Digging Themselves Deeper

Reviewed by Raanan Eichler

David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition
by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman
Free Press, 2006, 342 pages

The first claim—that of the fictitiousness of the David and Solomon narrative—is crippled by the archaeological assumptions upon which it is based. Most important in this regard is Finkelstein’s assessment that urbanization in the land of Israel, together with large-scale and centralized building, began not in the tenth century B.C.E., but rather only in the ninth. Other archaeologists, however, disagree with Finkelstein, citing, for example, the well-known matching-gate complexes at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, all of which date from the tenth century B.C.E. and illustrate the existence of urbanization and centralization at the time. Finkelstein, for his part, dates these finds to the ninth century. While the controversy over what has come to be known as “Finkelstein’s low chronology” is far too complex to discuss here, it is important to note that, as American archaeologist William Dever concluded in 2003, “Finkelstein’s idiosyncratic ‘low chronology’ is not supported in print by a single other ranking archaeologist.” (Emphasis mine.) Of course, it is possible that Finkelstein is right and the rest of the archaeological world is wrong, but shouldn’t he at least engage the mainstream opinion in debate if he expects to convince the reader to reject it, as well? Though the authors do explore the issue of dating archaeological finds in some detail in an appendix, they fail to refute—or even acknowledge the existence of—a single one of their contemporary opponents’ arguments.

A second contention on which this claim rests is that of the nature of Jerusalem in the tenth century B.C.E. Finkelstein and Silberman maintain that Jerusalem was an insignificant village at that time, and thus could not have been the capital of the large kingdom described in the Bible. Although the archaeological remains found in Jerusalem from this period are indeed scant, other archaeologists have been more cautious in their declarations, pointing to large structures that have been found, such as a stepped-stone structure with a system of terraces. They further note that determining the size of Jerusalem during any historic period is problematic, on account of the difficulties of digging in a densely populated, living city. Moreover, the fact that Jerusalem has been continuously inhabited throughout the millennia means the constant destruction and reconstruction of roads and buildings, further complicating dating. But Finkelstein and Silberman sidestep these realities, asserting that “over a century of excavations” ought to have revealed more.

An ironic twist of fate has recently demonstrated just how treacherous silence can be when used as evidence. In the summer of 2005, just as David and Solomon was going to press, a team led by Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar and supported by the Shalem Center was in the midst of excavating an enormous public building in Jerusalem which was apparently connected with the aforementioned stepped-stone structure. Pottery found at the site strongly suggests that this building too was occupied during the tenth century B.C.E. (even according to Finkelstein’s dating system), probably having been built at that time or slightly earlier. Mazar suggested that this complex could in fact be David’s palace: The location, style, size, and dating of the building all match the textual description in the Bible, and there are no finds that suggest the contrary. Most importantly, the building appears in an ancient world in which such constructions were extremely rare, and would have represented the greatest sort of public works. By the time the book hit the shelves, Mazar’s find had already been reported in popular media and scholarly journals. Many of Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s readers were likely scratching their heads, wondering how many mere “villages” in the tenth century B.C.E. contained structures of this magnitude.

The authors’ second argument—in which they attach later political contexts to the David and Solomon narrative—also falls short, plagued as it is by the lack of a coherent theory of literary production and a failure (except in rare cases) to address potentially illuminating comparisons with other bodies of literature, ancient and modern. Although Finkelstein and Silberman are certainly not the first to make this mistake, it is particularly damaging here because of the counterintuitive hypothesis they present: Namely, the claim that entire histories (and not just new perspectives on existing stories) can be cynically cooked up by political groups, and then sold to a public naive enough to incorporate them into its national consciousness as fact.

Furthermore, the particular political contexts to which the authors attribute stories are often dubious. For example, I Samuel 27 contains a story in which David, still a fugitive from Saul, puts himself in the service of Achish, the Philistine king of Gath, for whom he supposedly carries out raids against the Judahites. Rejecting the possibility that this account is authentic, Finkelstein and Silberman settle on a late-seventh-century-B.C.E. context, when the Philistines had a thriving olive-pressing industry in Ekron, whose king was himself named Achish. They explain that Judah, which had always been an important olive-growing region, must have created an economic relationship with Ekron whereby olives were grown by the former and pressed by the latter. The David-Achish alliance, claim the authors, was invented to provide a precedent for a relationship with the Philistines, thus legitimizing it. Yet a quick analysis reveals just how strange this explanation is: The “economic relationship” in question would basically have consisted of Judahites selling unpressed olives to the Philistines. Would this really have required justification, in an area where inter-ethnic trade was common? And even if so, would the best way to provide such justification really be to invent a story in which a Philistine king listens with glee to stories of the slaughter of one’s own people?

