Judaism
Bent Scholar on the United Monarchy
Abstract
That the kingdom of David and Solomon was not as glorious or as extensive as the Bible indicates is certainly arguable and even probable.Hershel Shanks, Editor, BAR
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 08 July 2006
Historicity of the United Monarchy
Bent scholars do not explain things that are puzzling in connexion with the bible, they explain them away. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv university has called it “the Jerusalem Syndrome”, a state of intense religious delusion. Ong Kar Khalsa of UCLA Archeology in a 1998 article online discusses the archaeological evidence for the United Monarchy. He admits most of the evidence for…
…this period of David and Solomon is found in the Bible, and there is a decided lack of archaeological evidence to correlate (sic) the biblical narrative.
In typical bent scholar mode, his first ploy at obfuscation is to say the absence of evidence in Jerusalem is understandable because subsequent building in the city has gotten rid of all the earlier building. It is not something that happens elsewhere. Any number of excavations of cities—Troy, Jericho, London—show that buildings are rebuilt on the demolished ruins of old ones. Not Jerusalem, though. Moreover, the very fact that the city was supposedly peacefully occupied for five centuries from the tenth to the sixth “leaves less of an archaeological footprint than would a period of destruction or invasion”. This is plain nonsense. There is nothing obviously distinctive that helps the archeologist to date the sequence such as destruction by fire or a cultural change, but all of the residue of the continuous occupation is left as nuggets of gold to the proper archaeologist.
The excuse in Jerusalem, the usual biblicist special pleading is that Jerusalem builders always cleared the site down to base rock before they started to build anew. These builders are supposed to have gone to the trouble of completely clearing a site to base rock before they started building again! It sounds and is absurd. The only reason anyone could have had for doing it is because they were building a fortress or a massive stone palace. Such a building would have needed firm foundations. It is the sort of building that Solomon and David were supposed to have built. Then, would later builders, with no need or will to build any such massive building go to the trouble and expense of clearing away the massive stones that were already there? Of course, they would not. They would have done what anyone today would do—use the solid rocks as the foundation of the new building, with at most some levelling. That is what is found elsewhere, showing that this is special pleading.
Just in case you are one of those biblicists who think Kenyon is not biblicist enough for your liking, here on the right is another excavation, this time by a Jewish archaeologist, N Avigad. His excavations were deep too. Here at 15 meters (50 ft) down is an Hasmonaean tower, abutting an Iron Age tower!
And below, even in the city of David, Shiloh found plenty of stuff not cleared to bedrock.
The simple and honest explanation for the absence of as much archaeology in Jerusalem as one would have expected is that the site was not in use as a great city and center of a large empire as the bible states.
Biblical “Correlations”
Khalsa says there are too many correlations of the biblical narrative to other Near Eastern sources. It is the bent scholar’s lie. The whole point is that there is negligible corroboration of David or Solomon in history, full stop! The biblicists imagine there are corroborations but there are none at all.
He cites Shishak, the Egyptian king who invaded Israel in the days of Jeroboam I—a king also known only to the bible. There never was any Egyptian Pharaoh called Shishak. There are five Pharaohs called Shoshenq or Sheshonq, as some people have written it, in a two hundred year interval and the first one of these is assumed to have been the biblical Shishak. This Shoshenq is dated, to suit the supposed time of Solomon and Jeroboam I, 946 to 913, and this date is then used as a reliable anchor date for Egyptian chronology. It is true that a Shoshenq invaded Palestine and boasted about it on the walls of a temple, and left a stele later found in Megiddo, but these are dated from the bible, not objectively, so the supposed “correlation” is not established in the slightest. It is assumed to fit the bible.
Another ploy rapidly follows. The bent scholar cites the Babylonian king lists which have nothing in them about David, Solomon or Jeroboam, et al.
These correlations fall after the United Monarchy, but both suggest a continuity with institutions of Kingship and the office of the court scribe.
He means that because a few late kings, whom the Babylonians were directly engaged with, were mentioned in these Babylonian documents, we must believe the whole of the biblical narrative as history. That is non-scientific, non-legal and non-logical at all! You might as well say that we have to believe king Arthur of the Britons because he appears in a history of the British by Geoffrey of Monmouth. No one does, but when a king is important to modern religions, apparently we must believe in them even with no evidence other than the “sacred history”, otherwise known as myth. In fact, the Babylonian king lists and the Assyrian ones were used by the Biblical authors to write the Jewish scriptures. It shows they had access to them, and therefore that they were the Persians.
More evidence that correlates with the bible is the temple of Solomon described in it:
The description of the Solomonic Temple in the Bible is so much like the MB Age Temple and the 8th century Syrian Temple at Tell Tainat (which was also constructed by Phœnician craftsmen), that it is highly unlikely that it could be fictitious.
Again the sheer idiocy of this claim is beyond belief, and is certain proof that this scholar is bent. We are to suppose that the people writing the bible who had seen the temples built by the Phœnicians could not use the Phœnician temples as a model for their description of Solomon’s. If any author today can describe, say, the colosseum of Roman times, then the biblical authors could do something similar. But why should they have?
