Bce Signed

Bce Signed

David and Solomon's Missing Kingdom

The Book of Samuel recounts the tale of David and Solomon. This part of the Bible gets off to a bad start. In the previous episode we heard that the Israelites exterminated all their foes. Yet suddenly this chapter says that the Israelites are under severe pressure from their enemies!

Our story opens in a time of intertribal rivalry and political tension, things are so bad for the tribes of Israel that they ask God for a king. God tells them Saul, from the lowest family, in the lowest tribe of Benjamin, is their leader. For some unfathomable reason, God tells Saul to avenge the Israelites on the tribes who gave them grief when they were travelling through the wilderness, 300 years before. Saul has a go at this but messes up so God reminds him to go back and finish the job properly. He has some success, but Israel's defences are weakened as their old enemies the Philistines soon have them struggling for survival.

In the Israelites' moment of great peril and need, Saul is supposed to unify the tribes, currently in disarray, but can't manage it. A shepherd boy comes to our attention when David defeats an improbable giant named Goliath, champion Philistine warrior whose unexpected death causes the whole vast Philistine army to turn tail and flee.

After this, we start to see that God had chosen the wrong leader yet again: Saul neglects his duty to Israel because he's obsessed with killing David. Naturally Saul dies and God gives David his job. David leads the Israelites and becomes their great king. David soundly defeats his powerful enemies the Philistines, to secure the Kingdom of Israel; he then goes on to defeat the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Edomites and the Arammeans, and in doing so, carves out a glorious empire, stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates.

After David, his son, Solomon, consolidates his father's achievements and does even greater things. Before we know it, Solomon built the fabled Temple in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant and constructed a fabulous palace and erected great fortified walls for his capital just the same as he did at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer. He raised a huge army, which required the construction of a massive stable to house 40,000 horses for his cavalry and chariot forces. Solomon also gained recognition as a wise and fabulously wealthy king who was lauded all around the ancient world.

In 1 Kings, the Bible informs us explicitly:

‘Thus Solomon excelled all kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. And the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind'

and

‘… silver as common in Jerusalem as stone'.

These and similar claims, led to the period being described as Israel's great ‘Golden Age'.

This remarkable success was achieved in an astonishingly short time. Like something out of a Boy's Own comic, ‘in one mighty bound' the Israelites move from being defeated underdogs to rulers of a fabulously rich and militarily mighty empire. This sounds like fantasy and indeed archaeology reveals that it is. What the facts tell us about the great kings David and Solomon and their glorious city of Jerusalem, is something of a shock to traditionalists.

If as the Bible states, the whole world was in awe of Israel, we should be able to find records of its powerful neighbours to confirm it. Sorry to disappoint the Bible believers but from both Egypt and Mesopotamia, there is not one single line recorded, that mentions either David or Solomon, or a great empire that stretched from the very border of Egypt to that of northern Mesopotamia.

Israel first gets a mention at the time of Alexander the Great. The Greeks travelled widely and loved to record the differences and oddities of the people they met. The historian Herodotus, gathered stories about people from every region, and wrote in detail about Egypt, but it wasn't until 100 years later, when Alexander the Great invaded the region, that the Greeks first heard of Israel. So why had they never heard of the great King David and his ‘world famous' son King Solomon, why had they not heard of the great golden empire of Israel? Why — because it was all a lie.

This omission isn't bizarre, nor is it merely suspicious, it is an unarguable indication that this Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon and their empire never existed. If it had, the records at the time would have shown it.

If the great empire had ever existed, then the great building programme undertaken by Solomon would support the Biblical claims. The problem is that modern archaeology has failed to find any great structures that might have been built by Solomon. In the past, the destructive fires that consumed cities like Megiddo were quickly attributed to David's victory over the Philistines; above the burnt ruins, achaeologists found the remains of later structures, which they immediately attributed to Solomon. For a long time, excavations appeared to prove the Biblical stories — the pillared remains found at Megiddo were pronounced as being ‘royal stables' built by Solomon.

