 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Solomon’s Temple. Myth and History - William J. Hamblin and David Rolph Seely
Thames & Hudson - 2007. 224pp, 200 colour illus. Hardback, £24.95.
David and Solomon. In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition - Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
Free Press, New York - 2006. 342pp. Hardback, £17.99.
The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating. Archaeology, Text and Science - Thomas E. Levy and Thomas Higham (eds.)
Equinox Publishing - 2005. 450pp, 210 b/w illus. Paperback, £24.99.
Preliminary Report on the City of David Excavations 2005 at the Visitor Center Area - Eilat Mazar
Shalem Press, Jerusalem - 2007. 87pp, 72 colour and b/w illus. Paperback, $23.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Solomon’s Temple. Myth and History |
 |
|
|
 |
|
| David and Solomon. In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition |
|
|
|
 |
|
| The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating. Archaeology, Text and Science |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Preliminary Report on the City of David Excavations 2005 at the Visitor Center Area |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
The hunt for truth behind the biblical narrative of the 10th-century BC kings David and Solomon is far more than just an archaeological obsession. To many of Earth’s 3.2 billion Christians, Jews, and Muslims - 53% of the world’s population - the image of a United Monarchy in Iron Age Israel is sacrosanct. It has also become a barometer for measuring changing degrees of nationalism in the Middle East. Today the edges of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount are honeycombed with trenches cut in search for Solomon, first laid down by Professor Benjamin Mazar in 1968-78. For the fledgling State, archaeology served as an umbilical cord linking David (1004-965 BC) and Solomon’s (965-928 BC) United Monarchy with the modern day - ultimate geopolitical validation.
No doubt it is precisely this politicised application of history that the University and College Union of England (UCU) objected to so fiercely at the end of May by voting to boycott Israeli academics. Even though Britain triggered the modern quagmire through its colonial mismanagement of Palestine under the mandate of 1920-48 and through the Balfour Declaration, and even though no modern Middle Eastern country from Turkey to Morocco embraces such democratic forms of education for men and women of all faiths, Israel has been branded enemy number one. A string of very different new books on David and Solomon now offers a truly honest opportunity to assess the UCU’s objectivity.
William Hamblin and David Seely’s Solomon’s Temple. Myth and History (Thames & Hudson) treads a traditional path by viewing the Temple as image and myth rather than seeking out historical truth. The reader is taken on an abbreviated journey across the archaeology of the Temple before its historical symbolism to early Christianity, Islam, and the modern era is assessed. As the authors assert in the Introduction, ‘This book is not the story of a place, but of an idea, whose origins lie before the dawn of history, and whose culmination extends beyond the apocalyptic twilight of mankind’.
Boiling down such a rich stock of texts, excavation reports, and folklore is no easy task, but this elegantly presented book succeeds with gems of information and rarely published imagery, such as an early 7th-century AD representation of the interior of the Tabernacle in Sinai from the Ashburnham Pentateuch and a Renaissance interpretation of Titus’ destruction of the Temple in AD 70 by Maerten van Heemskerck (1569). Hamblin and Seely impressively explain how the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was reinvented by Constantine as the New Temple. It was dedicated on the same day as Solomon’s house of God, the Sepulchre was seen as the centre of the world like Mount Moriah, perpetual lamps burnt within, and the church contained Temple relics, including the ring used by Solomon to bind the demons who helped build his house of worship and a horn filled with oil used to anoint the Israelite kings. The book, a comprehensive introduction to a vast subject, ends with the same question that perpetually haunts the Arab-Israeli conflict: ‘Are Jews and Arabs thus fated to remain forever poised at the Temple on the brink of disaster, as the children of Abraham struggle for their shared birthright?’
This question of birthright is central to the most original and groundbreaking scrutiny of kings David and Solomon ever published. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s David and Solomon. In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (Free Press) smashes traditional biblical perceptions and modern prejudices. Once again, the authors begin by outlining the vast influence of these two icons on world history from Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day AD 800 and styled himself as a new David who would make a united monarchy of Europe a medieval reality, and Suleiman the Magnificent who cultivated a public image as a second Solomon to sanctify the historical and religious authority of his empire.
