David is still invoked more often and more vividly than any other figure in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, aside from David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, and Moses on Mount Sinai, the Bible is not mentioned much in the arts and letters, the mass media and pop culture of postmodern America. But “David and Goliath,” as we have already seen, survives as a convenient shorthand phrase in the vocabulary of newspaper headline writers and advertising copywriters, a glyph for the underdog who prevails against a much stronger adversary. Even as I was writing this book, I saw several different billboards and television commercials that depicted a young David in battle with Goliath in order to hawk computer chips, Internet services, frozen pizza, and fast-food restaurants.
Elsewhere in the world, however, David is conjured up with far greater passion and for matters of far greater consequence.
“Eshkol, you have the best army since King David,” said Ezer Weizman, a founder of the Israeli Air Force and future president of Israel, to the prime minister of Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967. “If you don't attack, you will never be forgiven. If you do attack, you will be the conquering hero.”16
After the victory in 1967, which restored the Old City of Jerusalem to Israeli sovereignty, a government minister was asked to comment on the conflicting claims of Arabs and Jews to the site where the City of David once stood and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, two of the most sacred sites in Islam, now stand. The minister asserted that the modern state of Israel enjoyed the legal right to clear the Temple Mount, as the site is known in Jewish tradition, because King David had purchased it from Araunah the Jebusite for fifty pieces of silver!17
More recently, Yael Dayan, member of parliament and daughter of the Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, cited the intimate relationship between David and Jonathan in support of a proposed law to extend civil rights to gay men and lesbians. She was beaten and cursed by some of her fellow members of the Knesset, who were outraged at her audacity in suggesting that King David might have been a bisexual.
As recently as 1997, a celebration of the “three thousandth anniversary” of Jerusalem was conducted in the modern state of Israel and in Jewish communities throughout the world. The significance of the anniversary, however, was downplayed in the publicity and the public festivities for the celebration. What actually happened three thousand years ago in Jerusalem? According to the Bible, it was the conquest of the Jebusite hill-town by the newly crowned king of Israel and his private army of foreign mercenaries, perhaps by means of a commando attack on the waterworks and the slaughter of “the blind and the lame.” And the modern celebration of a military operation reported only in the Bible rang with shrill political symbolism—the Israelis, of course, were asserting their right to rule over an “undivided” Jerusalem in the face of Palestinian Arab demands for shared sovereignty over the city known in Islamic tradition as al-Quds, “the Holy.”
Thus does the biblical King David come to figure in the current conflict between Arabs and Jews on that bloodstained patch of earth that we call the Holy Land. The most militant Israelis claim property rights over Jerusalem on the strength of David's purchase of a threshing-floor from an obscure Jebusite—yet another event mentioned only in the Bible—and the most militant Arabs deny that David ever existed. And, significantly, both factions look on archaeology not as a scholarly discipline but as a tool of politics and diplomacy, a way to corroborate their claims on the basis of hard evidence scratched out of the soil of the place the Bible calls the Promised Land.
Archaeology has always been an urgent interest for the founders and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel—it is no accident that Yigael Yadin, one of the preeminent archaeologists at work in Israel, was also a general of the Israeli Defense Forces, or that Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, was a collector of antiquities. Not to be outdone, Palestinian Arab archaeologists are putting their scholarship to use for political purposes, too. A recent excavation of ancient Canaanite houses near the town of Nablus was offered as a validation of modern Arab aspirations for statehood in Palestine.
“These are our ancestors, these are our roots,” insisted one Palestinian archaeologist, and a colleague added: “We hope in the future to make more discoveries to disprove Israeli claims that they have a right to this land.”18
THE SEARCH FOR THE HISTORICAL DAVID
Of course, David has been hailed as a historical figure by a gallery of commentators ranging from an amateur Bible critic like Sigmund Freud—“It is real history,” he writes of the Book of Samuel, “five hundred years before Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’ ”19— to a fully credentialed Bible scholar like Donald Harman Akenson. “He is the first full-formed figure to be found in the Bible, and, indeed, is probably the first human being for whom we have a biography,” Akenson writes. “I think that King David is the one figure whom the editor-writer believes is 100 percent historically real and also completely compelling from a storyteller's viewpoint.”20
And yet a certain hedge can be discerned in the telltale phrase “from a storyteller's viewpoint.” Even a scholar as convinced of David's historicity as Robert Alter—“There really was a David who fought a civil war against the house of Saul, achieved undisputed sovereignty over the twelve tribes, conquered Jerusalem, founded a dynasty, created a small empire, and was succeeded by his son Solomon”—subtly backs off from his own assertion. Although Alter writes that it is “possible” that the soap opera of David's intimate family life “may have been reported on good authority,” he is intellectually honest enough to concede that the biblical stories “are not, strictly speaking, historiography, but rather the imaginative reenactment of history by a gifted writer.” About all we can say with complete conviction, Alter seems to concede, is that the biblical life story of David “is surely one of the most stunning imaginative achievements of ancient literature.”21
So we are left with an unanswered question: Is the biography of David a work of history, a work of literature, or an uncertain blend of both? And, ironically, the question is rendered all the more troubling by the obvious literary gifts of the man or woman who was the original author of the biblical life story of David. After all, a gifted author might readily produce a work of fiction that seems real without being so.
