Public building activity in the early monarchic period of a polity named Israel

Once upon a time, in a faraway place, Israel Finkelstein could say: “Khirbet ed-Dawwara provides the only solid evidence for public building activity in the early monarchic period” (1990:197).¹ No longer.

A comparison of the finds from late Iron I/ very early Iron IIA Khirbet Qeiyafa (=KQ) with those of late Iron I/ early Iron IIA Kh. ed-Dawwara (=KD) is instructive. KD’s fortifications are “the earliest example of a developed Iron Age defense system in the hill country, and therefore the earliest full-scale Israelite fortification” (Finkelstein 1990:196-97). But the public architecture of KD is rudimentary and primitive compared to that of KQ. As Volkmar Fritz noted (1994:235), “[KD’s] enclosures were by no means city walls: although built for protection they lack the strength of a real fortification.” Furthermore, KD is by all accounts a component of the Saulide entity, which neither the Bible nor the Bible’s modern interpreters credit with control of territory beyond the southern limits of Benjamin and Ephraim (Finkelstein 2006:178-179). It is not credible to think of KD as the epicenter of the polity to which KQ belonged.²

But for Finkelstein to relate KQ to Jerusalem, he would have to round-file his earlier and oft-defended reconstruction of Iron Age I-IIA Judah. I quote from the last iteration thereof I have read (2006:175):

[N]ew analyses of the archaeological data from Jerusalem have shown that the settlement of the 10^th century B.C.E. was no more than a small, poor highland village without monumental construction (Finkelstein 2001; Ussishkin 2003). Furthermore, archaeological surveys have revealed that at that time the hill country of Judah to the south of Jerusalem was sparsely inhabited by a few relatively small settlements, with no larger, fortified towns (Ofer 1994). No less important, apparently the expansion of Judah to include the territories of the Shephelah and Beer-sheba Valley did not take place before the 9^th century B.C.E. (Finkelstein 2001).

KQ lays to rest Finkelstein’s reading of the settlement history of Judah and calls into question his assumption that the kingdom of David known to us from the Deuteronomistic History is a cunning invention of late monarchic authors. This is of a piece with finds from Khirbat en-Nahas (KEN) in the northern part of biblical Edom: as Thomas Levy and colleagues have shown (2008), Finkelstein’s revisionist reconstruction of the settlement history of Edom is similarly flawed. 

It now seems childish not to allow for the possibility that the Jerusalem-based polity David is reported to have headed became, as David’s reign wore on, (1) a state-in-formation, and (2) an empire-in-formation. KQ lends credence to (1) and is consistent with (2). KQ considered geopolitically reopens the possibility of taking Psalm 60 as a precise expression of David’s accomplishments and aspirations (compare Aharoni 1972; Rainey 2006:161).

I might as well spit it out: there are no good reasons for doubting that Psalm 60 is what its superscript says it is: (the text of) an inscription (cf. LXX and Targum’s rendering of the operative word) pertaining to David. The script of said inscription would have been “proto-Phoenician,” not Old Hebrew, which had not yet been invented.

To be continued.

¹ Apart from Kh. Qeiyafa, Kh. ed-Dawwara remains unique among putatively Israelite sites with respect to the confidence with which one can attribute fortifications and other public building activity to the late Iron I-early Iron IIA chronological horizon. But, by the same token, it cannot be affirmed with confidence that finds from Tell el-Ful and Tell en-Nasbeh (= Mizpah) attributable to the same horizon are not to be understood as examples of defensive structures of a territorial nature. On the contrary. But the socio- and geopolitical divide separating the house of Saul from the house of David as they fought tooth and nail into the reign of Solomon can now be seen to have been decisive.

² KD and KQ are coeval single-layer sites ideally suited to contrastive analysis. It seems likely that KD’s abandonment slightly post-dates that of KQ.

Bibliography

Yohanan Aharoni, “The Conquests of David According to Psalms 60 and 108,” in Bible and Jewish History: Studies in Bible and Jewish History Dedicated to the Memory of Jacob Liver (Binyamin Uffenheimer, ed.; Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1972) 11-17; Israel Finkelstein, “Excavations at Kh. ed-Dawwara: An Iron Age Site Northeast of Jerusalem,” Tel Aviv 17 (1990) 163-208; idem, “The Rise of Jerusalem and Judah: The Missing Link,” Levant 33 (2001) 105-15; idem, “The Last Labayu: King Saul and the Expansion of the First North Israelite Territorial Entity,” in Essays on Ancient Israel in its Near Eastern Context, A Tribute to Nadav Na’aman (Yairah Amit, Ehud Ben Zvi, Israel Finkelstein, and Oded Lipschits, eds.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006) 171-177; Volkmar Fritz, “The Character of the Urbanisation in Palestine at the Beginning of the Iron Age,” in Nuove fondazioni nel Vicino Oriente antico: realtà e ideologia (Stefania Mazzoni, ed.; Atti del colloquio 4-6 dicembre 1991, Dipartimento di Scienze storiche del mondo antico, Sezione di egittologia e scienze storiche del Vicino Oriente, Università degli studi di Pisa; Pisa: Giardini, 1995) 231-252; Thomas E. Levy et al, “High-precision radiocarbon dating and historical biblical archaeology in southern Jordan,” PNAS 105 (2008) 16460–16465; Avi Ofer, “‘All the Hill Country of Judah’: From a Settlement Fringe to a Prosperous Monarchy,” in From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel (Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na’aman, eds.; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2004) 92-121; Anson F. Rainey, “Survival and Renewal: Eleventh Century BCE” and “Territorial States: Tenth Century BCE” in  The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World (Anson F. Rainey and R. Steven Notley; Shmuel Ahituv, ed.; Jerusalem: Carta, 2006) 131-156; 157-189; David Ussishkin, “Solomon’s Jerusalem: The Text and the Facts on the Ground,” in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew, eds.; SBL Symposium Series 18; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 103-115  

