Did David Have A Kingdom?
January 15, 2014Mountain Brook Baptist Church
It
is sometimes fascinating to get backstage and see what it takes to make a play
come off so seemingly effortlessly.
Sitting in the audience and seeing only what takes place on the stage in
front of us does not give us the proper appreciation for the myriad operations
required to stage a professional play.
The lights come on right on cue;
the scenary rolls out for each new setting; costumes seem only fitting;
lines are said as if they were something that just came to mind. But if one looks behind the stage and follows
the development of such a production from original script to final stage, the
logistics, artistry and months of hard work and rehearsal are mind boggling to
the lay person. This same insight
applies to many professions, perhaps to
all of them. Few things are simple these
days.
Few
of us ever get the chance to go "backstage" into a biblical scholar's
study to gain an appreciation of what it takes to bring fresh understandings of
our Bible to books and sermons. I'll
leave the process of bringing new understandings to sermons to Dr. Dortch, but
I'll try to go behind the covers of that new book in the bookstore on the
History of Israel. In this session, we'll look behind the normally closed door
of the scholars who are writing the history of Israel (and shaping our
understanding of what God has done in and through that history).
If
a typical Christian lay person gives any thought to what is required to write a
textbook about the history of Israel, she might think that writing such a
history is a relatively simple matter.
After all, we do have the Bible.
Presumably all one needs to do is summarize the massive materials housed
in the Old and New Testaments, especially the Old Testament. Admittedly, there is a lot of material there
and it does have to be woven together, but the task at first glimpse seems not
impossible. Like the play on the stage,
the books make the history seem fairly straightforward, especially the books that
are written for consumption in Sunday School and in popular television
dramas. A look behind the scenes tells
us a different story.
Let
me share with you first some broad brush stroke pictures of how we got to today
in the study of Israel's history and then we'll look at one particular
issue--the issue of describing David's kingdom--where there is rather vigorus
debate going on among the scholars as we speak.
The Big Picture
Obviously,
the first histories of Israel were written by the biblical writers. The book of Genesis describes the very
ancient beginnings of Israel and the patriarchs whom Israel claims as
ancestors. Exodus tells us about the
event that forever changed Israel.
Slaves in Egypt had what they described as a miraculous delivery. The exodus became for Israel much of what the
cross became for Christianity; God
delivered them. Joshua and Judges give
us stories about the struggle to find a homeland and the stories of heroic
figures of the early days in the land.
And then there are the two "histories" in Samuel/Kings and
Chronicles. Samuel/Kings tells the story
of David and his dynasty using a formula derived from Deuteronomy as a
guide. The formula says that if you obey
God you will be blessed and if you do not you will be cursed. Each king is judged by the historian
according to the formula. There weren't
many who were blessed and the disaster of exile by the Babylonians is the final
judgment on the whole nation. Many years
later a new history we call Chronicles was written in the conviction that David
was God's chosen and that there was hope for a future beyond exile. The biblical histories told stories which
Israel accepted as fact, but they are not histories in the modern sense,
histories that require primary evidence of events. Not long after the time of Jesus, a Jewish
historian named Josephus summarized the biblical account for the Romans and all
who came after them. Josephus, however,
could offer a first hand account only of events during his own lifetime. The rabbis who became the authors of the
Mishna and the Talmud were consumed with the Law but did not write histories.
It
was not until the eighteenth century and afterwards, primarily in Germany, that
scholars began to study the Bible using the same tools they used to study
secular literature. A century later
German scholars were using comparative religions to help them understand the
development of the Bible and the history of Israel. What later became sociology began to
contribute to the understanding of tribal communities like the twelve tribes of
Israel. And in the nineteenth century
German scholars discovered a key to unlocking the age of the biblical
narratives. Jews had for centuries
attributed the first five books to Moses and the Psalms to David and Proverbs
to Solomon, but it became clear that it wasn't that simple. The great traditions
of Moses had been treasured by Hebrew people across the ages, and the ages had
put their stamp on the way the traditions were presented. The Bible tells us that the book of
Deuteronomy was "found" in the temple in the 600's B.C. when it was
renovated. That discovery enabled those
who wrote Samuel/Kings to write their story using the formula of blessing and
curse found in Deuteronomy. The stories
were old but the frame in which the stories were told had to date to a time
after Deuteronomy became known. It
gradually became clear that both the northern and the southern kingdoms had
separate ways of telling the stories of
the patriarchs. When the northern
kingdom was taken over by foreigners, the northern stories were taken to the
south and kept alongside the southern stories.
