name God. If dood originally was a Hebrew word for a god, perhaps the Hebrews of the time gave the name to their own national god. There were many gods in the world then and in Palestine too, as the scriptures repeatedly tell us, although the mindless monotheists cannot understand it. The god who came to be the god of the Jews and eventually the Christians was probably not the god of the Exodus, who was represented by the image of a bull, or a serpent or a smoking pillar.

Perhaps one of the gods they took from the period of Egyptian colonization, they called Thoth, but pronounced dood and later gave heroic deeds, or perhaps Dood was a god they met on the way, or when they arrived in Canaan. The Canaanities had a god they called Hadad, meaning "The Loved One." Wherever, he came from Dood was, to judge by semantics, a god, and the fact that he was reduced to the hero of a national saga, does not prove otherwise. Kitchen should stop joking and do his job properly, looking for the identity of Dood in other nations. When he finds him, he will have the answer to his fatuous questions about temples, shrines and so on devoted to Dood. The very word devoted might be proof that Dood was a widespread name for God in ancient times. Many such words precede their supposed derivation.

That his deeds were magnified in typical epic fashion is proved even in the scriptures themselves. David's greatest heroic deed was killing the Philistine champion, Goliath. Or was it? the Holy Book itself does not know. 2 Samuel tells us it was Elhanan who killed the giant. Common sense, but not absurd belief, should convince us that someone has attributed Elhanan's deed to David, the hero. That is how legends grow. Legendary deeds are never transferred to lesser men!

Incidentally, while Kitchen is joking about Dod being as dead as a dud dodo or whatever it was, does he realise that One of David's 30 champions was called Dodo, doubtless a variant or diminutive of Dood? I suppose we must assume that a scholar like him must know, but he sounds as though he did not. That's a hazard for clever people trying to be funny. 



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Monarchy

The Persians were intent on setting up a theocracy but there had been a period of monarchy in Israel and the administrator-priests had to explain it within their theocratic historical framework. If God's people wanted a king then they should have a king to teach them a lesson. Saul's history was written as a warning that a theocracy should not want kings. The institution of the monarchy in 1 Samuel chapters 7-13 was shown as a blasphemy against God leading to innumerable punishments, the overthrow of the monarchy and "Exile" (if there ever was one). Only the saviour of the Jews, Cyrus, allowed righteous Jews to "return" to their homeland!

Saul is depicted as a bad king, incompetent and disobedient to God. He reigned only two years according to 1 Samuel 13:1, and then God replaced him with his own choice. God designates David as king and the Merlin of the time, Samuel, anointed him. 

David and Solomon

Caetano Minette de Tillesse thought that the stories of the accession of David and Solomon served the purpose of unifying the disparate tribes of Israel. The author thinks the histories are genuinely tenth century BC because no later editor could have had the aim of uniting an already united kingdom. That is plainly false. The kingdom was not united after the "return" as the Bible makes clear and the Persian administrators had a purpose in using a historical romance to give a basis to unity. The later Hellenistic editors had even more reason at the time of the setting up of the independent Judah by the Hasmonaeans. The core of the romance might be a tenth century romance but the style alone is sufficient to show that it has been edited by a refined editor at a much later date. The obvious times were during the priesthood of the "second" temple and more especially during Hasmonaean times.

The stories of Solomon's and David's accessions, from 1 Sam 4:1b to 1 Kings 8, are strictly parallel to one another. The story of the Ark is the framework of both histories. These romances are reminiscent of the Arthurian legends in which the heroes are replaced by David and Solomon, Samuel is Merlin and the Ark is the Holy Grail.

The accession of David starts with the disaster of the Ark of Israel being taken by the Philistines. The Ark of the God of War, "the Lord of hosts," cannot save Israel from its enemies. The symbolism is that the foreign aggressors have usurped the god of Israel. The tide of history was to nationhood (1 Sam 8:5) but God was the proper king of Israel and he instructs Samuel to make it clear what hardships having a king will mean to them (1 Sam 8;7-8). Kingship is here tied to apostasy and that is what the Maccabees claimed to be fighting. All of this is expressed in terms of some early story of tribal nomads determining to be a people.

While the tenth century core might have had some substance, the later editors had their own purpose. The country had to be unified but the priests wanted a theocracy so that they were the real rulers, and the kings were disparaged. The fate of Israel was bracketed between the loss of the Ark to the Philistines for lack of a king, and the fall of the City to the Babylonians through the faults of the kings. "Exile" was blamed on the wrongs of the kings so that the priests could rule from the temple. It suited the Persians, of course, who preferred priests to princes, and the later Maccabees assumed the priesthood anyway. The Deuteronomic editor plainly mixed the bitter experience of the historic kingship into chapters 8 and 12 of 1 Samuel, and the Maccabaean editor slotted in the rebellious family in this story, over 1000 years earlier in history, calling him Phinehas instead of Mattathias.

Saul's reign was a failed attempt at kingship that ended in disaster for Israel (1 Sam 31). But the Merlin-like kingmaker, Samuel, had already anointed David, in the name of God, to replace Saul as king to deliver Israel from its enemies. David was crowned, conquered Jerusalem and brought the Ark to Zion. The successful king had to be the choice of the priestly god, Yehouah, although the barely united people of the time worshipped their own different gods, in fact.

