The Fight for History
In the Holy Land, archaeology itself is a battleground. Will the Bible win out?
Whatever their origin, it is clear that a people called "Israel" was established in the region by the end of the 13th century B.C. and was known to the Egyptians, as revealed in the Merneptah stele. Within a little more than a century, according to the Bible, they would be consolidated into a powerful nation envied by rival kingdoms of the ancient Near East.
THE KINGDOM OF DAVID AND SOLOMON. No figure in the Hebrew Bible is more central to Israel's heritage than King David, the shepherd-warrior who forged the disparate Israelite tribes into a mighty monarchy with Jerusalem as its capital. The reigns of David and his son, Solomon, from roughly 1000 to 920 B.C., are described in the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles as Israel's golden age--an era of dazzling military and economic achievements. Their united kingdom also has become a favorite target of minimalists, who wonder how such a magnificent dynasty could have left so few traces in the archaeological record.
During Solomon's prosperous reign, according to the Bible, vast wealth poured into Jerusalem, enabling him to launch ambitious building projects throughout the kingdom. The centerpiece of the king's construction program was an elaborately adorned temple and a regal palace complex in Jerusalem. Solomon's temple, built on Mount Moriah (known today as the Temple Mount), would become the focal point of Israel's religion and national identity. It was destroyed by invading Babylonians in 587 B.C., rebuilt late in the sixth century B.C., and massively expanded by Herod the Great in 18 B.C. Herod's temple was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.
But while part of a retaining wall supporting Herod's temple still stands (it is revered as the Western Wall in modern Jerusalem), no remnants of any of Solomon's Jerusalem structures have been found, prompting minimalists to conclude that they were never really there. If the rich and powerful Jerusalem of David and Solomon "existed at all," argues Thompson of the University of Copenhagen, "and years of excavation have found no trace of a 10th-century B.C. town--it was still centuries from having the capacity of challenging any of the dozens of more powerful autonomous towns of Palestine."
However, other scholars note that there are other blank spots in Jerusalem's archaeological record during periods when the city is known to have been occupied, and they caution against reading too much into a lack of evidence. Ronny Reich, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, notes, for example, that excavations near the Gihon spring outside the present Old City have turned up "no pottery, nothing" from the Byzantine era--roughly A.D. 330-1450. "Does that mean there were no people in Jerusalem?" Reich asks. "Of course not. How do you explain it? You can't."
Outside of Jerusalem, archaeological links to David and Solomon have been more tantalizing. According to the Bible, Solomon's building campaign included new fortifications at strategic cities throughout the kingdom, the construction of "store cities" to stockpile goods, and the building of numerous military bases. Archaeologists have found what many consider dramatic evidence of Solomon's handiwork at several sites mentioned in 1 Kings 9:15. Fortifications of almost identical design and material have been discovered at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, reportedly dating to the middle of the 10th century B.C.--precisely the time of Solomon's reign. Yigael Yadin, an Israeli archaeologist who worked at Hazor in the 1950s, was convinced that the gates of all three cities "were in fact built by Solomon's architects from identical blueprints."
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