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

Hi John - when Diana and I were very young and I very fundamentalist, we could still show a little humour - one Halloween we put on a costume comprised of poster boards - mine had on one side - his undergarments are like sharp potsherds - and on the other side - Moab is my washpot. (Ps 60)

I am preparing for the psalms - will you come to Oxford? I am determined to read every recurrence in sequence before Sept 22. At psalm 44-45 I begin to anticipate a profound theological lesson on the church from the psalter.

[JohnFH]

Hi Bob,

Would that I were able to go to Oxford in September. I still have the trip on my wish list.

[Ben Smith]

Hi John - so what's your view on the stories of David? Elaborated legends with a core of truth?

[JohnFH]

Hi Ben,

The diction of your comment reminded me of something that Pilate is reported to have asked:

"What is truth?"

Much of what we find in 1 Samuel - 1 Kings falls into the category of cultural memories. American analogies include the first Thanksgiving of the Pilgrims and the prayer of George Washington at Valley Forge. There are many examples one might cite from Greek and Roman civilization.

In all cases, the accounts in question have emblematic or iconic value. Given the purposes the accounts serve, the means by which the past was reconstructed and the rank conflation of the typical and particular characteristic of all historiography but by necessity the name of the game almost without remainder until quite recently, the sense in which these accounts are true can in many ways be taken as a given.

For example, there may little or no solid evidence that Washington prayed at Valley Forge, but it's not clear why that should matter. It is compatible with what else we know about Washington and his time. It embodies an authentic cultural memory on many levels. Unless we possessed documentary evidence that allowed us to tell the particulars in a different way - someone else did the praying, the crucial prayer, both for Washington and his troops, took place in another location - it makes sense to keep on telling the story in the canonical version.

How does that work with David? It depends. Take the strands of narrative that relate to David and Bathsheba. We are not in a position to verify any of it, and probably never will be. But the account makes sense on many different levels, then and now. We are not in a position to know what part of it happened as told, a fraction or all of it, but all of it *could* have happened. Furthermore, the most important aspects of the narrative, the emplotment, the theological points that are made, the dialogues, are authored rather than read off from events or reported.

1 Samuel - 1 Kings *shares* these features with pre-modern historiography in general. Exactly as we should expect. Only fundamentalists and reverse fundamentalists expect otherwise.

One excellent starting point on these matters: a couple of essays by Ronald Hendel, which you can download at his place:

http://sites.google.com/site/rshendel/

Try "Cultural Memory" and "Culture, Memory, and History."

[Ben Smith]

Yes, this is the way I see these things now. It was very painful to come round to it, though, after being raised according to the more fundamentalist mindset. You can understand the fear of saying something didn't 'actually' happen though, I'm sure.

[JohnFH]

Hi Ben,

I can understand the fear, but I am not willing to second it. Sooner or later one has to stop being so controlling and give the authors permission to write according to the genres connatural to them.

An analogy. I don't know if you enjoy a classic like the Iliad or the Odyssey. I do. I am confident that the narrative's relationship to a specific set of events is complex to non-existent.
I don't think that diminishes the value of Homer's compositions in the least. Homer is lifting up particular virtues for praise and particular vices for scorn; he also lays out a theology.

It is not much different, say, with Icelandic sagas.

The most inspired parts, the truest parts, the most actual parts, of both sets of epic are the dialogues and authorial emplotment and comment, precisely those parts that are authored rather than based on documents or otherwise researched.

The same holds for the content of the Primary History (Genesis - 2 Kings).

It's another story with the Gospels. I would defend both the Synoptics and John none the less.

[Ben Smith]

So you'd hold the gospels to a different standard? That would make sense seeing as they were recent history, I suppose. I'm happy to leave some 'wiggle room', though.

[JohnFH]

I'm not interested in imposing standards of my own. I want to understand what standards the authors gave themselves.