Thursday, June 25, 2020

Archaeological Debates About King David


In this week's New Yorker (here), Ruth Margalit examines archaeological-historical-religious debates in Israel.

Margalit's primary focus is Israel Finkelstein, a 71-year old archaeologist who argues that King David and King Solomon were either (1) purely figures of fiction/myth or (2) at most, the leaders of a small chiefdom of minimal historical or political significance:
"... A wily, resourceful man from Bethlehem decides that his people are meant for more than lightning raids and mercenary stints. He sends his men to rout an advancing force, then shares the loot with the highland elders. This wins over the highlanders, and, in time, they make him chieftain of the southern hill area. 
He takes over the tribal center of Hebron, and later captures Jerusalem, another hilltop stronghold. 
The chieftain moves his extended family to the main homes of the Jerusalem village, and settles in one himself—a palace, some might call it, though there is nothing extravagant about it. He rules over a neglected chiefdom of pastoralists and outlaws. His name is David."
Finkelstein's argument rests on the limited physical evidence of the biblical Solomonic kingdom (referred to as the United Kingdom) that is claimed to have existed during the 9th century BCE.

His argument is influential but not entirely accepted among other archaeologists. For instance, in 2005, an archaeologist named Eilat Mazar discovered the walls of a large public building on a slope that descends from the Temple Mount, and she claims that this building was part of the biblical capital city.

Finkelstein and Mazar are representative of a debate between two camps of scholars known as maximalists and minimalists: "If maximalists treat the Bible as verifiable fact, the minimalists treat it as fiction: a near-mythological account, composed between 500 and 200 BC, that should be understood within a purely literary framework."

This article is helpful for me because it connects and overlaps with the intra-Christian debate (which I'm currently thinking about as I read The Evangelicals) between those who read the Bible as factual/historical and those who view it as metaphorical.

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Since I was a teenager, I've been more drawn to history than archaeology. I liked the feeling that a person could uncover the "truth" as a historian, whereas archaeology was more about conjecture and mystery.

As I've grown older and realized just how much ambiguity is embedded in language -- and how much language depends on the perspective of the author and his/her social context -- I've realized that the fields of archaeology and history are more similar than I thought.

This is part of the "Large Stone Structure," which Eilat Mazar claims may have been part of King David's palace