WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Those of us alert for Jewish homeland slights have our ears tuned for “Israeli occupation of ‘East’ Jerusalem and ‘the West Bank,’ the 1949 lines as ‘the 1967 borders,’ etc. But today’s delegitimizers don’t confine themselves to the present. As a recent magazine article shows, their delegitimizing targets go back three thousand years.
This Week in The Jerusalem Post: The Battle Over “King David and All of That Stuff”
The Jerusalem Post ran an article this Wednesday (7/15/20) on a long-running, still-current controversy over a fellow named David who lived awhile back, three thousand years back, in what’s today Israel. This article, “Jerusalem vs. Tel Aviv and the Battle Over Israel’s Biblical Archaeology” (not the one I’m complaining about) rightly characterized that controversy as “touching deep political and theological questions, including the view of the bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.”
By me, a Jew can’t dig deeper than into the roots of the bond between our people and homeland, and, as it happened, I got a first-hand briefing a few years ago on the unearthing of what this week’s JPost article called “one of the most recent and crucial breakthroughs in the debate over the existence and features of David’s kingdom.” By your leave, I’ll brief you on it.
One of the books in my private hundreds-of-volumes Jewish homeland history library has a unique attribute – I wrote it, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. What I’d set out to do, one non-historian Jewish homeland advocate to others, was to trace through the centuries an assertion that had been made by British theologian-historian James Parkes in Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p. 266) that today’s Zionists’ “real title deeds” had been written by the continuous tenacious presence all through the post-biblical centuries of the homeland Jewish Yishuv, in spite of every discouragement. Parkes had bitterly criticized us for not driving home that point, allowing deniers of Jewish homeland equity in Palestine to paint a false picture of Jews coming back after two thousand years’ absence to a land which had become wholly Arab.
I did my research on that continuous tenacious homeland Jewish presence between the times of Hadrian, the Roman emperor who defeated the Jews’ final Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, and of Herzl, whose book, The Jewish State, and convening of the First Zionist Congress marked beginnings in the late nineteenth century of our time’s Zionist movement. I sent the first draft, with its opening scene set in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins, to my esteemed non-vanity publisher, who fired back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” What about it, indeed? I replied that if we couldn’t connect the Jewish presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then King David and all of that stuff didn’t matter. But it does matter, of course. It’s the foundation stone, the rock, if you will, on which three millennia homeland Jewish history has been built. So Chapter One became Chapter Four, and I began to learn and then write about King David and all of that stuff.
Here it is. For long, King David and the United Kingdom of Judah & Israel were accepted on faith. But as “biblical archaeology” matured as a strict science, evidence of a significant tenth century BCE kingdom of Judah, especially in Jerusalem, just didn’t turn up. Skepticism, not all of it purely objective, grew into ridicule: “King David was as real as King Arthur.” But then in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription on a broken black basalt monument was unearthed, boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and over “the House of David.” Archeologist Finkelstein, a notorious non-believer in a powerful King David, acknowledged this much:
“This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the rein of David’s son Solomon. The fact that Judah (or perhaps its capital, Jerusalem) is referred to with only a mention of its ruling house is clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period.” (Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 129)
This week’s JPost article contrasts the views of Israeli archeologists Finkelstein, of Tel Aviv University, and Garfinkel, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on “one of the hottest matters of debate in the past 20 years,” the existence and if so extent of the biblical United Kingdom of Israel and Judah under David and Solomon. Finkelstein downplays that kingdom, treating David as more of a tribal chieftain founder of what became the House of David, not himself a powerful king. In Finkelstein’s view, the biblical portrayal of a substantial kingdom of Judah was a product of David’s seventh century BCE descendant Josiah, following Assyrian destruction of the more powerful kingdom of Israel, from which many refugees fled down to Judah.
In 2007, Garfinkel unearthed in the Elah Valley, southwest of Jerusalem, a fortified site, Khirbet Qeiyafa, carbon-dated to the tenth century BCE. The findings at this site are what this week’s JPost article plausibly called “one of the most recent and crucial breakthroughs in the debate over the existence and features of David’s kingdom.” Foundation Stone, an Israeli organization providing “education through archaeology,” became involved in publicizing these findings, creating what Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, called the best archaeological site publicity in the past fifty years. I’d been previously introduced to Jerusalem’s Rabbi Barnea Levi Selavan, co-director of Foundation Stone, and remained in touch with him while I was writing the 2011 updated edition of my book. I acknowledged the extensive information he provided me in footnote 13 in chapter two.