The priests inadvertantly made a rod for their own backs. They wrote that David brought the Ark of God into the temple to give the legitimacy of God to priestly endeavours in the second temple. The Ark was the safeguard of Israel but David became the protector and saviour of the Ark. The first king approved by God, and supposedly the head of the dynasty, became a god himself—if he was not already—expected to return as the Messiah and save Israel anew.

The return of the Ark to Jerusalem justified David's accession as king and the basis of the temple priesthood. Where the story of David's accession ends, the story of Solomon's accession begins. David left the Ark in a tent in Jerusalem, presumably because God lived with his people in a tent while the Israelites were in the wilderness. But the priests wanted to justify their temple and so a tent was not suitable for the Ark of God. Just as David had been divinely chosen through the prophet Samuel, so Solomon was chosen through the prophet Nathan to complete David's work by housing the Ark in a solid and immoveable building. 1 Kings 8:15-20 notes explicitly that all is now completed as "prophesied".

The accession of David is disturbed by the struggles of Saul and David and the accession of Solomon is disturbed by the revolt of Absalom, which forced David to flee, just as he had fled from Saul. Both cases end in a battle (1 Sam 31; 2 Sam 18) in which Saul and Absalom die, opening the way for the accession of David and Solomon respectively. Note the name Absalom who had to die!

Obviously, the events of David's accession are duplicated in the accession of Solomon. This should be sufficient to prove that we are not dealing with history here but romance. 

Whose House?

The priests were interested in creating the idea that the House of God was the temple and not the House (dynasty) of David. The "prophecy" (2 Sam 7), David's prayer (2 Sam 8) and Solomon's prayer (1 Kings 8) all play on the word "House".

In 2 Samuel 7, "house" initially means temple (which David had the "intention" of building). But Nathan says that David will not build this "house", but that the Lord would build a "house" (descendant, dynasty) for him. This descendant (Solomon) will build the house (temple) for God. David's prayer (2 Sam 8) uses the very same word "house" seven times, now with the meaning of descendance (Solomon), and 1 Kings 8 also uses the same word with the meaning of the temple, which David could not build but which Solomon carried on to its completion.

So the word "house" is used: eight times in 2 Samuel 7; seven times in 2 Samuel 8; and eight times in 1 Kings 8, where it has the two meanings: the temple which should be built, and the descendant who would build the temple. The priests wanted to sow doubt in the minds of a people who considered themselves of the House of David (probably a memory of when David was their local god) and make them think that the new god, Yehouah, always meant the "house" to have been the temple. Even more so, they wanted to confuse the use of the name of the city which previously had been Beth Salem.

The stories of the accession of David and Solomon were composed with an overt apologetic aim—to justify the setting up of the second temple priesthood as the will of God, and later the justification for the free state of the Hasmonaeans. God who used to reside in a tent now lived in the temple. The earlier Hebrew gods or heroes, David and Solomon, became the heroes of the saga and the founders of the Jewish state and its temple. The aim was to justify the temple but it succeeded so well that it gave credence to the make-believe history and David and Solomon began to be seen as real people in an Israelite Golden Age that never existed. 

David's Empire?

Solomon had an empire from Sinai to the Euphrates (1 Kg 4:21; Gen 15:18; Dt 1:7,11:24; Joshua 1:4; 2 Sam 8:3; 1 Chron 18:3), a meaningful area, giving him immense wealth, and a reputation for wisdom. (By a coincidence, it is the precise area of the Assyrian and then Persian province of "Beyond the River," Abarnahara. See below.) The empire was built by his father, David, and crumbled suddenly, for such a power, five years after he died when the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak invaded Judah and captured it (2 Chron 12). Nevertheless, it had lasted for about 70 years and must have made its mark.

With his power and wealth Solomon built the temple (1 Kings 6), the Royal Palace (1 Kings 7:2-12), the walls of Jerusalem, the Millo (an unknown structure) (1 Kings 9:15,11:27), royal cities at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer (1 Kings 9:15,17), store cities and cities for his horsemen and chariots (1 Kings 9:19). Solomon had 1400 chariots, 12,000 horsemen and had 40,000 stables for his horses (1 Kings 4:26;10:26). This was a substantial army and could only have been maintained by a substantial population and economy.

The dreamer's history of Israel, mainly a paraphrase of the bible with a commentary, was written by John Bright. This famous Christian historian thiks that Israel became a "ranking power of the contemporary world" "within a century." The hill country of Judah simply never could have had a sufficient population to support armies to conquer the whole of the Levant. Biblicists like to point to the weakness of Egypt and Assyria at the time, but these were massive countries compared with Israel and even in a weakened state could hardly have tolerated, without mention, upstarts forming incipient empires on their borders.

Had he been talking about Persia, he would have been believable. Persia could draw upon the large population (2.5 to 4 million, according to C McEvedy and R Jones in Atlas of World Population History) of the Iranian plateau and the skills in metallurgy of its peoples. The Israelites had a tiny population (55,000 on the West Bank in 1000 BC, according to I Finkelstein, and no more than 250,000 in the whole of Palestine, according to McEvedy and Jones) and no natural advantages. Bright seriously thinks that an impoverished, depopulated colony of Egypt could compete with Egypt (5 million) and Assyria (2 million). No serious historian could contemplate it, even supposing those great powers were in temporary decline as the apologists have to claim. Historians not besotted by the Holy Ghost must smell a rat, but for believers the rat is in the Holy Book so has the odour of sanctity.

