The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (37 page)

The result was disastrous. The restive Edomites took Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba, and Rezin, the powerful king of Damascus, and his ally Pekah, king of Israel, went to war against Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. With his back to the wall, King Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria, for help, with gifts from the Temple: “And the king of Assyria hearkened to him; the king of Assyria marched up against Damascus, and took
it, carrying its people captive to Kir, and he killed Rezin” (
2
Kings
16
:
9
). Judah was at least temporarily saved by the clever stratagem of a wicked king appealing to the mighty Assyrian empire.

But the time for a far-reaching religious change had come. The unending cycle of apostasy, punishment, and repentance was about to be broken. For Ahaz’s son Hezekiah, who ruled in Jerusalem for twenty-nine years, embarked on a sweeping religious reform, restoring the purity and fidelity to YHWH that had been lacking since the days of King David. One of the strongest manifestations of the cult that was practiced in the countryside of Judah was the popularity of the high places—or open-air altars—which were rarely disturbed, even by the most righteous of kings. Like a mantra, the Bible recites a formula in the summary of the acts of every just king, that “the high places were not taken away”; the people of Judah continued to sacrifice and to burn incense on the high places. Hezekiah was the first to remove the high places as well as other objects of idolatrous worship:

And he did what was right in the eyes of the L
ORD
, according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had burned incense to it; it was called Nehushtan. He trusted in the L
ORD
the God of Israel; so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the L
ORD
; he did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments which the L
ORD
commanded Moses. And the L
ORD
was with him; wherever he went forth, he prospered. (
2
K
INGS
18
:
3
–
7
)

The biblical picture of Judah’s history is therefore unambiguous in its belief that the kingdom had once been exceptionally holy but had sometimes abandoned the faith. Only the accession of Hezekiah was able to restore Judah’s holiness.

Yet archaeology suggests quite a different situation—one in which the golden age of tribal and Davidic fidelity to YHWH was a late religious ideal, not a historical reality. Instead of a restoration, the evidence suggests that a centralized monarchy and national religion focused in Jerusalem took centuries to develop and was
new
in Hezekiah’s day. The idolatry of the people of Judah was not a departure from their earlier monotheism. It was, instead, the way the people of Judah had worshiped for hundreds of years.

Until a few years ago, virtually all biblical archaeologists accepted the scriptural description of the sister states of Judah and Israel at face value. They portrayed Judah as a fully developed state as early as the time of Solomon and tried their best to produce archaeological proof of the building activities and effective regional administration of the early Judahite kings. Yet as we have shown, the supposed archaeological evidence of the united monarchy was no more than wishful thinking. And so it was also with the monuments attributed to the successors of Solomon. The identification of forts reportedly built by Solomon’s son Rehoboam throughout Judah (according to
2
Chronicles
11
:
5
–
12
) and the linking of the massive fortifications at the site of Tell en-Nasbeh north of Jerusalem with the defense works undertaken by the Judahite king Asa at the biblical city of Mizpah (
1
Kings
15
:
22
) proved to be illusory. Like the Solomonic gates and palaces, these royal building operations are now known to have taken place almost two hundred years after the reigns of those particular kings.

Archaeology shows that the early kings of Judah were not the equals of their northern counterparts in power or administrative ability despite the fact that their reigns and even accession dates are intertwined in the books of Kings. Israel and Judah were two different worlds. With the possible exception of the city of Lachish in the foothills of the Shephelah, there are
no
signs of elaborate regional centers within Judah on the scale of the northern sites of Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor. Likewise, Judahite urban planning and architecture was far more rustic. Monumental building techniques—such as the use of ashlar masonry and Proto-Aeolic capitals that typified the elaborate Omride building style in the northern kingdom—did not appear in the south before the seventh century
BCE
. Even if royal structures of the house of David in Jerusalem (supposedly obliterated by later buildings) achieved some measure of impressiveness, if not grandeur, there is no evidence for monumental construction in the few towns and villages anywhere else in the southern hills.

