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 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. David’s Tower in Jerusalem is not David’s
but Herod’s, and David’s Citadel in Jerusalem is
not David’s but Moslem, built by the Mamelukes and the
Ottomons, though many devout religious tourists do not realize, or,
will not hear, any of it.
The ancient water system of Jerusalem, of which parts remain, were
thought to have been built by David. In 1995, they were shown to have
been built 800 years earlier! The archaeologist, Ronny Reich, showed
this using eighteenth century BC pottery associated with the complex
itself (but in so doing removed large amounts of rubble, allegedly
sixth century, that might itself have been valuable for dating).
The historical David is nowhere to be found in the
landscape of the city most closely associated with his rule.
Amy Dockser Marcus, Rewriting
the Bible
(US, The View from Nebo)
No king called David is visible at all. Saul, David and Solomon seem
not to have existed, and if they did, the bible gives them less than a
century round about 1000 BC, yet the bible devotes more words
to them than any other Jewish king or period. All the more curious that
history outside the bible has nothing to say about these kings, even
when it relates to the period in question. The evidence outside the
bible of most of what is in it is hard to find. 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—a Babylonian puppet, Yaukinu (Jehoiachin), who
hardly ever ruled in Jerusalem, can be added, after the fall of the
city—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 Shoshenq I, who biblical scholars
believe is the Pharaoh Shishak of the Bible (1 Kgs
14:25 and elsewhere). Shoshenq supposedly 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
Shoshenq’s hieroglyphic list. Yet, even if genuine, this is
only the third time king David has been found mentioned in ancient
inscriptions. Chronological revizers place Shoshenq 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 Merneptah
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 reference to David is in the
ninth century BC Tel Dan inscription found in fragments of a
monument in 1993 by Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran. The strata in
which it was found, needless to say, has been the subject of dispute.
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. Written in Aramaic, the find
seems to be a victory stele celebrating the victory of an Aramean king
over Judah and Israel. J J Bimson says:
We can now be fairly certain that the inscription
gives a propagandistic account of the defeat of Jehoram (king of
Israel) and Ahaziah (king of Judah) at Ramoth Gilead and their
subsequent deaths.
The king whose victory it celebrates is therefore Hazael. It suggests
that a reinterpretation and lowering of Iron Age stratigraphy right
across Palestine may be required. R Chapman says the stele,
historically dated to 825-800 BC, came from a level
conventionally dated to the 10th or 11th centuries BC. So,
Israelite dates will have to be reduced by two centuries, making David
a contemporary of Jehu—unless he is a myth, that is.
Bimson’s conclusion about the Tel Dan inscription is:
Its significance as a chronological anchor may turn
out to be even more far reaching than its reference to the
“House of David”.
The fragment 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 fragments of stelae are usually
hard to place and interpret. Garbini considers these peculiarly
fortunate elements as not conducive to accepting it as genuine.
Moreover, 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
similarities with the Zakur inscription, that the style seems to copy,
even down to punctuation.
Nor is Garbini the only one who is supicious. Professor Fred Cryer of
Sheffield University is reported to be too. Russell Gmirkin writes
online that he attended a conference at the Israel Museum where Cryer
asked him to look carefully at the prominently displayed Tel Dan
Inscription. Gmirkin saw scratch marks and recognized the implications.
Cryer invited other experts at the seminar to look too, and about half
were surprised at what they saw. The others pooh poohed it. Gmirkin
videotaped the inscription, discovering two other clues that it had
been made on an already broken rock. Any competent and unbiased
forensic scientist could quickly tell whether the cuts were modern but
none will get the chance. Gmirkin even had to have permission to
photograph it.
Garbini summarises—it isn’t the first time
that we have been faced with epigraphic forgeries, all characterized 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.
A factory for biblical forgeries has been exposed in Jerusalem, among
its products being the supposed Solomon Stele, and the Jesus ossuary.
The factory was working undetected for over twenty years, and many
museums round the world must, the authorities believe, have many
forgeries made here among their exhibits, notably bullae. 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 a word meaning sons of the God El.
