Authors: Israel Finkelstein,Neil Asher Silberman
The great variety of depictions and moral contradictions embedded in the scriptural David and Solomon tradition proved a fertile source of discussion and debate on the nature of humanity. The sometimes sketchy, puzzling, or contradictory descriptions of events narrated in the Bible became subjects for speculation and themes for often-contentious discussion about family relations, legal observance, and conduct in the community. In the midrash and the commentaries on the Bible, David becomes yet another indulgent father, chided for spoiling Absalom and Adonijah—and thus being at least partially to blame for their misdeeds. In a midrash on Samuel, the rabbis declared that Bathsheba was at least partially to blame for David’s act of adultery and all its consequences, since she knowingly undressed for her bath in a place where she knew she would be seen by the king. In such discussions, the founding fathers of the Davidic dynasty gradually are seen as objects for reflection and theological discussion rather than static ideals.
In the elaboration of this wide range of vivid personal anecdotes and events mentioned in the Bible, David and Solomon remained at the bedrock of Jewish tradition. The golden age they achieved and symbolized was central to understanding God’s intentions and Israel’s history. To deny or ignore the importance of David and Solomon was to demean one of Judaism’s central traditions. As one particularly colorful expression in the Talmud put it: “Whoever contends against the sovereignty of the House of David deserves to be bitten by a snake” (Sanhedrin 110a).
DAVID AND SOLOMON AS CHRISTIAN METAPHORS
Even as the Jewish traditions and legends of David and Solomon were elaborated by the rabbis, the church fathers brought the image of David and Solomon to a far wider audience. The earlier Christological interpretations of Jesus as the true inheritor of God’s promise—and the contents of David and Solomon’s psalms as explicitly referring to Jesus—were taken one important step further. David and Solomon, examined from a purely Christian perspective, were increasingly seen not as independent biblical personalities, but as powerful metaphors for the history of Christ and the church, in every anecdote and episode.
In his commentary on the book of Samuel in
The City of God,
Saint Augustine wrote with faith-filled conviction “of the promises made to David in his son, which are in no wise fulfilled in Solomon, but most fully in Christ.” The religious scholar Jan Wojcik has highlighted some of the most vivid patristic metaphorical interpretations of the David and Solomon tradition, noting, for example, how Augustine suggested that David’s betrayal by Achitophel during Absalom’s revolt actually concealed a veiled reference to Jesus’ betrayal by Judas. Indeed Augustine’s interpretations of the psalms can be read as a fascinating exercise in metaphorical theology, seeing every act and expression of David and Solomon related in an illuminating way to the many lessons of Christian doctrine. In Augustine’s view, the narrative of David and Solomon should be split into a sequence of thematic religious examples, completely detached from their original context in the biblical narrative.
Another church father, Eucherius, saw in David’s marriage to Bathsheba, the former wife of Uriah, a metaphor of the church’s wooing the community of true believers away from the grasp of the discredited Jewish faith. Many similar metaphors can be mentioned—David’s battle with Goliath as a symbol of Christ’s confrontation with Satan; David’s speech to his followers during his flight from Absalom as a mere shadow of Jesus’ farewell speech to his disciples; and the Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) being not the erotic verses of an ancient monarch, but an expression of God’s love for his church.
By the fourth century
CE
, the Christian fathers were convinced that the psalms were really talking about Jesus and that David and Solomon’s lives were intended by God to be inspired metaphors. This reading of the David and Solomon tradition had become a matter of faith. But as Christian missionaries wandered from the intellectual milieu of the Roman cities around the Mediterranean into more distant pagan lands, a more down-to-earth meaning reappeared. The Bible that served as a pattern book of Christological symbols soon found audiences who listened to the colorful stories of ancient Israel and its glorious kings and absorbed them—quite literally—as examples to be followed by their own earthly leaders and as expressions of their own identity. In a sense, the process that began in the highlands of Judah in the tenth century
BCE
came to life again among new peoples and in new lands.