In the 1960s, new archaeological research discovered that above the burnt ruins and beneath the ‘stables' was the remains of a palace, which was attributed to Solomon — but that meant the so called ‘stables' were much later and not of Solomon's time and were attributed to King Ahab.

Further excavations unearthed very distinctive six–chambered gates at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer. Earlier archaeologists decided that these structures must have been built by craftsmen belonging to Hiram, the king of Tyre, whom Solomon supposedly hired from his ally. Eventually however, the dating was also found to be badly flawed and wrong.

The latest refinements to carbon 14 dating, left no doubt that the dating at Megiddo was misplaced. The results of dating the burnt timbers, originally attributed to David's assault, showed them to be 100 years after David's time. As a consequence, this also proved that the palace built two layers above the burnt ruins, could not have been constructed by Solomon, but was of a far later time.

Another question that needs addressing, is how would Solomon suddenly acquire such highly–skilled architects, ones whom no–one else seemed to have employed. This indicates that they could not have been foreigners, such as the craftsmen hired from the Phoenician king of Tyre, otherwise the distinctive style of architecture used by Solomon would have been reproduced elsewhere and they weren't Israelites, because they had no skills nor experience in this kind of grand construction work. The simple truth is that these impressive constructions are most certainly not of Solomon's time, but matched the style which was to appear much later in the region. They were designed and erected in the ninth century — over 100 years after Solomon's time.

We have to dismiss these buildings as proof of Solomon's empire, but they are an excellent proof of how academics can be led astray by their desire to verify a belief, rather than investigate with a detached open mind.

Next we have the problem of Jerusalem itself — the capital of Solomon's great empire. Jerusalem is sold as a place of impressive grandeur, it has a magnificent Temple and a gleaming palace to house Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines, all protected behind huge stone fortress walls — a glorious fabled city which reflected the glory of God. Alas, it is all romantic nonsense. Despite extensive excavations, archæologists have failed to locate any signs at all that there was ever a Solomon Temple, or palace, or great fortifications. Christian scholars and some biased archæologists, still continue to argue that the remains of the Temple and palace were totally obliterated by Herod's large–scale reconstruction. This may sound plausible, but on every archaeological site, demolition and rebuilding never completely eradicates every trace of earlier structures — as even those biased academics know full well.

In Jerusalem, not a single trace of the Solomon Temple has been unearthed. In the 1970s and 80s, intensive research revealed that beneath the remains of the later Temple built by Herod, there were only a few broken pottery shards dated to the tenth century BCE. This indicated a small population at that time; at a lower level, there were plentiful traces of late Iron–Age and Middle Bronze–Age artefacts. This was clear indication that at the time of David and Solomon, Jerusalem had actually diminished, rather than escalated in splendour.

The real facts reveal a very different Jerusalem from the one of legend and the truth is that during the time of David and Solomon, Jerusalem had diminished from its modest state of earlier periods, so that at that particular time, it was barely occupied and nothing more than a typical Judean hilltop village.

So what does this mean — realistically, this backward settlement was not developed enough to indicate a society which was either large enough, or literate enough, to be the site of an important kingdom, let alone a large empire. To carve out an empire and then to maintain it, takes a great deal of wealth and a large amount of manpower.

At that time there would have been no more than 50,000 people inhabiting the whole land belonging to all the tribes that made up the Israelites. In Judah, the power base of David and Solomon, the terrain was steep and rugged, and was not really suitable for agriculture, only pastoral husbandry and as a consequence, only something like 5,000 men, women and children lived there. If one discounts the old and infirm males, it is likely that the Judahite fighting force which Solomon had at his disposal — to not only conquer and control his empire, but to keep the disaffected northern Israelites from rebelling — would be well under 1,000 men. In any battle, a sizeable percentage of men would be lost, but because of the small manforce within Judea, very few could be replaced, resulting in the Judeans having a rapidly diminishing army, bringing about a spiral of certain defeat.