The new evidence from Shoshenq’s lists is that a place name
in the lists is “hydbt 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 long vowel
“o” or as the consonant “v”.
Both usages are found in the Shoshenq 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 Shoshenq list.
Kitchen explains that the mention of the “Heights of
David” makes sense in the Shoshenq 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 Sam
21-30). No one knows where Ziklag was, but it must be near the Negev if
not in it.
The eleven rows of Shoshenq’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.
Semantics of “David”
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 “oo” sound, 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 “hoo”, or in “woman”
which is really the same word as “human” or
““oo-uman”” (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.
Thoth and the Word
Humans recognized that they differed from dumb animals in that they
could talk, and it was talking that put them as kin to God. It had,
said J R Firth (The Tongues of Men, 1937)
“gone to their heads”. This delusion left its mark
in religion and philosophy in the importance to them of the Logos or
the Word. “The Word” was something
metaphysical—in philosophy a sort of overall law of Nature,
and in religion an aspect of God, becoming the Son in John’s
Christian gospel, the last of the canonical ones. Humans were made in
the image of God because they shared the Word with God. God created
people with the gift of the Word, and it was in respect of this gift
that people were the image of God.
In Egypt, the Word was identified with Thoth (Djehuti), the tongue and
scribe of Ra, and therefore the means whereby the will of Ra was
expressed, and thus his creative power. In ancient religions, the Word
was especially important when the word was actually a name. Nothing
could exist without a name, and so things only could come into
existence when they had been named. This is the creative power of the
Word that the scriptures speak of. The Egyptian god, Thoth, was the
power of the name. As the scribe of Ra, Thoth was also the Master of
Papyrus and the Ink Pot. He was the God of Scribes and the Lord of
Books, and scribes then were not merely amenuenses, simply secretaries
who took down shorthand for their masters. They were secretaries in the
sense of ministers of state being secretaries, like the US Secretary of
state, and UK Home and Foreign Secretaries. They were an important rank
in society — ministers, administrators, civil servants and
company secretaries — a senior and responsible class of
people. Then they were recorders of transactions, reckoners of tariffs,
like accountants, measurers like surveyors, timekeepers, and judges who
had to know and make case law. Thoth showed his relationship to time in
his title of Measurer of Months, and to justice as the Scribe of truth
for the Lord of Eternity, and in his image wore on his head the moon,
both crescent and full. |
|
Thoth was so important, that the Greeks, who identified
him with
Hermes, their messanger of the Gods, called him Hermes Trismegistus,
the Thrice Magnified Hermes. His equal in Babylon, the bringer of
writing and other skills to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians,
was named by the Greeks Oannes (John), and he was none other than Ea
(Hea), or rather a combination of Ea and Anu, two gods who, in one
view, were paired as the male testicles, whence the combined Greek
name, but who were mighty gods in their own individual ways. Note the
sound of the name Ea. It is the same as Iah (Yah), the Jewish God! In
India, the Word was a goddess, Vak, but she was nonetheless an
emanation of the ultimate Hindu god, Brahma, and therefore was coeval
with him, just as the Christian’s Word is with their supreme
God. |
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
god in Phœnicia was called Taautos, in a Greek rendering,
according to Philo of Byblos, and was associated with a Goddess called
Parthenos, The Virgin. The final consonant, from the Egyptian, is less
lisped than the Greek suggests. Censorinus (c 238 AD)
writes in confirmation (De Die Natali 18),
“quem vocant Aegyptii Thouthi ”,
being “which the Egyptians call Thouth”. The word
“dwd” might then have been 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
Solomon and Dood 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.
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 Canaanite word for a god,
perhaps the Canaanites 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. The Canaanities
had a god they called Hadad, possibly 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 realize 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 is a hazard for clever people
trying to be funny.
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;
- for the flight from Egypt by the Israelites;
- for a battle of Jericho where the walls came tumbling down
because any town there at the time had no walls;
- 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
Canaanite 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. Amihai Mazar, a senior
archaeologist of Hebrew University, which takes a traditional stance on
biblical history, is a strong biblicist who upholds the
bible’s stance on David and Solomon. It is just that the
might and grandeur of the United Monarchy was exaggerated.