The kingdom of David could never have even conquered the north of Canaan which was far more populated with more sophisticated people. If the empire of David was built by alliances and treaties rather than by warfare, it still fails to convince. Alliances were built under the threat of arms or through some perceived advantage, but what was it that made the nations to the north want to form alliances under the suzerainty of the feeble Israelites?

J M Miller and J Hayes (A History of Ancient Judah and Israel) of biblical historians only in 1986 begin to suspect something is phony about the biblical account of early Israel. They criticise the narratives of David and Solomon's reigns, describing them as "folk legend," "not to be read as historical record." It is an advance even if otherwise they paraphrase the bible as much as any other "biblical historian." Separately, Miller has admitted that there is no evidence for the monarchies of David and Solomon outside the bible, so everything that is written or speculated about these monarchs depends entirely on the bible.

Solomon is supposed to have married the daughter of a pharaoh, a privilege that was denied to the powerful kings of the Hittites. Moreover, no Egyptian record of this magnificent liaison has ever been found.

In the whole of the area supposedly covered by the kingdom of these mighty monarchs extant remains of it are "very poor." Kathleen Kenyon says that "the archaeological evidence is meagre in the extreme." The Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite peoples in the ancient Near East left evidence of their empires including tablets or papyri, art and inscriptions on buildings and monuments. Yet the empire of David and Solomon is not mentioned in any Ancient Near Eastern source. Monumental reliefs and statues, palaces, ivories, jewelry and all the normal signs of the sophistication required to run an empire are lacking.

E Leach (E Leach and D A Lay**** Eds, Structuralist Interpretation of Biblical Myth) says:

There is no archaeological evidence for the existence of these heroes or for the occurrence of any of the events with which they were associated. If it were not for the sacredness of these stories, their historicity would certainly be rejected.

Leach also spots that we have in many of these biblical traditions, conflicts that reflect competing factions in the Persian period, expressed as a mythical allegorical history.

Nothing can be unequivocally attributed to Solomon, nor is there any trace of a great culture that he developed. Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer have been widely excavated and palaces, temples and fortifications have been found, but none mention Solomon and the important buildings seem to be dated before his supposed time and after. Cartouches of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Amenhotep III, were common in deposits where seals of Solomon might have been expected.

The Davidic empire seems to be modelled on great empires of the Ancient Near east, notably the neo-Assyrian or neo-Babylonian, showing that the whole was composed after those empires died, when they were incorporated into the empire of the Medes and Persians. In its sudden emergence from a poor hill country after the wanderings of its people, the empire of David is a bijou image of the swift emergence of the Persian empire in the sixth century BC, after the Persians had wandered for several hundred years. The Persians had migrated, like the Israelites into their ultimate homeland on an arid plateau, and then had quickly become an empire through the military skill of Cyrus the Great, whom David parallels in his similar deeds. David is shown as an Israelite Cyrus defeating neighbouring Goliaths. Furthermore, the empire's extent is the precise extent of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara.

The expression used to delineate the north eastern boundary of the Empire of David (1 Kings 4:21,24) is the expression, Eber-ha-Nahar, "The Shores of the River" (Euphrates), used by the Assyrians from the seventh century onwards (perhaps earlier) and then by the Persians—as Abarnahara. Since there seems little reason why the Assyrians should have been involved in writing the Jewish scriptures, the conclusion is that the words came from Persian writers. It was therefore written from the fifth century BC. The absence of any references in ancient near eastern annals to such supposedly great kings as David and Solomon makes this fifth century work begin to look like deliberate myth-making.

The Philistines of the scriptures seem to be of the same culture as the Israelites of Canaan and seem to speak the same Semitic language as no suggestions occur of problems of understanding, interpretation or translation. They also worship Dagon, a corn god, considered by the Canaanites as a son of Baal. Since the Philistines were among the "Peoples of the Sea" who only occupied the coastal area from about the time of Rameses II when the Israelites too were moving into Canaan, they can hardly have had linguistic and cultural identity or even similarities with the hordes of escaping slaves.

By the time of the Persians 700 years later, the Philistines had been culturally assimilated into the regional culture of the Semitic Canaanites. Furthermore, the original Sea People at the time of Rameses were essentially mercenary soldiers, not settlers, selling themselves to the Pharaohs for their military skills. The Egyptian texts depict relationships between Philistines and Egyptians as mainly peaceful, as would be expected if they were allies. Doubtless, it is because they were allies of the Egyptians that the Persians showed the Philistines as the enemies of the Israelites. The episode of David and Goliath (1 Sam 17) is revealed as of Persian provenance from its vocabulary.

David conquers Jerusalem and brings the Ark there having retrieved it from the Philistines who had captured it but suffered so much misfortune as a consequence that they had abandoned it. David's kingdom however is shown as friendly with the Phoenicians, who were allies of the Persians in the fifth century and the suppliers of their sailors and navies. 

 



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Solomon

The early part of Iron Age II is thought to represent the "Golden Age" of the 10th century kings David and solomon—yet its material culture is of a surprisingly low level.
Peter James

The evidence for the empire of Solomon is deceptively abundant. It is abundant in the Jewish scriptures and nowhere else! Yet, biblicist archaeologists, who would be struck off the register if they were doctors, have "doctored" so much archaeological evidence that religious punters today think Solomon is a well established historical figure. You will often meet expressions like "a wall of the time of Solomon" as if there was no doubt about it because the name Solomon was scratched on every brick. What these "scholars" mean is a wall dated to the tenth century BC when they believe that Solomon lived!

