Titans of History

DAVID & SOLOMON

c. 1040–970 BC & c. 1000–928 BC

Blessed be the Lord thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel: because the Lord loved Israel for ever, therefore made he thee king, to do judgment and justice.

The Queen of Sheba to Solomon, 1 Kings 10:8–9

David and Solomon were rulers of the Israelite kingdom in the 10th century BC at the apex of its splendor, power and wealth. David united the Israelite tribes and made Jerusalem their capital while his son Solomon was the founder of Jerusalem’s Temple, the king whose myth transcended the bare bones of biblical history to embrace astonishing abilities as a sage, poet, lover and tamer of nature.

Yet the main source for both is the Bible, probably written centuries later. David was portrayed by the Bible as firstly a holy, ideal king but also as a superb warrior, a poet and harpist, a flawed warlord and adventurer, a collaborator with the Philistines, an adulterer, even a murderer. As an ailing king, he was responsible for the execution of his own rebellious son. The portrait of David is thus a surprisingly rounded and human one.

Born in Bethlehem the son of Jesse, during the reign of King Saul, first monarch of Israel, David was selected by the Prophet Samuel and anointed. Called to court to calm the increasingly demented Saul, he played his harp and won royal favor. When the Philistines invaded, fronted by a giant champion Goliath, David volunteered to fight and though still a boy, killed the champion with a shot from his sling. Now a hero, best friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, he married Saul’s daughter but, faced with the murderous jealousy of the king, he was forced to flee. He even crossed the lines to the Philistines, accepting a generalship and city from their king. When the Philistines again invaded and fought the Israelites at Mount Gilboa, Saul and Jonathan were both killed. David mourned for them in his famous poetical lament. He became King of Judah, ruling from Hebron while one of Saul’s sons ruled the northern tribes of Israel until David united both into his Kingdom of Israel. He attacked the Jebusite city of Jerusalem, which became the new neutral capital of his united kingdom and brought the famed Ark of the Covenant to the city. One day he saw there—bathing on the roof—the beautiful Bathsheba, who was married to one of his generals Uriah the Hittite. David seduced her and had her husband put on the front line in the wars—he was killed. David married Bathsheba. Buying land on the Temple Mount, he planned to build a house of God there, a temple—but God intervened: David was a man of blood and the building of the Temple must wait for his untainted son. In old age, the weakening warlord found it hard to control his seething court with its struggles for the succession. His main problem was his favorite son Absolom, the darling of the crowd, who rebelled against his father, expelling him from Jerusalem. David suppressed the rebellion but Absolom was killed, provoking another heartbreaking lament. According to the biblical account, Solomon was the surviving son of David and Bathsheba, and was anointed king while his father was still alive in order to thwart the conspiratorial aspirations of a half-brother.

After inheriting the kingdom, Solomon soon defeated his foes and built a booming commercial empire, exploiting the strategic location of Palestine—bridging the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Asia and Africa. With armies and merchants, he established a vast network of ports and overland trading routes.

The Bible describes a reign of unparalleled magnificence, in which Solomon reputedly fielded an army of 12,000 cavalrymen and 1400 chariots, and for his pleasure and prestige had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines. Such biblical calculations are undoubtedly exaggerations, but possibly not by much. (In Megiddo alone, the remains have been discovered of stalls said to be for 450 horses.) Using marriage to strengthen alliances, Solomon wed the daughters and sisters of kings. His marriage to the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, secured him the Canaanite city of Gezer. The biblical report that Solomon granted the visiting Queen of Sheba “all that she desired, whatever she asked” has prompted three thousand years’ worth of rumors that this included a child. Since Sheba was probably a prosperous kingdom that included modern Ethiopia and Yemen, this was another example of Solomon’s shrewd realpolitik.

The biblical pinnacle of Solomon’s achievement was the Temple he built to house the Ark of the Covenant. Described as a building of stone and cedar, with a magnificently carved interior and an exterior covered in gold, it was a wondrous testament to the greatness of God. After seven years’ labor, Solomon was able to dedicate it, and it became the holiest place in the Jewish world, the memory of it cherished for thousands of years at the heart of the Jewish faith: this was the first temple built on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which is also known by Muslims as the Haram-al-Sharif.

Solomon continued to build, and on a colossal scale, with cities and forts springing up throughout the empire. He constructed breathtaking palaces for his wives, a city wall for Jerusalem, and facilities to encourage foreign traders, including pagan shrines to make them feel at home.

Solomon’s 1005 songs and his sayings, collected in the Book of Proverbs, bear witness to his genius and wisdom. Confronted in his court by two women each claiming to be the mother of the same child, Solomon proposed dividing the infant in half, correctly judging that the real mother would abandon her claim rather than see the death of her beloved.

God was said to have granted Solomon power over all living creatures and mastery of the elements. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, and the Islamic sacred scripture, the Koran, both cite his miraculous ability to speak the language of the birds and ants, and to control the winds. He was said to have a magic carpet and a magic ring, the Seal of Solomon, which gave him power over demons. In the Persian and Arabic stories that, in a later millennium, made up The Arabian Nights, Solomon is the wizard who imprisoned the djinn (genies) in jars and cast them into the sea.

There was, though, a price to pay: Solomon suffered “imperial over-stretch”: exorbitant taxes oppressed the Hebrews. When the king died, his united realm fragmented into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judah—this was, the Bible has it, God’s punishment for Solomon’s breaking of his covenant.

The main sources for David and Solomon are the biblical Books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. There is archaeological proof that David existed, though it is doubtful whether Jerusalem was the glorious capital described in the Bible and whether the Davidic kingdom was an empire extending from the Egyptian border to Damascus. Archaeologists now believe the city was small and the kingdom was more of a tribal federation. On the other hand, 10th century traces have been found in the City of David in Jerusalem, which, thanks to its recently discovered Canaanite remains, was clearly a substantial stronghold. The lack of traces in itself is not decisive—after all the Maccabean kingdom a thousand years later, which covered similar territory to that of David, also left remarkably few traces. The court history of David in the Bible does read like a realistic firsthand account of a king in decline. And the Tel Dan stele, discovered in 1993/4, proves that David was a historical character, using the name “House of David” to describe the Kingdom of Judah ruled by David’s royal descendants.

As for Solomon, there is no archaeological proof of his personal existence. Unlike the rounded portrait of his father, Solomon appears as the legend of an ideal Oriental emperor. There is certainly wishful thinking and perhaps projection in the splendor of his court and brilliance of his life, and it is likely the biblical writers, forming their text four hundred years later, were describing their own Jerusalem, their own Temple, ambitions and nostalgia, in their Solomonic portrait. Little has been found of his Temple in Jerusalem but its biblical description is totally plausible in size and style—typical of temples discovered all over the Middle East. His gold and ivory wealth is credible too—artifacts have been discovered in other Israelite palaces such as those at Samaria. His famous mines resemble ancient 10th century mines recently discovered in Jordan. The size of his army is feasible—a king of Israel fielded 2000 chariots a century later. As for his fortress cities of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor, the ruins there were initially assigned to Solomon’s period but there is now debate as to whether they actually belong to the Kings of Israel a century later. However, new analysis of the stables there suggest that they may be his after all. As for the Temple, it certainly existed within a few years of his death, because Egyptian inscriptions confirm that the Pharaoh Sheshonq invaded Judaea and was paid off with the gold of the Jerusalem Temple. If Solomon’s magnificence is exaggerated, it is likely he did build the Temple.