Eventually they were woven together.
Slowly scholars were putting together a timeline on which they could
place all the contents of the Old Testament and, thus, begin to understand what
was oldest and what was much later. The
Germans led the way.
It
wasn't until a new tool came along, however, that things began to change
rapidly. The tool was archaeology
applied to biblical sites. In the late nineteenth
century headlines around the world shouted the news that the fallen walls of
Jericho had been discovered and that evidence of the flood had been found in
Babylon. Both discoveries were later
proven not to be what they were thought to be, but suddenly there was light on the past. Nineveh, with its rich treasury of pictures,
shed light on what Israelites looked
like and what they suffered at the hands of the Assyrians. And ancient hills in Israel itself began to
yield a treasure chest of walls and pottery that attested to life as it was
lived throughout the period of Israel's history. Suddenly, and especially in America, the
history of Israel seemed to be clear. In
the middle of the twentieth century, young seminarians all over America were introduced
to G. Ernest Wright's book, The God Who Acts, based on the
archaeological work of the famous W. F. Albright and Israeli archaeologist.
There were now two major ways of looking at Israel's history: one could base a history on comparative
religion and the chronology of the biblical texts or one could base a history
on the hard evidence of archaeology. The
stones spoke loudly to Americans anxious to have evidence that the Bible was,
indeed, historical. While classical
archaeology had been around for a century or more, biblical archaeology was in
its infancy.
And
that sets the stage for a debate that rages this very day among biblical
scholars. The debate concerns the
kingdom of David. While the Bible
clearly paints David as a king who ruled over two kingdoms, north and south,
and who put together an empire that stretched from northern Galilee to the
southern Sinai, there was --at least unil very recently--no stone uncovered
anywhere in the territory of ancient Israel that clearly said "David slept
here." In fact, there was no stone
anywhere with David's name on it. The
evidence from archaeology seemed to be debatable, and debated it has been. As always there are at least two sides to
every debatable issue and, as always, each side seeks to lable the opponents
with demeaning names. The names in this case are
"minimalist" and "maximalist."
The
Kingdom of David
While the different sides of the
debate about the historicity of David and his kingdom have roots that go back
two centuries, the current dialogue between scholars spilled into public view
in the early 1990's. One group concludes
that the biblical account of David's kingship is not supported by physical
evidence from archaeology. This group
concludes that the biblical accounts were written at least 500 years after
David lived and have been influenced by theology, the belief that God chose
David as king and made an everlasting covenant with him. The other group asserts that archaeological
evidence does support the core account of David and his kingdom. They assert that after allowing for the
theological purpose of the narratives it is still possible to detect places and
events that fit well with the external evidence. Thus, as usual, scholars have looked at the
evidence and come to different conclusions.
The names assigned to these two positions were given by their opponents,
not chosen by the proponents themselves.
Thus those who think the biblical account meshes well with archaeology
call their opponents "Minimalists."
The "Minimalists" have in turn used the term
"Maximalist" for the side that sees more historical value in the
narratives of the Old Testament. Before
we look at some of the scholars and what they have written it should be noted
that being a "minimalist" is not the same as being an atheist or a
person who is not religious. It is quite
possible for a person of faith to examine historical data and come to a
conclusion that a biblical narrative is not consistent with external evidence.
The Minimalists and Their Works
The
persons often associated with the view that the biblical narratives cannot be
used to write an objective history of Israel are associated with the
Universities of Copenhagen in Denmark and of Sheffield in England.
Philip R. Davies (Sheffield) published a book in 1992, "In
Search of Ancient Israel," which
brought the debate to the general public. Davies argued that there were
three different meanings of the word "Israel." He used the term, the "historical
Israel," to refer to what existed in the tenth century B.C. which in his
view was very, very small and not an organized kingdom. But there is an idealized Israel created by
the biblical authors writing 500 years or more after David's time. Davies calls this "biblical
Israel." The third Israel he calls "ancient
Israel." It has been created by
modern scholars over the past century or so by interpreting the archaeological
data in the light of the biblical narratives.
A second scholar
also associated with Sheffield University, Keith
Whitelam, published The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History in 1996.
