The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (24 page)

As we have seen, the historical reality of the kingdom of David and Solomon was quite different from the tale. It was part of a great demographic transformation that would lead to the emergence of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel—in a dramatically different historical sequence than the one the Bible describes. So far we have examined the biblical version of Israel’s formative history written in the seventh century
BCE
, and we have provided glimpses at the archaeological reality that underlies it. Now it is time to tell a new story. In the chapters that follow, we will present the main outlines of the rise, fall, and rebirth of a very different Israel.

The course of Israel’s history—the books of Kings gravely inform us—moves with almost tragic inevitability from unity to schism and from schism to national catastrophe. After the glorious reigns of David and Solomon, when all Israel was ruled from Jerusalem and experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity and power, the tribes of the northern hill country and Galilee—resisting the tax demands of Solomon’s son Rehoboam—angrily break away. What follows is two hundred years of division and hatred between brothers, with the independent Israelite kingdoms of Israel in the north and of Judah in the south intermittently poised to strike at each other’s throats. It is a tale of tragic division, and of violence and idolatry in the northern kingdom. There, according to the biblical accounts, new cult centers are founded to compete with the Jerusalem Temple. New northern Israelite dynasties, rivals of the house of David, bloodily come to power one after another. In time, the northerners pay for their sinfulness with the ultimate punishment—destruction of their state and the exile of the ten northern tribes.

This vision is central to the theology of the Bible—and to the biblical hope for an eventual reunion of Judah and Israel under the rule of the Davidic dynasty. But it is simply not an accurate representation of the historical reality. As we have seen, there is no compelling archaeological evidence
for the historical existence of a vast united monarchy, centered in Jerusalem, that encompassed the entire land of Israel. On the contrary, the evidence reveals a complex demographic transformation in the highlands, in which a unified ethnic consciousness began only slowly to coalesce.

And here we reach perhaps the most unsettling clash between the archaeological finds and the Bible. If there was no Exodus, no conquest, no united monarchy, what are we to make of the biblical desire for unification? What are we to make of the long and difficult relationship between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel for almost two hundred years? There is good reason to suggest that there were
always
two distinct highland entities, of which the southern was always the poorer, weaker, more rural, and less influential—until it rose to sudden, spectacular prominence
after
the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel.

In the Bible, the northern tribes are consistently depicted as weakhearted failures, with a pronounced tendency to sinfulness. This is particularly clear in the book of Judges, where the individual tribes struggle with the idolatrous peoples around them. Among the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob, only the tribes of Judah and Simeon succeeded in conquering all the Canaanite enclaves in their God-given inheritance. As a result, in the south there were no Canaanites left, no Canaanite women to marry and to be influenced by. The tribes of the north are another story. Benjamin, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan did not accomplish what they had to; they did not finish off the Canaanites. As a result they would be tempted again and again.

There is no question in the text that the northern tribes were more numerous and occupied a vast territory, and it is certainly no accident that the first king of Israel, Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, is said to have ruled over northern territories in the highlands. Yet Saul violated the laws of the cult and was driven to suicide after the defeat of his forces by the Philistines. God withdrew his blessing from this anointed northern leader, and the elders of the northern tribes duly turned to David, the outlaw-hero-king of Judah, and proclaimed him king over all of Israel. Despite their wealth and strength, however, the northern tribes are depicted in
1
Kings as being treated like little more than colonial subjects by David’s son Solomon. Solomon’s great regional capitals and store cities of Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor were built in their midst and the people of the north were taxed and conscripted into public works projects by Solomonic appointees. Some northerners—like Jeroboam, son of Nebat, of the tribe of Ephraim—served under the Jerusalem court in positions of importance. But Judah is depicted as the stronger party, having the northern tribes as subjects.

Upon the death of Solomon and the accession of his son Rehoboam, the northerners appealed for a reduction in their burden. But the arrogant Rehoboam dismissed the advice of his moderate counselors and replied to the northerners with the now famous words “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (
1
Kings
12
:
14
). The banner of rebellion was unfurled as the northerners rallied to the cry of secession: “And when all Israel saw that the king did not hearken to them, the people answered the king: ‘What portion have we in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. Look to your tents, O Israel! Look to your own house, David.’ So Israel departed to their tents” (
1
Kings
12
:
16
). The northerners proceeded to stone to death Rehoboam’s chief taskmaster, and King Rehoboam fled in terror back to the safety of Jerusalem.

The northerners then gathered to proclaim for themselves a monarch and chose Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who had served in the court of Solomon. The united monarchy of David and Solomon was completely shattered. Two independent states were created: Judah, which was ruled by the Davidic dynasty from Jerusalem, with its territory limited to the southern part of the central hill country; and Israel, which controlled vast territories in the north. The first capital of the northern kingdom was set at Tirzah, located to the northeast of Shechem. The new king, Jeroboam, decided to set up rivals to the Temple in Jerusalem and ordered that two golden calves be fashioned and installed in shrines at the farthest corners of his kingdom—at Bethel in the far south and Dan in the north.

Thus began a turbulent and fateful period in the biblical history of Israel. From the family solidarity of the patriarchal period, from the spiritual solidarity of the Exodus, and from the political unity of the united monarchy, the people of Israel were now torn in two.