A brilliant piece of academic sleuthing follows, outstandingly written in an authoritative and accessible style. Finkelstein has directed pioneering excavations and surveys in Israel - especially across Samaria and at Megiddo - so the book is grounded on hard data. The tale begins in Jerusalem, where the three features traditionally seen as Davidic: Warren’s Shaft, the Stepped Stone Structure (Fig 1), and the Tombs of Kings of Judah, are labelled a complete fallacy of dating. Indeed, for the entire period covering the late 16th to mid-8th century BC, archaeologists have discovered no more than a few walls and a modest scattering of potsherds in the City of David. Many scholars explain this invisibility through the obliteration of building remains by erosion or later building. To Finkelstein and Silberman this is ‘simply untenable’ because impressive Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1550 BC) and later Iron Age II (c. 750-586 BC) structures are conspicuous. Are we to imagine that the centuries sandwiched in between managed to melt out of the archaeological record?
Compelling reasons place the true context of Deuteronomic history 200 years after the traditional date of the United Monarchy (1004-928 BC). According to Finkelstein and Silberman, ‘Archaeology has revealed a far-reaching series of changes that took place throughout the kingdom of Judah in the late 8th century BCE - a full two centuries after David and Solomon’s time. Jerusalem suddenly grew into a huge metropolis. In the countryside of Judah, many new villages appeared, and existing villages and towns experienced a period of widespread expansion. Fortresses, storehouses, and administrative centers were built throughout the kingdom. The appearance of inscriptions and official seals testifies to the importance and widespread use of the written word’.
Fascinatingly, this increased social and economic sophistication seems not to have been driven by internal change from Jerusalem, but by world politics to the east. By the mid-8th century BC the vast Assyrian empire, expanding from the Tigris and Euphrates Valley to the Mediterranean, was successfully constructing history’s first globalised political and economic system. In 732 BC, the great Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III seized Damascus, Megiddo, Hazor, and the Galilee before Shalmaneser V laid siege to Samaria in 722 BC and annexed Israel as an Assyrian province.
Within a few decades brand new suburbs flourished outside the city walls of the original City of David, surrounded by a new fortification wall over 6m thick. A 510m-long subterranean tunnel conveyed water into the city. In the space of a few years Jerusalem mushroomed from a modest hill country town of about 10-15 acres to a large, fortified city of almost 150 acres. The urban population rocketed from about 1000 to 12,000 people. To Finkelstein and Silberman the impetus behind this building boom was the decision of the Judahite king Ahaz (c. 743-727 BC) to become an Assyrian vassal ruler. Judah was formally drawn into a wider economy as an active participant in long-distance commerce. The myth of Solomon’s kingdom stretching from the Euphrates to the borders of Egypt (1 Kings 4:21) was a clever piece of spin stolen from the historical reality of Assyrian territorial domination.
The archaeological evidence for this expansion is compelling. Outside Jerusalem, Megiddo’s stables were part and parcel of Israel’s involvement in the international horse trade with Egypt, Kue, the Hittite empire, and Aram (Damascus), known from the Fort Shalmaneser Horse Lists dating to the days of Sargon II and from 2 Chronicles, where Solomon gathered together 1400 chariots and 12,000 horses. It was also during the 8th century BC reign of King Manasseh of Judah that the remote kingdom of Sheba in modern Yemen became famous for its aromatics. Not only is this trade and region mentioned in late 8th- and 7th-century BC Assyrian sources of Tiglath-pileser III, Sargon II, and Sennacherib, but excavations confirm the emergence of the Sabaean kingdom at this time. ‘The biblical thousand-and-one nights story of Solomon and Sheba’, conclude the authors, ‘is thus an anachronistic seventh-century set piece meant to legitimize the participation of Judah in the lucrative Arabian trade’.
Only with this Assyrian-inspired stability did the core of Deuteronomy’s law code and its uncompromising prohibition against pagan idols and monotheistic cry for the one Temple in Jerusalem become a reality. Finkelstein and Silberman ascribe this literary work to King Josiah (639-609 BC), the seventeenth-generation descendant of David, about whom 2 Kings asserted that ‘Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him’.
