Israeli Archaeologist Claims He Has Found David’s Kingdom

David controlled a relatively substantial territory around his capital, protected by a ring of fortified border towns, says Prof. Yossi Garfinkel, a leading archaeologist at the Hebrew University. His study attempts to contradict the more broadly accepted paradigm that David and Solomon, if they were even historical figures, were local chieftains ruling over a tiny Jerusalem and not much more, and that Judah only emerged as its own as a kingdom a century or so after the supposed time of these monarchs.

Garfinkel’s study, published in June in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, was greeted with reams of skepticism by many fellow archaeologists, who claim that his conclusions are based on assumptions and poorly interpreted data.

He does not aspire to fully validate the biblical account, which describes the United Monarchy of the Israelites as ranging from Egypt to the Euphrates River (2 Samuel 8). Garfinkel maintains that the territory David and Solomon ruled over was small, with borders lying maximum a day’s walk from Jerusalem. But a kingdom it was nonetheless, marked by a bureaucracy and standardized urban planning, the archaeologist concludes.

The case of the ubiquitous casemate

The study is based on combining the results of Garfinkel’s own excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a 3,000-year-old settlement in the Elah Valley some 25 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, with data from digs conducted over the last century at other ancient towns in the environs of the capital.

Four other sites are included in the study: the ancient cities of Beth Shemesh and Lachish, west and south of Jerusalem, as well as Tel en-Nasbeh to the north, which some identify as the biblical town of Mitzpah, and a tiny settlement to the northeast of the capital known only by its Arabic name, Khirbet ed-Dawwara.

Most of these ancient sites are tells, meaning they were occupied at different times, with multiple settlements being built over each other over millennia. For each site Garfinkel believes he has pinpointed the layer that dates back to the first half of the tenth century B.C.E., or some 3,000 years ago, which is when David and Solomon would have ruled. And, he claims, in this period all these towns (with the partial exception of Lachish) share a similar urban plan: they are protected by a casemate wall backed by a peripheral line of abutting buildings.

A casemate is a fortification that archaeologists often associate with ancient Israelite architecture and is formed by building two parallel defensive city walls, which leaves hollow internal chambers that can be used as additional rooms – or quickly filled up in times of danger.

“You see a pattern emerging, the geography is speaking to us,” Garfinkel tells Haaretz. “These four sites have the same urban concept, a casemate city wall and houses abutting the casemate, and they are sitting on a main route leading into the kingdom – they are the outposts that are marking the border of the Kingdom of Judah, as I see it.”

The discovery of inscriptions in proto-Canaanite script at some of these sites further supports the idea that these sites were part of a larger kingdom with its own bureaucracy, he adds.

“The spread of writing indicated by these inscriptions is a sign of increasing demand for communication and a marker of centralized authority,” Garfinkel writes in his paper.

Fighting for David

The archaeologist believes his theory is realistic, he says, and claims to bridge the longstanding discussion between so-called “minimalist” archaeologists, who have a critical approach to using the Bible as a historical source, and more traditionalist or “maximalist” scholars who put greater stock in the historical truth of the biblical text.

The debate between these sides has long centered on the historicity of the biblical United Monarchy of David and Solomon.

As is often the case with archaeology in Israel, the argument is not confined to academic conferences, which are nevertheless the venue of some entertaining screaming matches, but frequently spills over into issues of nationalism and identity in the modern Jewish state, as well as the politics of its conflict with the Palestinians.

There is no question that two ancient Hebrew kingdoms existed in the Levant in the late Iron Age (or the late First Temple Period if you prefer the biblical chronology): the Kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem and the much larger Kingdom of Israel to the north, centered on Samaria. These kingdoms are widely attested archaeologically and in extra-biblical texts, but little or no evidence has ever been found confirming that in the 10th century B.C.E. these two realms were united in the great empire of David and Solomon as recounted in the Bible. We do have at least one extrabiblical mention of Judah as being ruled by the “House of David” in the Tel Dan stele, an Aramean inscription that dates to more than a century after the supposed lifetime of the biblical monarch.

But despite intense digging over the last decades, there are few archaeological remains in Jerusalem or the rest of Israel pointing to the existence of such a major power as the Bible describes. So the current prevailing paradigm among researchers is that the United Monarchy was a later aggrandizement by biblical authors and that, if they did exist, David and Solomon were minor tribal chiefs of early Judah, ruling over Jerusalem and its immediate environs.

“The minimalists want to say that David ruled over a small village and there was no kingdom, and I am saying there was a kingdom with fortified cities a day’s walk from Jerusalem,” Garfinkel says. “I’m not such a big maximalist. What I’m saying is the kingdom of David included Jerusalem, Hebron and a few cities around them: that’s the urban core of the kingdom of David. I think it’s realistic.”

