And
more telling still, digs show that
Jerusalem
did not exist as a city in David and Solomon’s time, the 10th
C. It was at most a country village, as the whole of Judah
was sparsely settled, with about 5000 inhabitants—certainly not enough
to sustain an army able to conquer all the surrounding kingdoms, as
David is supposed to have done. It was only in the 8th C.
that Judah
became substantially populated, and
Jerusalem
a city.
It was Canaan and such more fertile areas in the north that
were more populated and prosperous, throughout the ups and downs of 2000
years, and being conquered by Assyria, Egypt and later Babylonia.
Canaan
built and destroyed cities while Judah
remained a quiet backwater of sheep-herding tribes.
By the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, however, the
population had grown and
Jerusalem
was a relatively large city, with a central temple. King Josiah, newly
crowned King of Judah in 639 BCE, wanted to spread out and conquer the
kingdoms to the north. He needed to inspire his people to believe that
it was possible—that they could “regain” the lands conquered by Joshua
and lost by the sins of Solomon, that they could unite all the tribes in
one kingdom.
It seems to have been at that time, therefore, that their
history was written. Isolated patriarchs from their ancient legends
were brought together in a connected narrative. They were endowed with
a divine mission that was supposed to carry them through millennia, from
Abraham to David to Josiah and on into all future time. Twelve tribes
were invented, although history only knows of two (hence the ten “lost
tribes of
Israel.”)
Whenever the tribe of Judah
was overcome in battle, it was explained as a punishment by Jehovah for
their falling away from their religion’s laws, such as by turning to any
of the other competing gods, although it happened again and again. Even
King David, although it is alleged that he succeeded in completing
Joshua’s task of conquering all the lands promised to Abraham, also
sinned, as did his son Solomon.
It is alleged that whenever they turned to their God, they
prospered. For instance, there is the story in 2 Kings 19, where King
Sennacherib had led the Assyrians to conquer all the kingdoms in the
north, supposedly scattering or capturing the ten “lost” tribes. He
then returned in 701 BCE and conquered most of Judah,
laying siege to
Jerusalem.
The embattled Jews turned back to their God, praying to be saved.
Mysteriously, in one night, the angel of the Lord is supposed to have
slain 185,000 of the Assyrians. When the Assyrians awoke to discover
this, they fled. This pivotal moment is supposed to have been the
crucial event that assured the Jews their God had really chosen them.
Very recent scholarly work[v]
however has revealed a more likely explanation, more likely also than
speculation about plagues. Historians agree that at that time in Egypt,
there was a black Kushite pharaoh, who set up a fearsome army of
Nubians. Also on record is that the pharaoh dispatched them, including
archers, cavalry, infantry and charioteers, to prevent the Assyrians
from taking Jerusalem, possibly so that they would not attack Egypt
next. Knowing from experience what they would be facing, this is
apparently what made the Assyrians flee.
It seems earlier historians spoke highly of the Nubian
culture having been a beacon of civilization, but the racism of the
later 19th century turned this around to disparagement.
Combine this with the determination of the Hebrew drafters of their
history to portray the Egyptians as villains, whereas here they were
obviously coming to help, and we have this monumental fiction set up to
portray themselves as chosen by God.
A
generation later, however, in King Josiah they saw a new David, who
would reconquer the lands, and restore the worship at the one central
temple. For that, they had to galvanize the people with a sense of
mission, as the only one of the twelve tribes that had remained
faithful. They succeeded brilliantly in welding all the stories into a
historical novel, or rather a powerful piece of propaganda, but it is
not a history, still less a document on which to base a religion or
politics of today.
There
is however another very interesting recent book, this time by a notable
Egyptian scholar, Ahmed Osman, called Out of Egypt—The Roots of
Christianity Revealed,[vi]
which does show a way of reconciling the stories to history to some
extent.
The scholars, for instance, can find no record of the Jews
having been oppressed in Egypt
around the time claimed, nor of the vast kingdom supposed to have been
ruled by David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE. Osman
shows, however, that many of the stories of the Jewish history were more
or less true, but took place not only about 500 years earlier than
supposed, but in Egypt rather than Israel, and even then, dates were
compressed or stretched. Osman agrees that they were written down only
in the 7th C. and that the distortions were intentional, to
achieve certain aims. The Egyptians, however, had written records of
their histories from far earlier.
Hence, Osman is able to show convincingly that there were
two Davids: the local shepherd-king of the 10th c. BCE and
the great warrior-king who lived 500 years earlier, but who is known to
history as one of the greatest of the later Egyptian pharaohs, Thutmose
III.
His military campaigns exactly match those reported of
David. Names are also clues, as the Egyptians generally included the
name of the god they served into the names of royal figures. Thus,
Thutmose served Thoth, or Hermes. Mos or Mose meant “child”; thus,
“child of Thoth”. But (as both Egyptians and Hebrews omitted short
vowels in writing) Thoth in Hebrew would be written Dwd.
The story of young David killing the giant Philistine,
Goliath, seems to have been taken from a famous Egyptian popular epic
known to every school-boy in Egypt.