NEW DAVIDS AND SOLOMONS
The legendary cycle was adopted with new energy and with distinctive new variations across the vast plain of northern Europe, as a new civilization emerged. With the gradual disintegration of the once great Roman Empire, peoples were on the move and patterns of society were changing—not only in the former provinces of Britannia, Gaul, Pannonia, Illyricum, Dacia, and Moesia, but also across the vast stretches of forest, mountains, and steppe land of northern Europe that had never come directly under Roman rule. The historian Patrick Geary has traced this complex process of splintering, migration, and integration, in which the modern nations of Europe first reached their recognizable form. As he suggests, Franks, Goths, Lombards, Saxons, Avars, and Vandals (among many others) were not initially distinct or even recognizable peoples. They only gradually assumed their identities as the result of the crystallization of societies that were once blurred together by the Romans as “barbarians.”
In many ways this process repeated the story of imperial disintegration and the emergence of new peoples and states that had taken place many times in history before. As we have seen earlier, the collapse of New Kingdom Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age was also accompanied by the movements and crystallization of peoples on the historical stage.
The rise of David in the highlands of Judah was one such development that spawned a long-lasting tradition. Based on the memories of a unique leader who emerged in a time of political and social crisis, it would be expanded and altered to serve as the focus of identity for an ever-changing community as it developed through the stages of chiefdom, kingdom, imperial vassal, and religious community. And as Christian missionaries spread through the peoples of Europe, bringing the good news of salvation to the Roman imperial subjects at a time when the empire was in an advanced state of disintegration, the tradition of David and Solomon was prominent in their sermons and their biblical tales.
The images of the great king and warrior—and psalmist—and of the wise and wealthy king who built the great city and the Temple lay in the background of the gospel stories. Yet it came increasingly to the fore as the bold and sometimes bloody tales of biblical Israel had greater impact on pagan proselytes than the parables of the gospels and the metaphorical interpretations of early Christian literature. Here and there bandit leaders gathered their coteries of followers around them, slowly and gradually seeing the advantage of the conversion to Christianity. Jesus himself remained seated in heaven, replacing the protecting gods that they had all previously known. David and Solomon, however, emerged as more tangible models for the kingdoms that they were building themselves.
And so new Davids arose to battle their people’s fearsome enemies and snatch divine anointment from other contenders. New Solomons built rustic towns and imposing castles and churches across Europe, in which the biblical images of Jerusalem’s kings were attractive, if impossibly dreamlike ideals. The story of David and Solomon thus inherited a place at the very heart of the new civilization of European Christendom. As the very model of righteous kingship with its human frailties and complexities, visions of grandeur and forgiveness, apocalyptic hopes, and its vivid moments of struggle and triumph, the images of David and Solomon—painted, sculpted, and placed in soaring stained-glass windows—would become as much a part of medieval and modern western traditions as the heroic folktales and legends of Europe itself.
Medieval and Modern Images of David and Solomon
THE IMAGES OF DAVID AND SOLOMON IN MEDIEVAL
European art are countless. The scenes of their lives and imaginative portraits exist in illuminated manuscripts and on frescoes, stained glass, stone, ivory, enamel, mosaic, textiles, and metalwork. In 2002,
The Index of Christian Art
published a catalogue of 245 scenes in which David regularly appears, in over five thousand examples from all across Europe, spanning every episode of the biblical story from his birth to his death. A similar accounting of the medieval artistic representations of Solomon would certainly add thousands more to the list. What is it about these two ancient figures that captured the imagination of so many generations of medieval craftsmen and so transfixed their patrons, both royal and ecclesiastical? To put it most simply, David and Solomon had come to represent a shared vision of pious Christian rule.
The story of the spread of this vision can now be traced only in surviving artworks and scattered literary references. Each represents a moment of self-reflection and recognition, in which the biblical stories of anointment, conquest, wealth, judgment, lust, and regret struck a deeply familiar chord. As we have seen, the David and Solomon tradition is by no means an accurate chronicle of tenth-century
BCE
Judah, but in its accumulated layers and reinterpretations it encompassed the collective wisdom and experience of centuries of observation and reflection about the nature of kingly power and national identity.
Carried to Europe in the stories and biblical manuscripts that accompanied Christian missionaries, and preserved by the scribes of monasteries and builders of cathedrals, the legend of David and Solomon beckoned to kings and prelates as a guidebook of church-crown relations. Great monarchs like Charlemagne could revel in David’s stunning military achievements and in Solomon’s incomparably wealthy and wisely ruled realm. The bejeweled crown of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II bore the cloisonné images of both David and Solomon. Bishops and prelates could call princes and monarchs all over Europe to repentance and contrition for impious behavior by evoking the lessons of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba and Solomon’s apostasy. In a delicate balance of earthly grandeur and spiritual submission, the David and Solomon saga both reflected and shaped a uniquely complex vision of the world.