Perhaps, he began as a god, then became personified, just as the Hebrew
Almighty God was also much more human in stories meant to be primitive
than the more refined Ormuzd figure of the post exilic Jewish
Priesthood.
David is introduced as a minstrel in the court of Saul entertaining the
king. Saul has forgotten him when he suddenly appears as a shepherd
with a sling to take on the mighty Philistine champion, Goliath. The
humble shepherd becomes a hero, then a cruel bandit—Robin
Hood was a nicer bandit—then eventually a vigorous empire
building king, before settling into senile decrepitude. It turns out
that a warrior called Elhanan really killed Goliath, and for doing it
was promoted to be one of David’s 30 “men of
valour”.
In 1 Sam 30:26, David acts like a
Robin Hood, sharing out his booty to local chiefs, his chums. This list
of towns that follows was “apparently added much
later”, unless it was just that the whole tale was written
“much later”, contrary to the hopes and dishonest
machinations of biblicist “scholars”.
Finkelstein and Silberman (David and Solomon,
2006) accept that the stories about David could not have been
contemporary because Judah was too economically backwards in reality to
have supported anything like such a fine court and administration. The
earliest possible time the tales could have been written was in the
eighth century when the supposed forebears of the Jews suddenly became
literate. Even then, nothing much in the way of inscriptions have been
found to confirm it, and even if it is true that these people had
discovered how to write, no one leaps from illiteracy to writing
extended romances or histories in a couple of generations. First, a
whole legacy of literacy has to be built, and it takes centuries,
unless, that is, you are among the sheep who think it was a miracle!
In any case, it seems the settlement patterns in eighth century BC
Judah did not fit the stories—the population had grown too
big so that many wild places David was said to have operated in were
actually settled quite densely. Finkelstein and others have extensively
surveyed modern Israel, collecting data on settlement patterns, dating
them by pottery types. So the pottery typology had better be correct,
but hitherto, from the baneful influence of W F Albright, pottery
dating has been entirely circular. Pottery was dated from biblical
events and descriptions, then was used as an allegedly independent way
to date the bible!
The method, as it is, shows that the fringes of Judah began to be
settled in the ninth century, and from then on, the situation on the
ground did not fit the stories. The prominence of the Philistine city
of Gath, for example, was anachronistic after 830 BC when it
was defeated and much reduced by Hazael, king of Damascus. It all seems
little different from the usual biblicist special pleading, meant
always to put the date of the bible as high as possible. In the
hypothesis offered by Finkelstein and Silberman, the earlier prominence
of Gath had to be immediately forgotten by everyone as soon as the city
was reduced to insignificance. It was never, note, destroyed. It
continued to exist as a small town long afterwards. Local people could
hardly have not preserved a memory of its former greatness until it
became legendary, probably centuries later.
Nor would the settlement of the former fringe areas in the story have
been the problem suggested. People are not zombies, and the inhabitants
of the most recent settlements knew theirs were new even generations
later, just as already existing villages will have been known to be
old! Besides their own memories and traditions, there were obvious
clues, such as the age of the buildings in the villages. They would not
have been frequently rebuilt, especially in the case of buildings with
a cultural or economic function, such as a shrine, a mill or a press.
Gath, for example, means “Wine Press”. Such
memories and traditions can be preserved for centuries, and look
plainly obvious for centuries when a place was a bamah,
a fortress, a stone circle, a threshing floor, or some other such
edifice.
Any author writing a tale about a local hero, especially intended as
propaganda, would have ensured that the tale tallied with local
folklore and geography. The propaganda purpose of these stories meant
the authors were not just someone hoping for fame as a historian. The
authors were educated men, scribes, priests, and possibly ministers,
senior officials with resources behind them. They had every reason to
consult locally, survey the landscape, and check records and histories,
such as they existed, to make sure their research was thorough. Such
diligence is unlikely before the Persian period, and is more likely in
the Hellenistic period when populations were getting more generally
literate, and writing skills were approaching those of modern times. To
imagine that carefully honed and detailed accounts involving the social
and emotional depth of these biblical pieces could have been written
within one or two generations of the Israelites becoming literate is as
ludicrous as thinking they were written in the actual court of David
and Solomon.