Had Solomon ever built a formidable army, it would have been deemed a threat to Israel's powerful neighbours and so Egypt and Assyria would have attacked. The territory of the tribe of Judah was an extremely poor, wild and arid land, and not one which generated even a small amount of income for its inhabitants. To supply any army with weapons and armour, takes quite a bit of wealth; to equip and pay a large standing army to control and defend an empire, takes enormous wealth.

It is said, that Solomon had a well organised society and government; he also raised taxes — which means keeping accounts and written records — but again it takes money to pay the administrators and bureaucrats, not to mention the professional soldiers, who would be needed to run and police both a bona fide kingdom and an empire.

The other problem that makes the whole matter questionable is that at that time the Israelites and especially the Judeans, were basically a pastoralist society. They did not possess the literate men who would be needed to undertake the specialised work of record keeping and accounts. They would have needed a bountiful food supply for the large numbers of bureaucrats and soldiers, not to mention the 700 wives and 300 concubines idling their time away in the royal harem. All these Judean men who were employed full–time by the king, would no longer be working the land. As the male agricultural workforce was severely depleted, who would grow the food; but then the land itself would have been unable to yield sufficient crops necessary to maintain an excess to be commandeered into a State food supply. Solomon might have employed mercenaries, but though it would increase the strength of his army, it would weaken his purse, for mercenaries did not come cheap — but as the scholars have shown, there was no great wealth, Jerusalem was a poor village on an isolated hilltop.

So what of the great wealth attributed to Solomon? Wealth could have been obtained by looting conquered city–states in Canaan, but the archaeological evidence disproves any invasion of Canaan from a Judean base, by either David or Solomon. Solomon supposedly was a great trader, but Judea was an out–of–the–way inhospitable backwater, well away from any established trade routes. After the fall of northern Israelite lands to Assyria, Judea began to grow vines and olives, which then attracted merchants, but at the time of Solomon, the Judeans had nothing to trade. The final possibility concerns the myth that Solomon had fabulous mines in Africa, but this is a nonsensical fantasy. Such a thing would never have been allowed by Egypt and its army would soon put a stop to any impertinent attempts at exporting from within territory under its control.

Was Solomon the king over a united Israelite state? Well, the Biblical sources say "Yes," but then as scholars know the earliest Bible histories were written by the Judeans after the joyous fall of their old enemy, the alleged northern state of Israel to the Assyrians, so the account is likely to be at best biased and at worst, a total fabrication. The likelihood is that if there were a Solomon, he was not king of a united Israelite people, but only of Judea and possibly not even that. The harsh truth is, that both David and Solomon — if indeed they actually existed, which we must doubt since there is no contemporary evidence to support that they did — would have been little more than tribal chiefs. Considering the poverty of the region and its historical reputation for banditry, both David and Solomon nestling in their remote hilltop village, could well have been bandit chieftains.

We can get an excellent insight into the composition of Jerusalem and its rulers in these times by studying the Amarna Letters, written during the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. Tell Amarna is the present day name for Akhenaten's capital city and in the ruins, discarded inscribed clay tablets were found. These were correspondence sent to the pharaoh from around the Egyptian empire.  Though they were written in the fourteenth century BCE, nearly 400 years before the time of David, from the information contained within the letters, archaeologists discovered that very little altered in this area until around the very end of the eighth century BCE, well after the David/Solomon era.

The letters tell us that there was a ruler, called Abdi–Heba of the southern hill country of Palestine, which corresponded to what became Judea. His hilltop stronghold was called Urusalim — the original Bronze Age name for Jerusalem — and it was basically a village that occupied the plateau ridge site of what eventually became known as the City of David. Though his place of residence was small, Abdi–Heba's kingdom covered some 900 square miles, but the landscape was harsh and arid, and largely devoid of people; there were very few villages and the total population, including that of Urusalim was under 2,000. It is a strong possibility, judging by the description given in the Bible, that if David was indeed real, that he and his armed followers could well have been some of the Apiru outlaws mentioned in the letters and at some stage in time, they took control of the village of Urusalim.