Why select the Phœnicians? Yehud and Phœnicia were both in the same Persian satrapy of Abarnahara. The Phœnicians were Canaanites, and all the plain archaeology of the region we have says the Israelites and Judahites were the same, and the Persians must have known it. Moreover, Phœnicians were sophisticated, and had a history, so what better than to tie the bogus history of an unknown people into the history of a sophisticated race.
Just in case anyone did not realize it, the bible authors made it quite self-evident that the temple was a Phœnician one. Solomon had Hiram’s Phœnicians come to build it for him! Phoenician temples all over the Mediterranean were of the same layout with the same two pillars, the biblical Boaz to the north and Jachin to the south, the temple facing east. They represented God’s testicles as his rays penetrated the holy place at the autumnal equinox, in a symbolic fertilization of the earth. It was the beginning of the rainy season, and farmers could then plant knowing the earth would respond with life. This is an explanation. The bent scholar only has excuses.
This bent scholar then discusses the biblical Millo, supposedly a feature of David’s Jerusalem and whether it has been found or not. After a longish paragraph of obfuscation we learn:
The identification of Millo is again left unkown.
In short, all the blather about it tells us nothing, so why is it being cited by bent scholar as something “correlating” the United Monarchy?
Tel Dan Stele
The next argument for the correlation is the Tel Dan stele which has inscribed on it the word “bytdwd”. Biblicists read it as Beth David meaning House of David, and so it is proof of king David. Naturally, biblicists are easily satisfied when evidence supports them. Most of the time no evidence is needed, so any doubtful evidence is a bonus. Reasons for doubt are:
- This word “bytdwd” is only one word whereas two are required. It looks more like a name like “bytel”, Bethel. An ostracon has the word “bytyhwh”, seeming to refer to the House of Yehouah, but it deals with a transfer of money, and the reference looks again like the name “Bethyehouah”, also a parallel with Bethel. That these are names, is the reason they are not separated by a dot as a word separator. This ostracon has in any case been proved to be a fake from the Oded Golan fake factory in Jerusalem. Perhaps the Tel Dan stele is too.
- If “dwd” means David, why must it be king David?
- The word “byt” was used of houses at a time when many people lived in tents or shanties. In other words, it had the meaning we would use “palace” for—a grand building—and very often the grandest buildings were temples. So, it could more easily refer to a temple rather than a people or a dynasty, as the biblicists want us to think. “Well, it is still a House of David”, you might argue. Indeed, but it implies this David was a God. We know Solomon was the name of a God of the Phœnicians and Syrians, for example, so maybe David was too. David, or “dwd” in Hebrew, is of the form of “Thoth”, the name of an Egyptian god.
- The word “dwd” means “someone loved”, so could have simply meant that, or it could have been a title of a favoured deity, because its worshippers loved him or her.
- The find was not discovered in situ, and some archaeologists and philologists think it is a fake. A fake factory has been discovered in Jerusalem since the discovery of the Tel Dan stele, and some think they can see tell tale signs of forgery on it. In any event, there is a grave doubt over it.
- Some philologists also think it is too good to be true in the sense that a rare discovery has on it amazingly important information, but phrased curiously, again reasons to doubt its authenticity
The Tel Dan stele might be genuine, but there is no certainty about it, and even if it is, there is no certainty it has anything to do with the biblical stories about David. Why then would anyone want to use it as evidence of the United Monarchy, unless they were desperate. They are!
Believing in Nothing
The next try is to go back to the six chambered gates found at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. Such gates are said to have been built by King Solomon in 1 Kings 10:15. Bent scholar does not dwell on these because they are in the same category as the stables found about the same time, also thought to have been spoken of in the bible, but now discredited. These gates too are unlikely to be of the right date, and the excavators of Megiddo do not think so. So bent scholar does a little side step:
Even if the existence of King Solomon is not directly proven from these gates, certainly the rise of a centralized state with the power to organize and finance such a project can be inferred from their construction.
Except that the dates of them are probably too late, and the stranger fact that similar gates have been found elsewhere in places that Solomon had nothing to do with. Anyway, bent scholar accepts that they are not direct proof of Solomon, and the best we can do is make an insecure inference that is practically worthless to show any supposed “correlation”.
Next, we discover that David was not known in the bible as a great builder like his son, yet the growth in population of Megiddo from the tenth century is a “correlation” of the United Monarchy under him. This is so obviously nonsense it does not deserve an answer. The increase in population tells us nothing at all about David or a United Monarchy.
His final attrempt is even more diffuse. He argues that there were Canaanite city states ruled by kings in the Bronze age as testifed by the Amarna letters, and they could give worthy gifts to the Pharaoh, but there is no archaeological evidence of riches at the time. So, the same could be true of the Iron age, and David and Solomon existed as a rich empire even though there is no evidence of it in the archeology. It is tortuous but typical. Biblicists believe in no evidence so here we have to believe in David and Solomon because there is no evidence! It really is remarkable how far these people will go with their lies and deceit. If you believe in supernatural beings, then these people must be the agent of a lying god. Who could that be?