He charged that scholars had written the history of Israel as if Judah
and Israel were the only entities in the region, leaving out all the other
Palestinian peoples. This, he argued, supported the contemporary
claim to the land of Palestine by the descendants of Israel, while keeping
biblical studies in the realm of religion rather than history. In a more recent work (2006?), The Death of Biblical History, Whitelam
responded to critics of the minimalist position in this way:
For what lies at the very heart of the death of
biblical history debate is not just an argument about methodology—particularly
the relationship of the biblical texts to archaeology—but a stark choice about
the nature of history and what counts as history... . Although they
might justify the adjective “biblical,” their attempts to represent the ancient
past are very limited in scope and can hardly be described as history.
Thus this scholar argues
that the writing of the history of Israel has been shaped by the influence of
both Jewish and, later, German nationalists who either consciously or
unconsciously described the ancient "nation" of Israel like their own
nations.
Niels Peter Lemche
of the University of Copehagen published his The Israelites in History and Tradition in 1998. Like Whitelam and Davies he believes that
most of the biblical narratives were written at least 500 years after David's
time and cannot be used to write a history of Israel. He relies primarily on archaeological
evidence and thinks this evidence portrays a slow growth of Israelite society,
not a relatively swift expansion under a king like David. When archaeology produces artifacts that the
maximalist group cite as proof of David's existence as the head of a kingdom,
Lemche dismisses the artifacts either as fraudulent or as misinterpreted. He does not find them to support a kingdom of
David in the tenth century B.C.
The last scholar of the minimalist group we'll have time
to mention is Thomas Thompson also
of the University of Copenhagen. His
1999 book was
The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. He concluded that "the Bible's language
is not an historical language. It is a language of high literature, of story,
of sermon and of song. It is a tool of philosophy and moral instruction." Thompson began his career with a dissertation
on the historicity of the patriarchal narratives in 1971 that concluded that
then current biblical archaeology had not established the historicity of the
founding figures of Israel. His later
works have come to the same conclusion regarding the kingdom of David. He understands all Old Testament narratives
to be very late, perhaps as late as the second century B.C. some 800 years
after David's era.[1]
Thus in summary, the minimalist
position is that we have no sources before 500 B.C. to confirm the existence of
an organized kingdom led by David. They
see little if any archaeological evidence for Jerusalem being a large city and
a capital of a kingdom. They stress that
there are very few, if any, references to David from archaeological sites. The biblical accounts are very late and
reflect a theology centered in David which doesn't present an accurate picture.
The Other Side of the Argument: The Maximalists
On the other side of the debate about David's kingdom one
could pick from several archaeologists and scholars. Two archaeological sites stand at the heart
of the matter and we will focus on what was found rather than who found
it. The two excavations involve the
northernmost biblical site in Israel, Dan, and a town mentioned in the Bible as
"Sha'arayim," ("Two Gates" in English). [2]
The excavation of Dan has produced literally thousands of
artifacts which offer us new insights into life in the northern kingdom during
the tenth century B.C.--the time of
David. A well preserved city gate with a
platform on which a judge (or a king) would have sat while holding court
"in the gate" was uncovered. A
temple was discovered that may well have been the one in which Jeroboam, the
first king of the north, placed his "golden calf" to provide an
alternative to the Jerusalem temple. But the find that has been the center of
controversy since 1994-95 when it was published is the "Beth David" (House
of David) inscription. A stone with an
inscription was shattered into pieces when the city was destroyed. The inscription had been placed in Dan by the
king of Damascus (Syria) to commemorate his defeat of the Israelite and Judean
kings who were allied against him. In
making this statement the Syrian king (probably Hazael) says that:
[And
I killed ...]ram son of [...]
8'. the king of Israel, and I killed [...]yahu
son of [... the ki]/ng of
9'. the House of David. And I made [their towns into
ruins and turned]
10'. their land into [a desolation ...]
11'. others and
[...Then...became ki]/ng
12'. over Is[rael...And I laid]
13'. siege against
[...][6]
The archaeologists
think the reference is to Joram, son of Ahab, King
of Israel, and Ahaziah, son
of Joram of the House of
David, but the most significant part of the inscription is the
reference to "the House of David."
For the very first time, this reference to the "House of
David" is a clear reference to the dynasty of David . The dating of this discovery places the reference to David in the early
tenth century and to most scholars--
with the exception of the minimalists--proves that David did indeed control an Israel
that went as far north as Dan. If this
is the case, the contention of the minimalists that David ruled no more than a
small city state if he ruled anything at all is clearly proven wrong. While the majority of scholars agree that the
Tel Dan inscription does exactly this,
minimalist scholars remain unconvinced[3],
noting that the reading may be a fraud and even if legitimate, is not
necessarily to be read as "House of David."