Despite the long-standing contention that the opulent Solomonic court was the scene of a flourishing of belles lettres, religious thought, and history writing, evidence for widespread literacy is utterly lacking in Judah during the time of the divided monarchy. Not a single trace of supposed tenth century Judahite literary activity has been found. Indeed, monumental inscriptions and personal seals—essential signs of a fully developed state—appear in Judah only
two hundred years after Solomon,
in the late eighth century
BCE
. Most of the known ostraca and inscribed weight stones—further evidence of bureaucratic record keeping and regularized trade standards—appear only in the seventh century. Nor is there any evidence for mass production of pottery in centralized workshops or industrial production of oil for export until the same late period. The estimated population figures show precisely how unequal Judah and Israel were. As mentioned, archaeological surveys indicate that until the eighth century the population of the Judahite highlands was about one-tenth that of the highlands of the northern kingdom of Israel.

In light of these findings, it is now clear that Iron Age Judah enjoyed no precocious golden age. David and his son Solomon and the subsequent members of the Davidic dynasty ruled over a marginal, isolated, rural region, with no signs of great wealth or centralized administration. It did not suddenly decline into weakness and misfortune from an era of unparalleled prosperity. Instead it underwent a long and gradual development over hundreds of years. David and Solomon’s Jerusalem was only one of a number of religious centers within the land of Israel; it was surely not acknowledged as the spiritual center of the entire people of Israel initially.

So far we have produced only negative evidence of what Judah was not. Yet we do have a picture of what Jerusalem and its vicinity must have been like at the time of David and Solomon and their early successors. That picture does not come from the Bible. It comes from the Tell el-Amarna archive of Egypt in the Late Bronze Age.

Among the more than
350
cuneiform tablets from the fourteenth century
BCE
discovered at the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, the modern Tell el-Amarna, containing correspondence between the pharaoh of Egypt and the kings of Asiatic states and petty rulers of Canaan, a group of six tablets offers a unique insight on the royal rule and economic possibilities in the southern highlands—precisely where the kingdom of Judah would later arise. Written by Abdi-Heba, the king of Urusalim (the Late Bronze
Age name for Jerusalem), the letters reveal the character of his kingdom as a thinly settled highland region, loosely supervised from the royal citadel in Jerusalem.

As we now know from surveys and the recognition of repeated cycles of occupation throughout the millennia, Judah’s distinctive society was determined in large measure by its remote geographical position, unpredictable rainfall, and rugged terrain. In contrast to the northern hill country with its broad valleys and natural overland routes to the neighboring regions, Judah was always marginal agriculturally and isolated from the main trade routes, offering any would-be ruler only meager opportunities for wealth. Its economy was concentrated around the self-sufficient production of the individual farming community or pastoral group.

A similar picture emerges from Abdi-Heba’s correspondence. He controlled the highlands from the region of Bethel in the north to the region of Hebron in the south—an area of about nine hundred square miles, in conflict with neighboring rulers in the northern highlands (Shechem) and the Shephelah. His land was very sparsely populated, with only eight small settlements detected so far. The sedentary population of Abdi-Heba’s territory, including those living in Jerusalem, probably did not exceed fifteen hundred people; it was the most thinly populated area of Canaan. But there were many pastoral groups in this remote highland frontier zone—possibly outnumbering the settled village population. We may assume that the main authority in the remote parts of Abdi-Heba’s territory was in the hands of the outlaws known as Apiru, the bedouin-like Shosu, and the independent clans.

Abdi-Heba’s capital, Urusalim, was a small highlands stronghold, located in the southeastern ridge of ancient Jerusalem, which would later be known as the city of David. No monumental buildings or fortifications from the fourteenth century
BCE
have been found there, and as suggested by the historian Nadav Naaman Abdi-Heba’s capital was a modest settlement for the elite who ruled over the surrounding region’s few agricultural villages and large number of pastoral groups.

We do not know the fate of the dynasty of Abdi-Heba and we do not have sufficient archaeological evidence to understand the changes that took place in Jerusalem in the transition from the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age. Yet from the larger perspective of environment, settlement patterns, and
economy, nothing seems to have changed dramatically over the succeeding centuries. A few agricultural villages (admittedly increasing slightly in number) existed on the central plateau, pastoral groups continued to follow seasonal cycles with their flocks, and a tiny elite exerted nominal rule over all of them from Jerusalem. Of the historical David we can say almost nothing, except to note the uncanny similarity between the ragtag Apiru bands that threatened Abdi-Heba and the biblical tales of the outlaw chief David and his band of mighty men roaming in the Hebron hills and the Judean desert. But whether or not David conquered Jerusalem in the daring Apiru-like raid described in the books of Samuel, it seems clear that the dynasty he established represented a change in rulers but hardly altered the basic way that the southern highlands were ruled.