Still, this tiny kingdom is a far cry from the biblical descriptions of a regional empire, Garfinkel acknowledges.

“We don’t have archaeological data for a united kingdom and there is no extra-biblical source,” he says, adding that he believes the biblical stories of David and Solomon were aggrandized and promoted by their successors during the First Temple Period.

“The Davidic dynasty ruled for 400 years, and every generation told a greater story about their father and forefathers,” he says. “David was the founding father and over time he became larger than life, but that doesn’t mean there was nothing to start with.”

Garfinkel believes that his research also traces the modest expansion of the kingdom in the days following David and Solomon, especially at Lachish, located two-days walk from Jerusalem, in the fertile Shephelah region, the lowlands southwest of the capital. Lachish lacked a casemate wall but had a single three-meter-thick wall, which radiocarbon dating places in the late 10th century B.C.E., Garfinkel says. This suggests that Judah expanded into the Shephelah after the time of David and Solomon, possibly under Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and successor, he says. That interpretation is based on the biblical story in Chronicles about Rehoboam who is said to have fortified 15 towns in Judah including Lachish (2 Chronicles 11:5-12), Garfinkel says.

The construction of a full wall, rather than a cheaper casemate, may reflect the key economic role of Lachish, which would become the second most important city in Judah, he speculates.

Lack of nuance

Garfinkel’s new research has been greeted with howls of disapproval since its publication. Several archaeologists contacted by Haaretz declined to comment on the record – but did produce some colorful insults. Two top researchers who agreed to discuss the study critiqued Garfinkel’s dating of the fortified towns and his assumption that the settlements can be described as Judahite.

“I am not so sure that all the sites that he cites date to exactly the same phase in the 10th century B.C.E.,” says Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa. Precisely dating ancient remains is notoriously difficult, as even scientific methods like radiocarbon have significant margins of error. Placing a date on a structure often comes down to an archaeologist’s subtle interpretation of the types of pottery found around it or identifying which layer of the ancient site it belongs to. Differing views of scholars can easily shift a structure’s dating by half a century or more.

So, for example, the small settlement at Dawwara was probably established in the later part of the 10th century B.C.E., while Nasbeh and others are from earlier, according to Finkelstein, who for decades has been a leading voice of the skeptical camp in the debate on biblical historicity.

As far as the fortification at Lachish, it probably dates to the ninth century B.C.E., long after the supposed time of David, Solomon or even his son Rehoboam, Finkelstein adds.

It’s also worth noting that the tradition of Rehoboam fortifying cities doesn’t appear in the book of Kings but only in Chronicles, which is considered by most biblical scholars to have been written many centuries later.

Equally problematic is the conclusion that the fortified towns in Garfinkel’s study should be labeled as Judahite, as we have very little information about different identities in the Levant in the early Iron Age.

Even inscriptions, which can often serve as cultural identifiers, are not of great help because the few writings that have survived from the period are all in Canaanite script. This was the world’s first alphabet, probably invented some 4,000 years ago by Canaanite laborers in Egypt, which was used across the Levant well into the Iron Age. Only in the ninth century B.C.E – a century after David and Solomon lived – would this script develop local variations like the Hebrew, Moabite, and Phoenician alphabets, mirroring the different political entities that emerged in the region.

So it’s very hard to convincingly pin down a site’s political and cultural affiliation before that divergence, notes Prof. Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University.

“Yossi (Garfinkel) has a very black-and-white understanding of things and his interpretations often don’t recognize that situations can be more nuanced and complex,” says Maeir, who has excavated the Philistine city of Gath, close to Khirbet Qeiyafa.

For example, some scholars, like Tel Aviv University historian Prof. Nadav Na’aman have suggested that Qeiyafa may have been a Canaanite town, while archaeologist Prof. David Ussishkin has suggested it may not have been a city at all but a cultic compound.

“There may have been multiple identity groups in the area that we know nothing about,” Maeir tells Haaretz. While most scholars agree there was a nascent kingdom in Judah at the time of David, there is very little evidence to help us determine its extent and influence, he says.

So long, David’s empire

Ultimately, whether or not Garfinkel’s theory holds up, its very existence is perhaps a sign of the success of the critical approach to the Bible’s historicity. When a longtime supporter of the more traditional view acknowledges that there is no evidence for the United Monarchy and that, at best, David ruled over a tiny kingdom, it might be time to declare this debate over and done.

“Even if Garfinkel is correct, he does not change the overall picture significantly as he himself is not speaking about a Davidic empire,” Finkelstein notes. “He went on a crusade to show that there was a Davidic empire and ended up admitting that there may have been a Judahite limited territorial entity, meaning that he too has joined the critical camp on biblical history.”

Ariel David