Editor, H. S. (2002;2002). BAR 23:04 (July/Aug 1997). Biblical Archaeology Society.
Cow Town or Royal Capital?
Evidence for Iron Age JerusalemBy Nadav Na'aman
BAR readers are already familiar with a recent school of Biblical interpretation that denies any historicity to the ancient Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon. 1 I call this the "revisionist" school. Others have described these scholars as "Biblical minimalists" 2 or even "Biblical nihilists."
Jerusalem in the tenth century B.C.E., when David and Solomon were supposed to have lived, was, according to the Biblical revisionists, hardly a town, let alone a city. It was, they contend, still centuries away from being able to challenge any of the dozens of more powerful small autonomous towns in the region. According to two prominent members of this school of thought, University of Copenhagen scholars Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas Thompson, "[Jerusalem] first took on the form and acquired the status of a city, capable of being understood as a state capital, sometime in the middle of the seventh century." 3
The Biblical evidence that contradicts this view is worthless, they say, because it was written down hundreds of years after the events it describes. The Deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy through Kings) was composed, according to these scholars, no earlier than the fifth century B.C.E. The histories of David and Solomon were thus written hundreds of years after the deaths of the two kings–assuming they were real people. Therefore, we are told, only non-Biblical sources and archaeological evidence can be used to write a history of early Israel–and, alas, there is not enough material of this kind to write such a history.
The argument of the Biblical revisionists is thus essentially negative: We cannot rely on the Bible. And other evidence varies from scant to nonexistent. Especially for Jerusalem, the archaeological evidence, despite the enormous number of excavations in the city, has provided very little, if anything, from the tenth century B.C.E.
My first response–I shall concentrate on Jerusalem here–is that they are wrong about the archaeological evidence. In the 1980s Yigal Shiloh found a few walls that can be dated to this period. 4 In the 1960s Kathleen Kenyon also exposed a wall fragment from the tenth century. 5 The famous Stepped-Stone Structure may also date to this period. 6 Nevertheless, it is true that tenth-century remains from Jerusalem are few and come only from the ridge south of the Temple Mount known as the City of David; no pottery from this period has been found in other excavated areas of Jerusalem.
1 See the following BAR articles: "'Annual Miracle' Visits Philadelphia," BAR 22:02; and Hershel Shanks, "New Orleans Gumbo: Plenty of Spice at Annual Meeting," BAR 23:02.
2 Although Philip Davies, one of the leading Biblical revisionists, has called this term a "sneering epithet," Yale University scholar William Hallo has characterized it as "fairly innocuous" ("Biblical History in Its Near Eastern Setting: The Contextual Approach," in Scripture in Context , ed. Carl D. Evans, William W. Hallo and John B. White [Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick, 1980], p. 3).
3 Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, "Did Biran Kill David? The Bible in the Light of Archaeology," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 64 (1994), p. 20.
4 David Tarler and Jane M. Cahill, "David, City of," The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 52–67.
5 Kathleen Kenyon, Digging up Jerusalem (London: Benn, 1974), pp. 92, 114–115. See also G.J. Wightman, The Walls of Jerusalem: From the Canaanites to the Mamluks , Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement 4 (Sydney: Meditarch, 1993), pp. 33–35.
6 See Yigal Shiloh, Excavations at the City of David I, 1978–1982, Qedem 19 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1984), p. 27. However, Tarler and Cahill have recently suggested that the Stepped-Stone Structure was constructed in the 13th–12th century B.C.E. ("David, City of," Anchor Bible Dictionary ).
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