Archaeologists and biblical historians alike have generally taken the biblical narrative of the rise and disintegration of the united monarchy at face value. The ethnic unity and distinctiveness of the people of Israel as a whole were taken for granted. And the historical sequence was believed by most biblical historians to have run approximately like this (minus, of course, the occasional biblical mythmaking and heroic hyperbole): Whether by conquest or peaceful infiltration, the Israelites settled in the empty highlands. At first they organized themselves as a sort of egalitarian society, with charismatic military heroes who saved them from their foes. Then, mainly because of the Philistine threat, which was far more dangerous than the other local menaces, they opted for a monarchy, built a strong army, and expanded to establish a formidable empire under David and Solomon. It was a tale of steady political evolution of a unified people, from tribes to unified statehood, an evolutionary process that was essentially completed by the time of Solomon in the tenth century
BCE
.

The breakup of the united monarchy was therefore seen as an unfortunate postscript to a story that had already run its course. It appeared as if only the arrogant and ill-advised tyranny of Solomon’s son Rehoboam destroyed the expansive grandeur of the Solomonic empire. This vision of the united monarchy and its downfall seemed to be confirmed by the archaeological finds. Scholars believed that the construction of the great “Solomonic” cities with their gates and palaces was indisputable evidence of full-blown statehood by the tenth century
BCE
and of Jerusalem’s iron-fisted control of the north. By the
1980
s, even though the understanding of the initial period of Israelite history had become somewhat more nuanced, it was taken for granted that the united monarchy of David and Solomon—and its sudden breakup—were historical facts.

In tracing the subsequent history of the two sister states of Judah and Israel, scholars followed the biblical story almost word for word, with most assuming that the two successor states shared a nearly identical level of political organization and complexity. Since both Judah and Israel had their origins in the full-fledged monarchy of Solomon, both inherited fully developed state institutions of court, fiscal administration, and military force. As a result, the two independent kingdoms were believed to have
competed with each other, fought each other, and helped each other, according to the changing political circumstances in the region, but always on more or less equal terms. Certain regional differences did, of course, become apparent. But most scholars concluded that the rest of the history of the Israelite kingdoms was one of population increase, intensive building, and warfare—but no further dramatic social development.

This widely accepted picture now appears to be wrong.

The intensive archaeological surveys in the central hill country in the
1980
s opened new vistas for understanding the character and origins of the two highland states of Judah and Israel. The new perspectives differed dramatically from the biblical accounts. The surveys showed that the emergence of the Israelites in the highlands of Canaan was not a unique event, but actually just one in a series of demographic oscillations that could be traced back for millennia.

In each of the two earlier settlement waves—in the Early Bronze Age (c.
3500
–
2200
BCE
) and in the Middle Bronze Age (c.
2000
–
1550
BCE
)—the indigenous highland population moved from pastoralism to seasonal agriculture, to permanent villages, to complex highland economies in a manner that was strikingly similar to the process of Israelite settlement in the Iron Age I (
1150
–
900
BCE
). But even more surprising, the surveys (and the fragmentary historical information) indicated that in each wave of highland settlement, there always seemed to have been
two
distinct societies in the highlands—northern and southern—roughly occupying the areas of the later kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

A map of Early Bronze Age highland sites, for example, clearly shows two different regional settlement systems, with a dividing line between them running roughly between Shechem and Jerusalem, a boundary that would later mark the frontier between Israel and Judah. Like the later kingdom of Israel, the northern settlement system was dense and possessed a complex hierarchy of large, medium, and small sites, all heavily dependent on settled agriculture. The southern region, like the later kingdom of Judah, was more sparsely settled, mostly in small sites, with no such variety of sizes. The south also had a relatively large number of archaeological sites
with only scatters of pottery sherds, rather than permanent buildings; this suggested a significant population of migratory pastoral groups.

Northern and southern regions were each dominated by a single center that was apparently the focus of regional political and economic centralization—and perhaps of regional religious practices as well. In the south, in the Early Bronze Age, it was a large site named Khirbet et-Tell (the biblical Ai), located northeast of Jerusalem. It covered an area of about twenty-five acres, which represented a full
fifth
of all the built-up area in the southern hill country. Its impressive fortifications and monumental temple underline its paramount status in the largely rural and pastoral south. In the north there were a few central sites, but a dominating one, Tell el-Farah, situated near a large freshwater spring and guarding the main road down to the Jordan valley, seems to have controlled the rich agricultural lands of the region. It is not pure coincidence—as we will see—that this city, later known as biblical Tirzah, became the first capital of the northern kingdom of Israel.

In the succeeding Middle Bronze Age, the wave of settlement in the highlands possessed exactly the same characteristics. There were very few permanent settlement sites in the south, most of them tiny, and there were a large number of pastoral groups, evidenced by their isolated cemeteries not related to sedentary sites. The north was much more densely inhabited, with settled farmers in much greater proportion than pastoralists. The major urban site in the south was now Jerusalem, which was heavily fortified (as Ai had been in the Early Bronze Age), joined by a secondary center, Hebron, which was also fortified. The great center of the north was now Shechem. Excavations at the site of Tell Balatah on the eastern outskirts of the city revealed imposing fortifications and a massive temple.

In addition to the archaeological indications of the north-south split there is some important textual evidence from Egypt. One source is the so-called execration texts—curse inscriptions, written on pottery fragments on statuettes of prisoners of war that were meant to be broken and buried ceremonially to bring misfortune upon the enemies of Egypt. Like ancient versions of voodoo dolls covered with angry graffiti, these texts offer us a glimpse at the political geography of Canaan during that era, in particular those places and peoples whom the Egyptians found most threatening. The texts mention a large number of coastal and lowland
cities, but only two highland centers: Shechem and (according to most scholars) Jerusalem.