Over the seasons, there were three successive astonishing discoveries at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the first being the sheer massiveness of the fortification there where David bested Goliath, between Jerusalem and coastal lands of the Philistines. It was unclear initially whether this massive fortress had been Israelite or Philistine, but if the former it would have taken a substantial tenth century Jerusalem-based entity to build it, and if the latter it indicated a substantial threat from Jerusalem. My book lists Garfinkel’s reasons supporting “Why the City Is Judean.”
The second electrifying discovery at Khirbet Qeiyafa was an ostracon, a pottery shard with writing, being “the first Hebrew inscription clearly dated to the tenth century.” Among the arguments for an insubstantial tenth century Judahite kingdom had been absence of evidence of literacy. Additional literacy evidence was unearthed around that time at Tel Zayit.
It was still not clear what this fortified city between Jerusalem and the Philistines might be. Indeed, the city’s gate, always on the safe side, faced the Philistines on the west. But then came the third discovery, that of an extraordinarily massive eastern-side second gate, marking the city as Sha’arayim, the only biblical-mentioned two-gate city in Judah, the name actually meaning “two gates.”
From all this, Garfinkel claimed:
“What is the historical value of the biblical narrative concerning the period of the United Monarchy? In the early days of research it was accepted as an accurate historical account [citing B. Mazar and Yadin]. Since the 1980’s serious doubts have been raised regarding this tradition, suggesting that it is merely a literary compilation dating from centuries later [citing Thompson and Davies]. King David was, according to this view, a purely mythological figure. Although the inscription on the Tel Dan stele clearly indicates that he was indeed a historical figure [citing Biran and Naveh], it is unclear if he was the ruler of a large empire or a small, dusty ‘cow town.’
“The geopolitical circumstances in the Elah Valley during the late eleventh – early tenth centuries are quite clear ….”
Citing the massive dimensions and weight of the Jerusalem-side gate, which “far exceeded technical requirements and was clearly intended as a statement of power and authority,” plus the biblical text reference and radio-carbon dating, Garfinkel concluded
“… the biblical tradition does bear authentic geographical memories from the tenth century BCE Elah Valley. There is no ground for the assumption that these traditions were fabricated in the late seventh century or in the Hellenistic period.” (Garfinkel & Ganor, The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, vol. 8, art. 22, quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, p. 30)
But more’s being contested today about King David and Khirbet Qeiyafa and when the bible was written than whether it dates in part from the tenth or seventh (Josiah) centuries or post-exile times. There’s still challenge out there in substantial publications as to whether David was real.
A June 29, 2020, New Yorker magazine issue article, “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire,” is subtitled “The biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.” This is followed with this: “The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin sheikh?” This is the on-line edition’s title. A footnote says the print edition’s title is “Built On Sand.”
Last month’s New Yorker article has been criticized by professionals on a number of grounds. What seems to me as a layman to be misleading is the article’s author characterizing Finkelstein as characterizing David as “a Bedouin sheikh.” To us laymen, this implies that he wasn’t Israelite at all, but a member and leader of a different ethnic group appropriated by biblical writers as Israelite. What Finkelstein maintained in The Bible Unearthed was that the Conquest didn’t happen, that the Israelites had an “indigenous origin,” arising from pastoral nomads who infiltrated the Judean-Samarian hills a couple centuries before David from the east. (Archeologist Dever, mentioned extensively in the New Yorker article, agrees with Finkelstein on the Israelites’ indigenous origin, but says he and most others believe they arose from disgruntled Canaanite farmers moving up into the hills from the west: “… no one follows Finkelstein’s almost exclusively resedentarized nomads theory.” Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, pp. 157-58, quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, p. 6).
Those of us Israel supporters with our ears tuned for media and other Jewish homeland slights look out for current canards – Israel as “occupying” what are called “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank,” the 1949 ceasefire lines as “the 1967 borders,” Israel having been “created and founded in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-blue, etc., etc. For real, but we have to look out as well for Jewish homeland slights on events going back, say, about three thousand years.