Intriguing complementary forensics for a retrospective fabrication of the story of David and Solomon is embedded in the United Monarchy’s battle with the Philistines (biblical Peleset). Goliath’s armour, as described in the Bible, bears little resemblance to contemporary military equipment emblazoned across the walls of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, where this Sea People wear distinctive feather-topped headdresses and use a single spear but no heavy armour combination, such as the spear, javelin, sword, and greaves so conspicuously worn by the giant Philistine warrior. But Goliath’s armour was no fanciful creation - every item has a clear parallel with the standard hoplite soldier. These items were rare in the Greek world until the 7th century BC, but, as Herodotus reported, Carian and Ionian mercenaries servicing the Egyptian army’s border forts took over the Philistine coast in the late 7th century BC and would have imported this technology with them. Archaeology has caught the Bible in a 250-year old white lie.
The appliance of science has now entered the Solomonic arena to calculate whether Jerusalem and Israel was really a barren backwater during the traditional 10th-century BC reigns of David and Solomon. Thomas Levy and Thomas Higham’s edited papers in The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating. Archaeology, Text and Science (Equinox Publishing), based on an international conference convened in Oxford in 2004, juxtapose theoretical discussions of chronometric precision dating through the application of Bayesian statistical methods and wiggle-matching with heavily scientific analyses of radiocarbon results and interpretation.
The book is based on a huge bank of short-lived radiocarbon samples drawn from comparable destruction levels at Tel Dor, Megiddo, Tel Rehov, and Tel Hadar in Israel, Khirbat en-Nahas and Tell Madaba in Jordan, and the desert forts of Tell el-Qudeirat, Nahal Ha’Elah, and Horvat Haluqim in the Negev and Sinai deserts. These deposits are traditionally equated with invasion damage inflicted during the fifth year of King Rehoboam, 926 BC, when ‘Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house; he took away everything’ (1 Kings 14:25-26).
Ilan Sharon, Ayelet Gilboa, Elisabetta Boaretto, and A.J. Timothy Jull have examined over 100 samples collated from 21 sites across Israel producing over 400 measurements (analysed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, with 22 samples double-checked at the Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at Tucson). The results support the Low Chronology proposed by Finkelstein and Silberman, perhaps with an even later timeframe.
Similar conclusions have emerged from Tell Madaba in the central highlands of Jordan, biblical Mishor, where under David the Israelites won a pitched battle against a coalition of Aramaeans and Ammonites (1 Chronicles 19:6-15). According to the Mesha inscription Madaba was then urbanised under Israelite control by ‘the house of Omri’. Analyses by Timothy Harrison and Celeste Barlow of 17 samples selected from the Iron IIB stratigraphic sequence associated with major building works, and submitted to the IsoTrace Radiocarbon Laboratory at the University of Toronto, have yielded calibrated dates clustered tightly in the mid- to late 9th century BC, well beyond the traditional era of David and Solomon.
An extensive line of 350 Iron Age sites comprising 58 fortresses, 1195 dwellings, 360 animal pens, 30 threshing floors, and 80 silos in the central Negev have long been viewed as expressions of the United Monarchy’s golden age, with the construction of the fortresses, in particular, assigned to King Solomon and destroyed by Pharaoh Shishak. Radiocarbon samples obtained from the destruction level of the 27m-diameter elliptical Lower Fortress of Tell el-Qudeirat in north-east Sinai by Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht, and tested in Groningen, turned out not to be Solomonic but to range between 1103 and 1050 BC, 150 years before Shishak’s invasion. Similarly, a thin ash layer in the casemate rooms of the elliptical fortress of Nahal Ha’Elah, measuring 34 x 20m, 13km north-west of Mizpe Ramon in the Negev desert, has now been calibrated to 1006-972 BC, again too old for Shishak.