An interesting way to test the plausibility of any explanation for the composition of a particular piece of literature is to ask whether, by using the same type of logic, a future historian could attribute this literature to our era. I would like to suggest, for the benefit (or confusion) of such a future historian, that the David-Achish alliance story was actually composed in Israel of 2006, the context being as follows: The State of Israel had recently removed its citizens from a section of the southern coastal plain inhabited mainly by a rival ethno-political group. Opponents of this procedure, still bitter over its having taken place, wrote a propaganda piece with the intention of showing that a minority community of Israelis (Israelites) could have actually been viable among a majority of Palestinians (Philistines) in that same area. Even the mythological hero David and his men had done it millennia before! Of course, we happen to know that such an explanation is absurd, though to a historian 3,000 years from now it could make as much sense as Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s. Indeed, the only limit to such “explanations” is the limit of one’s imagination, since without a coherent theory of literary production, attempts at contextualization are little more than a game of association, intellectually entertaining but historically useless.

Particularly puzzling is the authors’ third argument, which insists that stories of David’s and Solomon’s courts could not have been written down by tenth-century royal scribes in Jerusalem (as claimed by most biblical scholars), since we have evidence of widespread literacy in Judah only from the end of the eighth century. But widespread literacy is unnecessary for the existence of court scribes; rather, only some literacy is needed. We know, for example, that already in the fourteenth century B.C.E., Abdi-Heba, the Canaanite ruler of Jerusalem, was writing letters in cuneiform to the Pharaoh in Egypt; six of these letters were found in Pharaoh Akhenaten’s archive at Tel El Amarna. There are also plenty of examples of Hebrew-type writing in the land of Israel from the twelfth to the eighth centuries B.C.E., most notable of which is the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon, an eleventh-century pottery shard with the alphabet and various other jottings scribbled on it in ink. Clearly, someone was writing at this time. Would it not make sense for that someone to find his way to a job in a palace, even a small one?

All this is not to say that David and Solomon has no redeeming value. Indeed, there are several instances of impressive and valuable scholarship. For example, in a section on the depiction of Goliath the Philistine, the authors ask whether the description of his armor matches what we know about how Philistine warriors actually looked, based on ancient drawings of them. By way of reaching a negative conclusion, the authors use data on Greek culture to propose that this depiction of Goliath is actually based on Greek mercenaries who they claim began to appear within the Judahite sphere from the seventh century B.C.E. Although this proposition is vulnerable from several angles, the very attempt to use data from ancient Near Eastern visual art and Greek culture is welcome, since these fields are not generally given enough attention in biblical studies.

The book’s most important contribution, however, is in demonstrating what archaeology can reveal about the process of the Bible’s composition. Until now, most biblical archaeologists have tended to confine themselves to shedding light on the Bible’s “finished product,” and most biblical scholars have failed to avail themselves of all that archaeology has to offer. In other words, David and Solomon is a refreshing attempt to apply archaeology to biblical source criticism. Unfortunately, its success is seriously hampered by Finkelstein’s idiosyncratic views and the absence of a theory of literary composition.

Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s previous book suffered from the same problems, and most of their peers in archaeology and biblical studies strongly rejected its conclusions. Granted, one would hardly know this from the media whirlwind that surrounded the book’s publication in Hebrew. It is often hard to escape the feeling that in Israel, theories in any field that are perceived to be “myth-smashing” receive disproportionate attention and insufficiently cautious acceptance. In our case, this bias might be partially countered with a popular Hebrew book by a more mainstream scholar who asks the same questions yet provides very different answers. Unfortunately, such a book has yet to appear. Perhaps it is time for the all too quiet majority to raise its voice loud enough for the general public to hear.

---

Raanan Eichler is a graduate student of Bible Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a lecturer at Hadassah College and the Jerusalem College of Engineering.