A second and much more recent excavation carried out over
the last five years at a place west of Bethlehem known as Khirbet Qeiyafa has
produced further evidence that the minimalist's positions are wrong. Qeiyafa is a site that was only occupied
during the tenth century. It was not
destroyed and re-built many times as were most biblical sites. Thus everything in the city dates to the time
of David. The surprising discovery at this site was its double walls, a type of construction known as
"casemate" walls, which had fortified gates on two sides of the city.
Since almost all cities had only one
entrance gate that had to be defended, it was not difficult to identify the
site with a town mentioned in two biblical passages by the name of "Two
Gates" (in Hebrew, Sha'arayim).
David's battle with Goliath is set in the hills outside Sha'arayim! Inside the double walls the archaeologists
discovered a very large set of buildings that were obviously an administrative
center with a large storage area (to hold wine and grain sent in as taxes). One of the buildings would have been the residence
of the king when he was present in Sha'arayim.
The discovery of a shard of pottery with writing on it that is
consistent with tenth century Hebrew makes the dating of the city very precise. The dating was further confirmed by Carbon 14
analysis. Taken all together, the
existence of Sha'arayim in the tenth century indicates that David had
fortresses overlooking the Philistine plain which provided protection for
Jerusalem. At this point, most scholars
with the exception of the minimalists have concluded that this evidence ends
the debate about whether David had a kingdom.
Minimalists still insist that there is nothing in the city that makes it
a Davidic fortress, noting that if we did not have the biblical record to help
us we would have no reason to assign the city to a Davidic kingdom.
Conclusion
There is doubtless truth on both sides of this debate
and, as is normally the case, the ultimate resolution of the issues will
probably end up somewhere in the middle with contributions from both groups. On the one hand, Christians have been much
too eager to accept every discovery of an archaeologist as evidence that the
Bible is true. Many of these discoveries
later tend to have been misinterpreted.
On the other hand, those who minimalize the biblical narratives have
doubtless erred in exactly the opposite direction, basing their reluctance to
accept any biblical narratives as having historical value on the obvious
theological elements in them. We must
remember that "truth" and "historicity" are not
synonyms. Truth can be conveyed in
non-historical stories as Jesus demonstrated with his parables
wonderfully. We must also remember that
our faith is not in the Bible but in the God who speaks to us in the
Bible.
[1]
If the biblical narratives "had been
written in the Persian period, as Davies claims, surely they would reflect
conditions of that era, and some anachronisms would give them away. I challenge
Davies to show any “Persian” features -- ideas, institutions, Aramaic
terms, material culture items, etc. -- that fit anything we know
archaeologically of the Persian era in the provenance of Palestine. If Davies
really wants to reconstruct a plausible Persian-period context, he must master
the archaeological data. Yet in his 1992 book, he cites the basic handbook,
Ephraim Stern’s The Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian
Period 538-332 B.C. (1982), once, without discussion." William G. Dever, "Contra Davies," The
Bible and Interpretation, January,
2003.
[2]
The city appears in the city list
of Judah's tribal inheritance, after Socoh and Azekah (Jos 15, 36). After
David killed Goliath, the Philistines ran away and
were slain on the “road to Sha'arayim" (1 Sam 17:52). In the city list of
the tribe of Simeon, Sha'arayim is mentioned as one of the cities "unto
the reign of David" (1 Chr 4:31). The name means "two gates" in
Hebrew
[3] Philip R.
Davies ," 'House of David' Built on Sand:
The Sins of the Biblical Maximazers," Biblical Archaeology Review 20:04,
Jul/Aug 1994. " As it turns out, neither claim made for the Tel
Dan inscription—that it contains the name “David” and that it contains the term
the “House of David” as a reference to the kingdom of Judah—is factually
true." "It is worth noting
that no Assyrian inscription reads “king of the House of Omri,” nor does the
equivalent phrase occur in any Biblical text. The restoration of the first two
letters of the word for king is purely conjectural." "In our search for its meaning, one thing
is sure. We will get nowhere until we can see the difference between what a
text says, what it might say and what we would like it to say. If being a
“Biblical minimalist” means refusing to see what is not there, then I prefer to
remain a minimalist, though I resent the inaccurate and sneering epithet. I
submit that this is far preferable to the stance of the “Biblical maximalists” who,
in matters of the Bible and archaeology, place the Bible before both
archaeology and the conventions of scholarly argument."