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 Baal’s father. 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
biblical 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, and, from
the description of his armour and weaponry, Goliath is a Greek hoplite!
Moreover, the idea of champions being nominated to settle a war is
Greek, appearing in The Iliad, viz
the fights between Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Ajax, and Nestor of
Pylos who, like David, fought a giant. Finkelstein and Silberman invite
us to think that Greek mercenaries or traders brought Homer to the
court of Manasseh, whose scribes took on board a few choice incidents
from it. It is a juvenile proposition. If Homer influenced the Jewish
scriptures, it must have been when Greeks were in a position to exert
an influence on them. It must have been after Alexander began the
Hellenization of the east, and the occasion then is
obvious—when the Ptolemies published the Septuagint.
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
Phœnicians, who were allies of the Persians in the fifth
century and the suppliers of their sailors and navies. Finds of ostraca
and the occasional formal inscription testify to Phœnician
activity all over the country, and as far south as Kuntillet Ajrud in
the Negev. Quite possibly, the wealthy people in the Palestinian hills
were Phœnician land owners—perhaps often absent, as
they were in Ireland in the nineteenth century—and merchants
arranging for wine, oil and sheep to be despatched to Tyre and Sidon,
or on into Egypt.
Stanley Isser considers tales of David like this contain heroic themes
and banditry from different countries and from different times. The
story of Goliath is a good example. Goliath’s armour and
weapons are those of the typical Greek hoplite, a heavily armoured foot
soldier, of 600 years later. Philistines drawn on Egyptian reliefs were
only lightly armoured, having no helmets or greaves, and carrying only
a spear. Philistine cities were to the south west of Jerusalem, but
Saul killed himself in a fight with them in the north, at mount Gilboa
near Bethshan. Nothing found in archaeology suggests the Philistines
ever had a field army that could operate much beyond their own
boundaries. Yet archeology does show Bethshan to have been an important
Egyptian center—well fortified in the LBA—and
though it declined, it was still an Egyptian stronghold at this time.
The nations which attacked Judah from the north were Babylon and
Assyria. Then, the story looks like an allegory of the attack on Judah
by the Assyrians. Philistines are an allegorical, architypal enemy of
the Jews and their brothers, the Israelites. They stand for enemies.
Those who have oppressed them.
David built his empire by conquering the surrounding people (2 Sam
8), the Philistines, Moabites, Elamites, Ammonites and Amalekites, not
to mention the Aramaeans who appear as an afterthought. The strange
thing is that Saul fought all of the same people (1 Sam
14:47), Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, Aramaeans and Philistines, and
“wherever he turned, he put them to the worse”.
Saul fights and is victorious but ends up a failure, whereas David has
the same victories and ends up an emperor! For the believer, it is
God’s providence, no doubt, but for the historian it looks
for all the world as if Saul’s exploits have been used to
magnify and justify a newer myth of David.
The Accessions of David and Solomon
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. The
story of how David got the throne of Saul is a true one, but not of
David. It is told by king Idrini of Alalakh in a fifteenth century BC
inscription on his monumental statue.
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 Samuel 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 Kg
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?
The court historian of David was accepted by all because the biblical
narrative was so detailed that only an official scribe, it was
imagined, could have made such a record. It had not just the trappings
and procedures of an eastern potentate’s court, but it also
recorded the personal lives and feelings of the people involved. All of
this 500 years before Herodotus, yet no one thought it at all curious.
One can see that someone contemporary might have had access to such
detail but contemporary sources from much greater empires in Assyria
and Egypt had not perfected writing to such a high level, and nor did
any until the empire of the Greeks, supposedly 700 years later.
These stories could not have been written until the Hellenistic period.
Writing had not evolved to giving such detail at the time of David, no
one bought novels or biographies yet, and the affairs of courts were
not for public consumption, even, or especially, for exhortation in the
sermons of priests in public temples. Kings did not want their faults
and foibles recorded let alone discussed by their subjects. Kings
wanted their subjects to think of them as gods, or, at least, the
privileged agents of a god. They were super human beings, yet David is
portrayed as a callous mass murderer, an adulterer who arranges for his
rival to die on the battlefield, who falls out with his son, and decays
into self reproach and senile dementia.