Donald Redford, an author and leading authority on the era, writes in frustration at the absence of anything to verify the biblical stories:

Such topics as the foreign policy of David and Solomon, Solomon's trade in horses or his marriage to Pharaoh's daughter must remain themes for midrash and fictional treatment.

Philip Davies (In Search of Ancient Israel) discounts any possibility of…

…a Davidic empire administered from Jerusalem… The range of indices considered by Jamieson-Drake make it necessary for us to exclude the Davidic and Solomonic monarchies, let alone their empire, from a non-biblical history of Palestine.

The spring 1990 issue of the prestigious journal, the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, was entirely devoted to deciding which archaeological levels of the ancient cities of Palestine belonged to the time of king Solomon. The scholars were unable to agree on a conclusion. G E Wright can summarise:

No discovery has been made in Jerusalem which can be dated… to the time of David and Solomon.

There was quite obviously a tenth century BC, but what no one has yet been able to prove is that any emperors called David and Solomon lived in it… or any other time for that matter—unless David means Adad (Adad-nirari) and Solomon means Shalman (Shalmanezer), Assyrian kings who ruled successively in the ninth century. Any books that speak of "the time of David" or "the time of Solomon" should be burnt as religious proaganda. Respectable historians do not refer times in history to mythical figures or places. They do not talk of "the time of Hercules" and we can be certain that any historian that spoke of "the time of Atlantis" would be instantly dismissed or certified. Yet these biblical figures, David and Solomon, are no less mythical.

The mythical purpose of "king" Solomon is to build and dedicate the temple to establish that Jerusalem had been associated with a great temple, not because the temple had been to a god called Solomon, but had been founded by a great king called Solomon. The Solomonic temple to Yehouah did not really exist—the temple was to the god Solomon (Salem, Shalma)—but, having been destroyed by the Babylonians, the Persian administrators could pretend it had always been to Yehouah. No one in Judah was in a position to deny it because it happened about a hundred years before. So, the second temple set up by the "returners" is not the second temple to Yehouah—it is the second temple all right, but the first to Yehoauh.

In the bible Solomon has the powers of a Mesopotamian king—he is a melchizedek, in charge of the priesthood and the cult. He conducts the consecration of the temple as High Priest and blesses the qahal—the cultic community or congregation. But Solomon cannot escape the inevitability of the agreed formula that God des not like kings and even he is made to succumb to the temptations of apostasy and is punished as the Deuteronomic Historian makes clear (1 Kings 11).

The procedure for building the temple—decision of the king, confirmation by god, securing materials and labour, planning the building, inauguration and the king's prayer, all followed in 1 Kings 5-8—is that commonly attested in Mesopotamia from Gudea of Lacash on. Because it was common practice, it says nothing about this particular temple.

No trace of the temple of Solomon has ever been found. Be assured that nothing at all that has been found under the earth or in ancient archives can certainly be assigned to Solomon. Though architecture and artefacts corresponding to the tenth century BC are routinely ascribed to the "period of Solomon," absolutely nothing found has ever said anything about a king Solomon! 

Was Solomon a God?

So, the temple to Solomon did exist, but it was a Pagan temple to a Pagan god! El-Amarna letters 74 and 290 mention "Bit-NIN.IB," at first sight a reference to Assyria (House of Nineveh), but Professor Jules Lewy, an Assyriologist, said it was better read as Bit Shulman—the House of Solomon! The king of Damascus had commanded his chiefs, in letter 74, to attack the king of Jerusalem, ordering them to "assemble in Bit Shulman." It must be near Jerusalem or even in it, if the plot was an assassination not a field attack.

In letter 290, the king of Jerusalem complained to the Pharaoh that the Apiru were invading the land, adding:

…and now, in addition, the capital of the country of Jerusalem—its name is Bit Shulman—the king’s city, has broken away…

Towns in the ancient near east were often called after the ruling god (or vice versa). Lewy concluded that Jerusalem was also known at that time by the name "Temple of Shulman"—"bit" ("beth" in Hebrew) in this context meaning temple. The text is ambiguous, but Jerusalem here seems not to refer to a city but to a country. The capital city or the king's city was called Bit Shulman, after the temple of Shulman in it, yet after the conquest by the Israelites under Joshua, no mention is made of it. It was called Jebus or Salem before David conquered the Jebusites and made it his capital city.

Now "salem" is taken to mean "peace" but in view of this information, it looks to be a corruption of Shulman. The biblical story of Solomon begins to look like a rationalization of the traditional name of a city named after Shulman, a god found in Mesopotamian sources as Shelmi, Shulmanu or Salamu. The last of these spellings is "salem!" In the Hebrew Bible, "Solomon" has no terminal "n," the "n" being added in the Greek Septuagint.More pertinent, perhaps, is Salem, the Phoenician (Canaanite) god of the evening, symbolised by Venus as the evening star, and doubtless being the setting sun, an aspect of the sun god to the Egyptians.