That vision was not restricted to Europe. As Islam spread through the Near East, North Africa, and the Balkans, the image of David and Solomon also exerted a lasting impact in the consciousness of caliphs, sultans, and imams. The Quran had adopted a great deal from the biblical tradition, and both Daoud and Suleiman appear in the Islamic lore as noble kings and judges who precociously expressed the will of Allah. Suleiman, in particular, was regarded as one of the four greatest leaders in history, along with Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, and Alexander the Great. His magical powers and his encounter with the queen of Sheba (known in Arabic as Bilqis) were celebrated from Persia to Morocco in elaborate artworks, extensive literature, and popular folklore. As in their Jewish and Christian incarnations, Daoud and Suleiman personified the larger-than-life standards by which contemporary leaders would be judged.
By the high middle ages in Europe, the lineage of David and Solomon—depicted in the spidery “Trees of Jesse” ascending upward and entwining generations of biblical monarchs, Christian saints, and medieval princes on façades of soaring Gothic cathedrals and rising luminously in stained-glass windows—had come to express the divine right of kings and universalize the principle of hereditary rule. As in every stage of the evolution of the David and Solomon tradition, and in every place where it developed, the present was seen as the culmination of God’s eternal plan and the defining models for European kingship itself.
Yet the story continued. In the Renaissance, a new vision of individual action and destiny changed the image of David from pious king to the muscular, aspiring youth, so familiar in Michelangelo’s
David.
Still later, in the somber biblical paintings of Rembrandt and the other Old Masters, David and Saul become embodiments of personal conflict and introspection, whose virtues and vices would be left for final assessment by the viewer, rather than by the dogma of an established church. The images of David and Solomon have, in fact, never ceased evolving; they remain enigmatic but ever-present founding fathers for every generation’s dreams of a golden age. Their story’s power lies, ultimately, in its anticipation of a utopian future, whose meaning and form has been deeply shaped by the particular historical situation in which the David and Solomon story was ever sung, painted, or read.
Our challenge in this book has been to search for the historical David and Solomon and to utilize the tools of archaeology and history to trace the evolution of their biblical images through the millennia. Step by step we have suggested a reconstruction of complex historical processes by which the figures of David and Solomon became the focus of a complex and adaptable foundation legend that began in ancient Judah and ultimately spread throughout the western world. We have shown how the memories of the founders of Judah’s Iron Age dynasty were reshaped to serve changing economic and social conditions. And we have described the centuries-long process in which the David and Solomon tradition was used to bolster the authority of Jewish and Christian religious ideologies—with David and Solomon ultimately becoming deeply ingrained western models for royal leadership and paradigms of the nation and the individual.
Archaeology’s new vision of David and Solomon has allowed us to separate historical fact from its continuous reconstruction. History is full of accidents, and insistent quests for survival in the face of external threats and domestic upheavals. The accessibility and fluidity of the narrative elements in the David and Solomon tradition allowed it to be passed on and freely reinterpreted again and again. And there is no sign of an end to this process of veneration and transformation of their images.
We all live in a world of clashing nationalisms and global empire—the very themes that brought about the rise of the Davidic legend in eighth-and seventh-century
BCE
Judah, and two of the most important themes on which the David and Solomon story has been developed and reshaped time and again. Our perspective on those themes is uniquely modern. We no longer honestly hope for the resurrection of an Iron Age kingdom. We can no longer rely on messianic dreams to overcome our shared nightmares. And we can no longer rely on the divine right of kings as the justification for the acts of our leaders. And yet—because of our need for historical identity and our continuing quest to believe that noble leadership is possible—the David and Solomon story retains its power.
Understanding the process of the mythmaking about David and Solomon in no way questions the value of the tradition. On the contrary, it is of vital importance to appreciating our shared history and its role in shaping the biblical tradition of Judaism and Christianity. The figures of David and Solomon embody the foundation of the evolving civilization we live in, in its attempt to reconcile dreams of golden ages and ideal leaders with ever-changing political, social, and religious realities. In that sense—and in light of all the discoveries we have presented—archaeology has not destroyed or even dimmed the value of the ancient David and Solomon tradition. It has merely reshaped it once again.