“David's biographer was a man of genius,” declares Robert H. Pfeiffer, who goes so far as to nominate an obscure biblical figure called Ahimaaz (2 Sam. 15:27) as the author of the earliest material found in Samuel. “Without any previous models as guide, he wrote a masterpiece, unsurpassed in historicity, psychological insight, literary style, and dramatic power.”22
But there is a difference between a “stunning imaginative achievement” and “unsurpassed … historicity.” Perhaps David seems so substantial for the same reason that a fictional character like Hamlet or Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield is memorable and compelling. When some scholars ponder the salacious details in the biblical story of David, they wonder out loud whether these passages could have been written by near contemporaries of David who were seeking to praise him.23 Perhaps the biblical King David is best compared to the medieval King Arthur as we find him in Thomas Malory's La Morte d'Arthur, a fifteenth-century romantic saga that tells the story of a king who may or may not have lived and reigned a thousand years earlier. Like Arthur, David may have been a rude aboriginal chieftain whose obscure life was glorified beyond recognition by later mythmakers. And, as with Arthur, the historical evidence for King David has been hard to find.
WHO IS BURIED IN DAVID'S TOMB?
Over the centuries, the figure of David has been dressed up in a colorful mantle of myth and legend, all of it phony. A fifth-century Christian king established a monastery at the site of a tower that he believed to be the “Tower of David.” The Crusaders who conquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century convinced themselves that they had discovered David's tomb, and they built a basilica to mark the site; when Saladin took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders, he added a mosque. But the so-cal
led Tower of David was actually erected by Herod, and “David's Tomb,” still marked on tourist maps of Jerusalem, is empty—or if anyone is actually buried there, it is not David.
Even the so-called Star of David, the symbol that has come to signify Judaism in general and the modern state of Israel in particular, has no real connection with King David, whether we regard him as a biblical or a historical figure. Indeed, the distinctive six-pointed star first came to be associated with David among alchemists and magic-users in medieval Christian and Islamic circles, and early Jewish sources linked the star sometimes to David, sometimes to Solomon, and sometimes to neither of them. The earliest written reference to the “Shield of David” (magen David), as the six-pointed star is known in Jewish usage, dates only to the fourteenth century. And it was not until the nineteenth century that the Star of David came to be adopted by the Jewish community as “a striking and simple sign which would ‘symbolize’ Judaism in the same way as the cross symbolizes Christianity,” according to Gershom Scholem, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism.24
So a close scrutiny of the historical evidence, such as it is, can be an unsettling experience. The very existence of David's mighty empire, so richly described in the pages of the Bible, is defended by some scholars only by arguing from a negative. The imperial powers that had contested with one another for dominance in Palestine at various times in history—the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Assyrians—were “quiescent,” according to Bible historian Norman K. Gottwald, for a brief period around the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E. “Only in the tenth century had Israel been the dominant power in the region between the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates valleys,” argues Gottwald.25 For one brief moment in history, then, the audacious ruler of a tiny tribal kingdom succeeded in creating a glorious empire in the cracks between the superpowers of the ancient world.
Still, as mighty as David and his little empire may have been, they wholly escaped the attention of the scribes and chroniclers of every other nation of the ancient world, and the story of his conquests is told only in the pages of the Bible. Scholars have searched in vain for any mention of David in other ancient texts, and the earliest archaeological evidence of King David is dated a century or two after his supposed reign. About the best case that can be made for the “historicity” of David is that his exploits as described in the Bible “fit reasonably well” with extra-biblical evidence, even if “there is no external corroboration” for the biblical account.26
The most radical of revisionist Bible scholars are willing to argue that the biblical David was originally (and, perhaps, only) understood as a cherished religious symbol and not a flesh-and-blood human being. Thus, for example, Thomas L. Thompson points out that we have “no evidence of a United Monarchy, no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem …, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe.”27 And he insists that we fundamentally misunderstand the very nature of the Bible when we seek to validate the biblical life story of David by digging in the soil in search of archaeological relics.
“It is a fundamental error of method to ask first after a historical David or Solomon, as biblical archaeologists often have done,” Thompson argues. “The Bible does not hesitate to tell these stories as tall tales.”28
Even the most temperate scholars, who continue to regard David as a historical figure and not merely a mythic one, feel compelled to concede that, whether or not the biblical authors understood David as the hero of a “tall tale,” his life story cannot be corroborated with the archaeological evidence so far available to us.