That all this appears here proves it was not contemporary, but much
later, and the literary skill shows it was Hellenistic. It plainly
could not have been written before Herodotus in the mid first
millennium, and, in fact, the Jewish scriptures were started by the
Persians, just about the time of the first historian, but were refined
in the later Greek period. Finkelstein and Silberman do not think such
literary ability was possible in Judah before 700 BC, yet they
think it was possible in seventh century BC
Judah, still 200 years before Herodotus, and in a backwater.
Nothing in the ground supports a Davidic empire that might have
explained such a level of literacy. Monumental structures have been
found in Jerusalem from 2000 to 1550 BC, and again from about
750 BC until its destruction, but none have been found in between, in
the very time when David and Solomon were emperors of the Levant,
according to the bible. Like the stories in Joshua,
of the conquest of Israel around 1200 BC, when many cities
were allegedly destroyed, excavators find suitable destruction layers,
attributed the destruction to Joshua, and thereby dated the
layer—from the bible! When David, according to the bible,
conquered an empire from Egypt to the Euphrates around 100 BC,
likely destructions were attributed to David and strata dated by it.
Characteristic pottery in those layers was typed and dated accordingly,
then the pottery typology was used to date other excavated strata, even
in distant countries when that type was found there as a result of
trade. Local dating schemes were even overridden by the supposedly
sounder biblical schemes, making nonsense of local archeology
elsewhere.
Using the biblical narrative as the basis for
archeological interpretation, and then using the interpretation as
proof of the bible’s accuracy.
Such circular reasoning has been the bane of biblical archaeology,
though not for the biblicists. Finkelstein and Silberman assure us in
one place in David and Solomon that the
pottery types have been reanalyzed, but to judge by the tendentiousness
of these authors the reanalysis might not be a lot better. Then
elsewhere in the book they tell us only a broad typology is possible,
one able to distinguish Late Iron Age II pottery from pottery of the
Persian era. It is not assuring.
More assuring is that Finkelstein and his co-workers are much more
ready to use C14 dating, unlike most biblicist archaeologiests who
disdain it, accusing its resulting dates of being consistently too low.
That means they do not suit their belief in the bible. The C14 results
showed the supposed conquests of David were at least a century after
David supposedly lived. The bible says David had 600 men, enough for a
bandit to operate at that time, but hardly enough to build an empire.
The population of Judah then was so sparse that even 600 non-productive
men would have stretched the region’s human resources.
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 Kgs 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.
Most of the Psalms belong
to a later age than David.
T R Glover
Who says there are no anachronisms in the Jewish scriptures? There are
many but the scholars are too embarrassed to point them out. Achish is
the ruler of Gath who shelters David for sixteen months when he is a
warrior on the run. Later again, David took Gath but later still, 4-5
years later, Achish is still the king of Gath. Maachah,
David’s wife was a daughter of Talmai, a meaningless name in
Hebrew because it is plainly Ptolemy, the Greek name of one of
Alexander’s generals. The two verses 1 Kg
5:1 and 4 are in different places in the Septuagint
from their places in the Masoretic text, meaning that when the Septuagint
was translated there was no final agreement on where these two passages
should be. It implies they had been late additions. David’s
court life and succession (2 Sam
9-20; 1 Kg 1-2) was not an original
composition of the time, supposedly by the court historian. It is pure
fiction, a novel written for politico religious reasons—they
will revive David’s glory only by being
obedient—and not completed until the Hellenistic period, 800
years after the events it pretends to describe.
Most Christians and Jews are not interested in these contradictions in
God’s Word, and those crazies who call the bible
“inerrant” spend a lot of time inventing hidden
history to explain them. The historian ought to look quizically at
these contradictions and wonder whether any of the supposed sacred
history is reliable, and, if some of it is, how do we know what it is.
Artical reproduced from www.askwhy.co.uk
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 11, 1999
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/0150David.php