Radiocarbon analysis is thus galloping to the aid of the Low Chronology model for regional ‘Solomonic-type’ urban development. Yet part of the jury remains hung and unconvinced. Amihai Mazar’s 70 radiocarbon samples from Tel Rehov have produced readings of 925-895 BC for Shishak’s destruction of Stratum V, which comfortably fits the traditional 10th-century chronology for a United Monarchy. Notably, the charred seeds from which the radiocarbon samples were extracted were dated in Groningen by PGC radiometry, which can yield very tight measurements down to 12 years. Thomas Levy and colleagues’ research at the copper factory guarded by a 73 x 73m fortress of Khirbat en-Nahas in the lowlands of Edom, Jordan, has also revealed that the construction of the four-chamber Iron Age gate (architecturally comparable to examples from Megiddo and Hazor that Yigael Yadin labelled Solomonic) did indeed function in the 10th century BC.
The lack of a consensus for the divergent radiocarbon dates presented in The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating is explicable in several ways. Finkelstein refutes the reliability of Tel Rehov’s Low Chronology because he believes that some of the samples come from pits, refuse deposits, and street surfaces contaminated by old material. Mazar wisely admits that ‘over a time-span of about 80 years, we push the radiometric method to the edges of its capability, and perhaps even beyond that limit’. Perhaps the last word on the debate should be left to the fierce wit of the late Andrew Sherratt summarising the Oxford conference’s conclusions and aptly quoting Sir Winston Churchill, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning’.
Not even before the extensive new data in this book could be digested, controversy has swirled once again with Eilat Mazar’s excavations in the City of David, conducted between February and August 2005 200m south of the southern wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In the Preliminary Report on the City of David Excavations 2005 at the Visitors Center Area (Shalem Press), Dr Mazar presents monumental stone remains spread across 300 square metres as no less a building than King David’s palace. At least 28m long and up to 3m wide, its walls extend beyond the confines of the excavation area. Beneath lay Middle and Late Bronze Age pottery of the 12th-11th centuries BC, while additions to the building, designed to thicken walls for security or structural purposes, are apparently stratified alongside Iron Age IIA pottery spanning the 10th-9th centuries BC.
Mazar ascribes the foundations of this monumental building to c. 1000 BC and identifies it as the palace built by the Phoenicians for King David, best known from 2 Samuel, when ‘King Hiram of Tyre sent envoys to David with cedar logs, carpenters, and stonemasons; and they built a palace for David’. Its elevated geographical location also apparently fits 2 Samuel’s description of how ‘The Philistines marched up in search of David; but David heard of it, and went down to the stronghold’. Although Mazar claims radiocarbon dating of a bone sample has procured a Davidic reading, her note 124 detailing the carbon-14 probability percentages is regrettably unreadable due to typos. With her new reinterpretation, the colossal Stepped Stone Structure that dominates the City of David, the most monumental Iron Age architecture in the Near East, now morphs into a contemporary support for the podium on which the palace was set. Phoenix-like, have Solomon and David risen once more from the ashes? The dating criteria remain slim; Dr Mazar still has it all to prove.
Meanwhile, Finkelstein and Silberman’s David and Solomon remains one of the most thought-provoking archaeology books of the decade, not only an intellectually staggering and convincing piece of research, but a work that captures the true academic spirit of our age. While detached officers of the University and College Union in England boycott Israeli scholars, it is Israel’s academics who are showing the maturity and responsibility to seek unwelcome historical truth. Finkelstein, an Israeli Jew, and Silberman demolish one of the greatest foundation myths in the world and the core of Israel’s identity. Welcome to the new Israel, the objective, academic Israel willing to make painful concessions.
Finkelstein and Silberman portray the biblical story of David and Solomon as tales for cold winter nights, and rationally conclude that ‘We all live in a world of clashing nationalisms and global empire - the very themes that brought about the rise of the Davidic legend in eighth- and seventh-century BCE Judah… Our perspectives on those themes is uniquely modern. We no longer honestly hope for the resurrection of an Iron Age kingdom. We can no longer rely on messianic dreams to overcome our shared nightmares. And we can no longer rely on the divine rights of the kings as the justification for the acts of our leaders’. Powerful words that should make the UCU bow its head in embarrassment. Words too, based on solid science, that the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, hell bent on naively denouncing the evils of religion, ought to pay greater attention towards. An epic United Monarchy may never have existed in the 10th century BC, but this story of how and when Israel invented itself speaks volumes about how ancient and modern societies and religions truly work.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