Was this a reference to Solomon's temple even at such an early date? The Egyption glyphs read as "Shulman" have no sign of divinity, implying the name is not that of a god. If it is named after its founder then Bit Shulman means Palace of Solomon, and Solomon lived much earlier than anyone thought, or Egyptian chronology is hundreds of years out. Or, perhaps the Egyptians did not recognize Shulman as a god. Either way, the Solomon legend was written to explain the memory of the old name of the city—Salem or Bit Shulman. 

More Aspects of the Myth

Several substantial gateways of a similar design at Hazor, Gezer and elsewhere were glibly assigned to Solomon. Solomon's stables were discovered at Megiddo, and are still described as such by religious liars, but they are not Solomon's if he lived in the tenth century because they are 200 years later. They are also not stables, most modern archaeologists think. No one has ever found Solomon's port at Ezion-Geber. It is not at Eilat or at Aqaba or anywhere between, so Biblicists have been obliged to reposition it down the coast into Sinai, but no one knows where. Solomon's pillars or Solomon's mines north of Eilat were not Solomon's because they were abandoned before the tenth century and were probably Egyptian.

The kingdom of Sheba did not exist in the tenth century, and Ophir remains an unidentified place. It is only speculation that Tarshish is Tartessos in Spain (according to some) or Tarsus in Cilicia (according to others), neither being accessible entirely by sea from Solomon's supposed port except by circumnavigation of Africa. Both Ophir and Tarshish might be entirely mythical places like Shangri-La, intended to depict the kingdom of Solomon as of equal civilisation and wealth. The wealth of Solomon must also be part of his legendary growth because he was at some stage supposedly unable to pay his debts to Hiram, king of Phoenicia (1 Kings 9:10-14). Solomon is supposed to have married a daughter of the Pharaoh Siamun. It is more likely that Solomon was Siamun, because the Egyptians had no practice of marrying off royal princesses to foreigners whereas the Pharaonic line was itself passed on matrilinearly.

Jeroboam is supposed to have rebelled and taken the ten northern tribes out of the confederation of tribes to form Israel leaving Judah and Benjamin to form Judah. Since he followed an oracle of God in doing this, he was again expressing the Persian propagandist's view that God had no desire for His people to have kings and he would undermine them if they insisted on it.

The most likely historical basis of the twelve tribes, if there is one at all, is that they were divisions of the province for taxation purposes. A system like this was used in Israel under Solomon (1 Kings 4:7-19;5:2-4,7). Each of the twelve divisions had to provide tribute for one month of the year. This was an Egyptian system used by the Pharaoh Shoshenq, a successor to Siamun and contemporary of the mythical Solomon.

All these traditions were set down at a relatively late period, often more than 500 years after the events to which they refer…
J Alberto Soggin

Much in the stories of David and Solomon was probably added by the scribes of the Maccabees who wanted to justify their setting up of a Jewish free state. They depicted their own battles with the Seleucid Greeks allegorized as Philistines and Canaanites. 

Who Wrote It?

According to  V Harris (Ancient Literacy) widespread literacy does not happen by accident but requires central commitment and investment, usually by government, and the setting up of a complex social network of support. Such a social structure would be needed to allow any substantial and accurate reporting of history such as emerged even in Greece only in the fifth century BC, with Herodotus and Thucidydes, yet the Israelite so-called Court Historian of Kings supposedly lived in 1000 BC in a society that has left no visible trace! It shows it is fiction—a romance written much later, and not by the natives.

The fault of all apologists, puzzled by a fictional history that is far from glorious, containing many incidents derogating the people and their kings, is that they take the history to be the work of the Jews themselves, and expect it to be laudatory. People, especially in those days, do not present critical histories of themselves. Jews and Christians have to realize, though, that stories written by a conqueror about a subject people need not be laudatory. They were written as propaganda to shame the people of Canaan into behaving the way the Persians wanted. The history therefore showed the immense potential the people had if only they would behave in the right way!

They had been introduced to the universal God of Heaven in a uniquely privileged way in the distant past but their subsequent history showed them as consistently apostatizing against this great god. The god reacted by having to punish them repeatedly, culminating in having them deported to distant parts of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. But the great and generous god was giving them another chance through the action of his earthly agent, the Persian king, who was returning deported people to their rightful homes and restoring the proper worship of their gods. They were god's saviours of people and restorers of gods.

The native people naturally began totally unfamiliar with this new notion of a god and will have thoroughly opposed it. So, they were shown as unrepentent sinners, opposed not to the Persians but to the God of Heaven, who would punish them accordingly. Among the remnants of history and the romances, the "returners" told a story of the pure religion revealed by God as being corrupted by contact with the Canaanite religions. Stories like those of David and Solomon, and the adulterated history of the divided monarchy, were meant to hammer home the message of potential greatness constantly rejected through ungodly behaviour. Even their greatest kings finshed up apostates. Many lesser ones were thoroughly wicked.

J Hughes (Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology) says that the stories of Judges and Samuel are fiction written to give a 1000 year background to the Jewish province set up by the Persians.

Historians know that genealogies are often unreliable because those who commission them are more interested in claims in the present rather than any past actuality. In short, they are often produced to justify the present. That is just as true of Egyptian genealogies as it is for the genealogies given in the gospels. Actual blood relationships in the past are subordinated to present needs, to prove a legitimate claim for example. It is no less remarkable that native Canaanite chroniclers suddenly developed a preference for accurate genealogies than it is that they inexplicably evolved an ethical religion. Both were imposed from outside.

