The Kingdom of Israel

The story

A story told in two ways

To understand the kingdom of David and Solomon you have to keep two things apart: the account in the Bible and what archaeologists have managed to check. The Hebrew Bible is a sacred book, for Jews and, together with other books, for Christians; and many scholars also read it as a historical source. But what it tells is not always confirmed by the digs. This is why in this card we will always say “according to the Bible” when we report the account, and we will say clearly when scholars disagree.

According to the Bible: from Saul to David

According to the biblical account, the twelve tribes of Israel at first lived without a king, led by chiefs called judges. Then they asked for a ruler like the other peoples, and the first was Saul. After him, and after a period of conflict inside Saul's family, David became king. The account describes him as a shepherd, then a warrior, musician and poet. David united the tribes in a single kingdom and chose Jerusalem as its capital. This is why the city is still called the “City of David” today.

Solomon and the Temple

David's son, Solomon, is remembered in the Bible for his wisdom and his wealth. His main work was the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest place for the Jewish people, which the biblical account says was built with the help of the king of Tyre, in Phoenicia. The cedar wood, for example, came from Lebanon. The king of Tyre in those years, according to scholars, was Hiram I. The dates of these kings (about 1047 to 930 BC for the whole kingdom) are worked out from the Bible and from the calculations of those who study it, not from outside documents.

After Solomon: two kingdoms

When Solomon died, says the Bible, his son Rehoboam did not listen to the complaints of the northern tribes, who felt burdened by labour and taxes. The kingdom split. In the north arose the kingdom of Israel, in the south that of Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. The two kingdoms sometimes cooperated and sometimes made war on each other. Then came greater powers: in 722 BC the Assyrians conquered the kingdom of Israel, and in 586 BC the Babylonians conquered that of Judah. We discuss this in the card on the Babylonian Exile.

What archaeologists say

Here comes the most debated part. Archaeologists have not found, in the times of David and Solomon, clear proof of a great united kingdom. Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli scholar, proposes a “low chronology”: many monumental buildings that others date to the 10th century BC would instead belong to the 9th, and so the kingdom of David would have been smaller than the Bible tells it. Amihai Mazar, another archaeologist, defends instead the older dating. Other researchers cite in support of the biblical account the digs of Eilat Mazar in Jerusalem and those of Yosef Garfinkel at Khirbet Qeiyafa. These datings and identifications too are debated. Today there is no agreement among scholars.

The Tel Dan stele

One discovery has a special place. In 1993 and 1994, at Tel Dan, in the north of Israel, the archaeologist Avraham Biran and his team found fragments of a basalt stele, a stone with an inscription in ancient Aramaic. The stele had been reused as building material in a wall, and is dated to the 9th century BC. Most scholars think it was set up by Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, after a victory. The text speaks of a king of Israel and a king of the “house of David”. It reads “bytdwd”, with no space between the two words: almost everyone translates “House of David”, but some propose other readings. It is one of the oldest mentions of David outside the Bible. However, the stele does not prove that in the 10th century there was a great kingdom: it only says that, a century later, Judah was ruled by a dynasty that traced itself back to David. Today the stele is in the Israel Museum.

A story that goes on

Of David and Solomon, then, we are left with an account of enormous importance and with archaeological evidence that sometimes supports it and sometimes does not. This is not a problem: it means that research is still open. For the Jewish people, and for Christians and Muslims, those kings remain fundamental figures, regardless of how much archaeologists manage to confirm.