“There is not a single contemporary reference to David or Solomon in the many neighbouring countries which certainly were keeping written records during the tenth century,” writes archaeologist Magnus Magnusson. “Without the Biblical accounts, history would be totally unaware of the very existence of the twin founders of the tenth-century expansion of Israel/Judah into a major power, and archaeology would have been able to do little to indicate that it had ever taken place. As far as archaeology is concerned it was a paper (or papyrus) empire only.”29
Archaeologists suggest, for example, that the City of David described in the Bible covered eleven or twelve acres of intensively excavated ground.30 “Jerusalem is probably the most excavated city in the world,” observe the editors of Biblical Archaeology Review31—and yet archaeologist Margaret Steiner confronts us with an uncomfortable fact: “No remains of a town, let alone a city, have ever been found: not a trace of an encircling wall, no gate, no houses. Not a single piece of architecture. Simply nothing!”32 A crumbling citadel at the site of ancient Gibeah was identified by William F. Albright, the Bible scholar who first excavated the site in the 1920s, as the place where Saul reigned as the first king of Israel—but no such evidence of the City of David has ever been discovered.33
Indeed, precisely because no one else in the ancient world seems to have noticed David or his kingdom, the restless search for “facts on the ground”—or, more accurately, facts in the ground—has taken on ever more energy and urgency. Only very recently has the heroic effort to find a trace of the historical David been rewarded with the first tantalizing glimmer of success.
THE QUALITY OF LIGHT AT TEL DAN
On July 23, 1993, a team of archaeologists was at work on a dig at a place in northern Israel called Tel Dan. The site under excavation was an elaborate system of ramparts, walls, and gates, which dated back to the mid-ninth century B.C.E. and were believed to be the outer-works of the town that the Bible calls Dan, the northernmost point in the land of Israel: “From Dan even unto Beersheba” is the classic biblical phrase to describe the full reach of the Promised Land (Judges 21:1).
Excavations at Tel Dan had begun in 1966 as an “emergency project” of Israel's Department of Antiquities, but archaeologists were still at work nearly thirty years later. On that day in 1993, they were dismantling a portion of the wall that bordered a plaza at the entrance to the outer gate of Dan. Like other ancient constructions, the wall included scraps of stonework that had been broken up and reused as building materials at some point in the distant past. But one stone in particular caught the eye of Gila Cook, the official surveyor of the archaeological expedition at Te l Dan, and she bent over to take a closer look.
What attracted her attention was a fragment of basalt, cracked and worn but somehow different from the other detritus that had been built into the wall by a Bronze Age laborer some three thousand years before. She had seen something on the stone, and now she was able to make out the letters, words, phrases that were incised on the polished surface.
“Taking a closer look at the stone while still in situ and helped by the direction of the early afternoon rays of the sun which illuminated the engraved lines on the stone, we could see the contours of the letters quite clearly,” recall Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, members of the archaeological team. “The stone was easily removed as only a small part of it was embedded in the ground. Turning the stone to face the sun, the letters became even more legible. The words, separated by dots, sprung to life.”34
To the astonishment of the archaeologists who now peered at the stone under the summer sun of the Galilee, the inscription on that battered fragment of basalt appeared to include the three consonants that spell out a name that was deeply familiar but, until then, had been found only in the pages of the Bible—the name of David.
The hunk of stone was a portion of a stela—an upright stone slab bearing a written inscription—that had been fashioned out of native basalt, polished to take the inscription, and then incised with an iron stylus at some moment in distant antiquity, perhaps as long ago as the early eighth century B.C.E. The inscription memorialized an event that had once been regarded as worthy of celebration, but the stela had been broken up and put to use as building material not long after it was made. And, for the next three thousand years, it remained buried inside a forgotten town wall somewhere in the Galilee.
As the archaeologists pored over the fragment, they wer
e able to make out a portion of the original inscription. The language was early Aramaic, a sister language of biblical Hebrew, and the lettering style was dated to the ninth century B.C.E. Later, two more chunks of the same stela were found at the site, and more of the inscription was recovered. Archaeologists and biblical scholars were thrilled to discover that the inscription included a reference to David—or, more precisely, the house of David (bet David), a phrase that is interpreted to mean the royal dynasty founded by David.
Scholars cannot be entirely sure about any of the particulars of the stela from Tel Dan—when it was created, by whom, or for what reason. Even the reference to David is still obscure.35 But according to the archaeologists who found it at Tel Dan, the stela was a monument raised by a Bible-era Aramean king to commemorate his victory in battle over two kings, one from the northern kingdom of Israel and the other from the southern kingdom of Judah, where the house of David reigned. These kings have been identified as Jehoram and Ahaziahu, both of whom are mentioned in the Book of Kings (2 Kings 8:25–26), and the key lines of the inscription have been reconstructed to read as follows:
I [killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab]
king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-] g of the House of David. And I set [their towns into ruin and turned]
their land into [desolation]36
Strictly speaking, as we have noted, the inscription refers not to David himself but to the house of David. The phrase itself harks back to that famous promise of God to David in the “theological highlight” of the Book of Samuel: “And thy house and thy kingdom shall be made sure for ever before thee.” (2 Sam. 7:16) Now, for the very first time, the existence of the house of David seemed to be confirmed by an archaeological relic that one could read with one's own eyes and hold in one's own hands. And the relic could be plausibly dated all the way back to the early eighth century B.C.E., a period only a century or so after the supposed lifetime of King David himself. Even though the stela recorded the defeat of a king from the house of David—and that's why it was broken up by the Israelites and used as building material—the antiquity of the Tel Dan inscription has been greeted with enthusiasm and even exultation.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 31