In the history of the monarchies, good and apostate kings alternate, a device meant to show that previous generations had repeatedly come back from error and apostasy to the true God, so that this generation could feel good about returning to the fold as others did before them. They were the remnant, the few Israelites who remained true and pure while others stayed with their idols. The supporters of the new religion and those who repented their apostasy were justified against those who refused to abandon their age old gods and goddesses.

In these stories the king is also divine, though commentators will rarely observe upon it. The only proper king was the Shahanshah, a manifestation of God on earth. In Psalms 45:7, the king is addressed as God! In 1 Kings 21:11-14, those who blaspheme "God and the king" are put to death. In 2 Samuel 23:17, Elyon the Canaanite high god elevated the king (David) above men. The king has the attributes of a fertility god in Psalms 72:6-7,16. He is a priest-king, Melchizedek, in charge of the cult as well as the country!

Plainly in the Hellenistic period, and notably in the Maccabaean period, these stories were being reworked again to render the Jews and their kings much better people than they were shown as by the Persian administrators. David and Solomon in Chronicles seem much more saintly than in Samuel and Kings. 



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http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=53466

In Jewish Sacred Literature that was later included in the Old Testament of the Christians, we are introduced to King David of the United Kingdoms of Israel and Judah and his successor and son, King Solomon. For millennia these individuals have been accepted as historical figures of great import, yet more and more their actual existence (at least as portrayed) is being questioned. We can name all of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, we have monuments that they had created, documents of their actions, treaties they signed, mention of them by other nations and their tombs (sometimes their corpses too). We know the names of the Kings of Persia (the King of Kings), as with the Egyptians we have themonuments, documents, etc. We can repeat this with every ancient state in that area, even small city states such as Ugarit and Tyre, but when it comes to the illustrious King David and his even more venerated son Solomon, not a single shred of evidence. Not one monument, not one egotistical carving declaring that either King defeated an enemy or dedicated something to YHWH, not one document (Israelite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite or other nation) mentions either King. Even Hiram of Tyre, supposedly a good buddy of Solomon, never mentions ol’ Sol at all. When it comes to evidence of either King, as the saying goes, the silence is deafening! It’s almost as if they never existed! 
Christians scurry around attempting to prove the existence of these individuals with such things as the Bytdwd inscription and the Dawat inscription of Egypt. There are several problems with the authenticity of the Bytdwd inscription, that I will not address here, that tend to be epigraphist and translation problems and then there is the problem that the last letter before a break is continued down the side of the break, indicative of a forgery. The last I heard on that was that it was being investigated. The problem with the Dawat inscription is that even creative translation can not make the inscription h(y)dbtdwt read as the heights of David as the Christians would want it to. Christians love to state that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, a rather ridiculous saying at best. Actually lack of evidence is nearly always lack of existence, especially after an exhaustive search for evidence of existence.
The very existence of the United Kingdom now seems to be on very shaky ground also. All archaeological and contemporary historical evidence shows the state of Israel came into being around the early 9th century BCE followed by the formation of the state of Judah in the mid 8th century BCE. There is mention anywhere (except in the Bible) of Kingdom of Israel, be it an independent state or part of a United Kingdom, prior to the 9th century BCE. Many Christians will wildly wave their hands at this and start babbling about the Merneptah Stele. There are two scholarly debates going on about this stela. The first concerns whether or not Merneptah actually campaigned in Canaan; the existence of a stela by his predecessor Ramesses II, about the Battle of Qadesh, indicates firm control of the Levant. This calls into question why Merneptah would have to campaign there. The second debate surrounds “Israel”. As the stela mentions just one line about Israel it is difficult for scholars to draw any information at all about Israel. The stela does point out that Israel, at this stage, refers to a people since a determinative for "country" is absent regarding Israel (whereas the other areas had a determinative for "country" applied to them). There is the thought also that at the time of Merneptah, the “Israelites” would still be wandering in the desert, not yet entering the “Promised Land”. 
To summarize, there is a singular lack of evidence, archaeological and historical for David, Solomon or the United Kingdom. A lack that is highlighted by the myriad of evidence available for kings and nations that were supposedly less famous and the myriad of evidence for the individuals of the “king lists” of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, Tyre, etc and for the very nations and city states that they ruled. As with nations today, these various states of the ancient world maintained a diplomatic service that communicated with their counterparts of other nations. The dry climate of Egypt preserved the archives of the Egyptian diplomatic corps and the use of clay as a medium for inscription (baked afterwards into stone-like consistency) preserved the archives of the other ancient nations. In none of the archives excavated in all of the ancient sites, not one missive to or from David or Solomon, men that supposedly controlled an empire to rival that of their western, southern, and eastern neighbors, nor was there any addressed to (nor from) any ruler of Israel until the 9th century BCE. There is a faint possibility that the OT is glamorizing and enhancing the legend of a “Robber Baron” of a small hill country city state (possibly centered on Jerusalem), just as the Robin Hood legend of the Danelaw glamorized a robber of ancient England. Solomon seems to actually have been an Assyrian King. King Shalmaneser V (the name actually means Solomon) who sacked Samaria and sent the Israelites into captivity. Shalmaneser V is known as a great warrior and a very wise king. Evidentially the post-exilic priests of YHWH borrowed this Assyrian king as their model for the biblical Solomon. Until there is more than mere coincidental evidence of either David, Solomon or the United Kingdom, they must remain denizens of the Jewish post-exilic mythology



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David and Solomon probably existed--though not in the grandeur as characterized in the scriptures. As for Moses, Abraham et al ... there's not a shred of evidence that they existed.