Whatever the truth of the area, there was no sudden miracle where a vast horde of gold fell from Heaven into David's lap. There was no large population from which he could recruit a great army with which to conquer and then hold not only a country, but also an empire. His ridge–top stronghold at Jerusalem remained at best, pretty much as it had always been — a modestly–sized village with a probable population of less than 1,000 people. The changes and development which occurred were very slow and gradual — there was no wealth, no great buildings, no monuments, no strong fortified walls, no palace, no Temple. Archaeology has revealed that there were no trappings of a royal court, no bureaucratic office with its records, seals, weights and measures; there was little if any literacy and certainly no centre of poetry and the arts. There appeared to be no production sites, such as those for making pottery and metal work, which would be necessary for the making of armaments or artefacts.

By the seventh–century BCE when the Judean scribes were writing the Bible stories, Jerusalem had grown into what was called a small city, though it was no more than a modest town, whose wealth had increased through trade. It became a city with a centralised religion and a single temple to their God, and it had a king, administrators and a small army, to run a small compact kingdom. With no one to dispute its authenticity, it was this contemporary image of their society, which Judean scribes transposed onto the story of David and Solomon, then embellished it even further, into the glorious golden age of which we have heard so much.

abridged from Chapter 5, The Greatest Lie Ever Told, W H Uffington

www.thegreatestlieevertold.co.uk

Maxwell Miller, J. The Biblical Archaeologist, "Old Testament History and Archaeology" 1987

Kenyon, K M. Archaeology in the Holy Land, Ernest Benn, 1957

Finkelstein, I & Piasetzky, E.  Science, Comments on "14C Dates from Tel Rehov: Iron Age Chronology, Pharaohs and Hebrew Kings", 2003

Wightman, G J. Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research, "The Myth of Solomon"

Moran, W L. The Armana Letters, John Hopkins University Press, 1992

About the Author

W H Uffington is a historian, specialising in ancient history. Raised in Germany, he has lived and worked in many countries. Once freed from the constraints of academic life he studied comparative religion, in particular the pagan beliefs of Teutonic and Celtic people. He started to write a novel but found the background research so shockingly profound that he has spent the last nine years collating it into a book. What he discovered meant the factual premise for his novel was untrue, so if ever he writes it now, it must be a very different story.

How do you know If Messiah Jesus is real, for me as a Jew-I prayed and let him into my heart to save me-Cool!?

Isaiah predicted Jesus perfectly 700bce
7:14 born from a virgin as 70 Rabbis interpreted the word Alma- a young pure virgin-to have a sign, a miracle birth, and bring forth God with us.
since we get our blood from our father-it would as the muslims say have to be a virgin birth, also all true Jewish people will see this because they will not reject the Messiah. Romans 2 last two verses -"One is not a Jew by the circumcision of the flesh, but of the heart. Whose praise is of God and not of mankind. "

who do we praise -someone that is pie in the sky, the one that is real to us? If you dont know the messiah its just a possibility someone will come and fulfill these prophecies -yet with no temple God would be a liar to tell Moses we have to have blood sacrifice for sins-for it was destroyed 70 bce and If the Messiah hadnt came already -then we were left with an unreal Messiah-and my Jewish people would have to make up a new religion-rejecting Moses and the blood atonement for sin!TY

God established a covent with Moses including a ceremonial part which is a forshadow of that which is to come.Moses testafied of Messiah,Daniel told the time.Jesus established a new covenent in His blood,(read hebrews)the temple, with sacrafice,will b re-enstated....this time for antichrist.Jews eyes will b opened when he committs the abomination of desolation,Jews were only blinded in heart,so us gentiles coule obtain salvation,thru Jesus and provke Jews to jealousy,seeing the blessings of God on us.you as a Jew,r the apple of Gods eye,and true seed of Aberham,by accepting Gods true only begotten son..Jesus.to end ...seak Him,lift ur voice unto Him u will know He is.

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