The Bible, as History, Flunks New Archaeological Tests

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Archaeologists working at excavation sites like Megiddo in northern Israel, above, say that no evidence has been found to confirm biblical stories about a united monarchy ruling over a large area from Jerusalem or about the wanderings of the Jews in the desert during the Exodus.

The Bible's account of King David is so well known that even people who rarely crack the Good Book probably have an idea of his greatness.

David, Scripture says, was such a superb military leader that he not only captured Jerusalem but also went on to make it the seat of an empire, uniting the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Thus began a glorious era, later amplified by his son, King Solomon, whose influence extended from the borders of Egypt to the Euphrates River. Afterward, decline set in.

Yet what if the Bible's account doesn't fit the evidence in the ground? What if David's Jerusalem was really a rural backwater -- and the greatness of Israel and Judah lay far in the future?

Lately, such assertions are coming from some authorities on Israel's archaeology, who speak from the perspective of recent finds from excavations into the ancient past. "The way I understand the finds, there is no evidence whatsoever for a great, united monarchy which ruled from Jerusalem over large territories," said Israel Finkelstein, the director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

King David's Jerusalem, he added, "was no more than a poor village at the time."

Statements like these have earned Finkelstein -- who is leading excavations at Megiddo, a vitally important site for biblical archaeology in northern Israel -- a reputation as a fascinating but controversial scholar. His reports from Megiddo that some structures attributed to Solomon were actually built after his reign have touched off fierce debate in Israel.

Within a larger context, what he says reflects a striking shift now under way in how a number of archaeologists understand Israel's past. Their interpretations challenge some of the Bible's best-known stories, like Joshua's conquest of Canaan.

Other finds have turned up new information that supplements Scripture, like what happened to Jerusalem after it was captured by the Babylonians 2,600 years ago.

In an interview by e-mail from the Megiddo site, Finkelstein said that not long ago, "biblical history dictated the course of research and archaeology was used in order to 'prove' the biblical narrative." In that way, he said, archaeology took a back seat as a discipline.

"I think that it is time to put archaeology in the front line," said Finkelstein, the co-author with Neil Asher Silberman of "The Bible Unearthed," to be published in January by The Free Press.

His reference to past practices can be illustrated by a remark by Yigael Yadin, an Israeli general who turned to archaeology and who once spoke of going into the field with a spade in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Many archaeologists, both before and after the founding of the modern state of Israel, shared a similar approach: seeking direct evidence for biblical stories. This outlook was shaped either by their religious convictions or their Zionist views, said Amy Dockser Marcus, the author of "The View From Nebo" (Little Brown), a wide-ranging and engaging book that describes in detail the shift in archaeology taking place in Israel.

The problem with that outlook, she said, is that "you can't help but go in and look at material and interpret material in a certain way." And that, she added, "led to certain mistakes."

In her book, Marcus -- formerly the Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal -- notes that Yadin believed he had unearthed evidence in the ruins of a place called Hazor that corroborated the biblical account of how that Canaanite city had been destroyed. The Bible says Hazor fell to invading Israelites led by Joshua.

But these days, she said, an increasing number of archaeologists have come to doubt that Joshua's campaign ever took place.

Instead, they theorize that the ancient Israelites emerged gradually and peacefully from among the region's general population -- a demographic evolution, not a military invasion.

"And that would explain how their pottery is so similar to the Canaanites', and their architecture, their script," Marcus said.

Finkelstein makes the same argument: "Archaeology has shown that early Israel indeed emerged from the local population of late Bronze Canaan."

In addition, he said, archaeology has turned up no physical remains to support the Bible's story of the Exodus: "There is no evidence for the wanderings of the Israelites in the Sinai desert."

Asked how such conclusions have been received in Israel, Finkelstein replied that they have been producing a "quite strong and negative" reaction. But the anger, he said, was coming not from strictly Orthodox Jews ("who simply ignore us," he said) but from more secular Jews who prize the biblical stories for their symbolic value to modern Israel.

"I think that the young generation -- at least on the liberal side -- will be more open and willing to listen," he said.

Still, considerable disagreement exists among archaeologists on how to interpret many recent finds. And the new theories about ancient Israel are emerging against the backdrop of a raging dispute over the biblical "minimalists," a group of scholars who argue that biblical accounts of early Israel, including the stories of David and Solomon, have little, if any, basis in history.

(This debate was recently fought out in a lively issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review, a bimonthly magazine published in Washington, in which one of the minimalists, the British scholar Philip Davies, wrote that biblical accounts of early Israel were purely theological, not historical. In response, a major critic of the minimalists, the American archaeologist William Dever, wrote that ample physical evidence pointed to early Israelites living in the region's highlands 3,200 years ago, two centuries before the time of David and Solomon.)

But if many archaeologists are far less interested in trying to corroborate the exact biblical accounts than in how the area's ancient history fits into the larger picture of the Middle East, that change of perspective, Marcus said, reflects an intellectual shift among the people doing the digging.

Many current archaeologists, she said, were born in modern Israel and don't need a link to the biblical King David to think of themselves as part of the Israeli nation: "They see themselves as part of the broader Middle East."

Yet while archaeology is challenging some of the biblical narrative, it is also adding to it. At Megiddo, Finkelstein said, he found that the period 2,900 years ago -- the century following the rule of Solomon -- was a far more interesting and powerful time for the Kingdom of Israel than the Bible says.

Another tantalizing discovery, in 1993, turned up a stele with an inscription referring to the "House of David," the first real evidence that refers to the biblical king. Still other recent excavations have provided compelling new evidence about the lives of the residents of Jerusalem 2,600 years ago, when they were besieged by the Babylonian army, and about the nearby people of ancient Judah who did not go into exile in Babylon.

Marcus said that such discoveries illustrate how archaeology can restore information "left on the cutting room floor," as it were, by those who compiled the biblical narrative. "Archaeology is giving you back all this history," she said. "So archaeology doesn't just deconstruct the Bible, but reconstructs it."

[From The New York Times Leisure Section, July 29, 2000. It should be noted that "David" is an old Cannaanite god, which is likely the reason there would be an inscription with his name on it. In 1975 at Ebla, Syria, there were found 20,000 clay tablets, 4500 years old, a thousand years before the biblical David and Solomon supposedly lived. These tablets contain the names of various apparent Canaanite gods, such as "Ab-ra-mu (Abraham), E-sa-um (Esau), Ish-ma-ilu (Ishmael), even Is-ra-ilu (Israel), and from later periods names like Da-'u'dum (David) and Sa-'u-lum (Saul)."]

*David's Jerusalem: Fiction or Reality? (July/August 1998 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review)
http://www.truthbeknown.com/jerusalem.htm

*As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting (by Michael Massing)
http://eunacom.net/Rabbis_Bible.htm

*Mythological Elements in the Story of Abraham and the Patriarchal Narratives
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/abraham.html

*Hebrew Bible & Archaeology Recommended Reading List bh Peter Kirby & Joel Ng (2004)
http://www.eblaforum.org/library/bcah/reference.html

*Introduction to Biblical Archaeology 1: Archaeological History and Method by Joel Ng (2003)
http://www.eblaforum.org/library/bcah/intbibarch01.html



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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon's_Temple

Archaeology

Because of the religious and political sensitivities involved, no archaeological excavations and only limited surface surveys of the Temple Mount have been conducted.[14][15] Because no excavations of the site have been allowed, there is no direct archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon's Temple. This building is not mentioned in extra-biblical accounts which have survived.[16]

  • In 2007, artifacts dating to the 8th to 6th centuries BCE were described as being possibly the first physical evidence of human activity at the Temple Mount during the First Temple period. The findings included animal bones; ceramic bowl rims, bases, and body sherds; the base of a juglet used to pour oil; the handle of a small juglet; and the rim of a storage jar.[17][18]
  • By 2006, the Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation had recovered numerous artifacts dating from the 8th to 7th centuries BCE from soil removed in 1999 by the Islamic Religious Trust (Waqf) from the Solomon's Stables area of the Temple Mount. These include stone weights for weighing silver and a First Temple period bulla, or seal impression, containing ancient Hebrew writing which includes the name Netanyahu ben Yaush. Netanyahu is a name mentioned several times in the Book of Jeremiah while the name Yaush appears in the Lachish letters. However, the combination of names was unknown to scholars.[19][20]
  • A thumb-sized ivory pomegranate measuring 44 millimetres (1.7 in) in height bearing an ancient Hebrew inscription "Sacred donation for the priests in the House of YHVH" was believed to have adorned a sceptre used by the high priest in Solomon's Temple. It was considered the most important item of biblical antiquities in the Israel Museum’s collection.[21] However, in 2004, the Israel Antiquities Authority reported the inscription to be a forgery, though the ivory pomegranate itself was dated to the 14th or 13th century BCE.[22] This was based on the report's claim that 3 incised letters in the inscription stopped short of an ancient break, as they would have if carved after the ancient break was made. Since then, it has been proven that one of the letters was indeed carved prior to the ancient break, and the status of the other two letters is now in question. Some paleographers and others have continued to insist that the inscription is ancient and the authenticity of this artifact is still the object of discussion.[23]
  • Another artifact, the so-called Jehoash Inscription contains a 15 line description of King Jehoash's ninth century BCE restoration of the Temple. Its authenticity was called into question by a report by the Israel Antiquities Authority which claimed that the surface patina was modern. This finding has since been undermined by examination of the patina using more advanced techniques, as well as examination of a new break in the stone caused by handling since the original report was issued.[24]
  • In 1940 American archaeologist Nelson Glueck "proclaimed ... that he had discovered the Edomite mines controlled by King Solomon."[25] Later in '97, investigating the role of "metallurgy in [the] social evolution" of Southern Jordan, University of California anthropologist Tom Levy "started probing the site known as Khirbat en Nahas (Arabic for "ruins of copper")."[25][26] The samples Levy sent off to "Oxford for radiocarbon dating confirmed that Glueck had been on the right track: This was a tenth-century copper production site ‒ and Levy adds ... 'the closest copper source to Jerusalem.'"[25]. In response to these findings archaeologist Amihai Mazar has stated, "I believe that if, one day, we should find the copper objects from the temple in Jerusalem, it will prove to come from this area".[27]


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