The Timna Valley in the Aravah, the site of copper mining by nomadic Edomites in the 12th-9th centuries BCE. Photo courtesy the Central Timna Valley Project.
November 14, 2021

David and Solomon’s Kingdom as a State: An Archaeo-Historical Anachronism

November 2021 | Vol. 9.11

By Zachary Thomas

The kingdom ruled by David and Solomon (often referred to as the “United Monarchy”) is one of the most important landmarks in the history of Israel, at least according to the Hebrew Bible. But for the last few decades it has been an especially contested subject for archaeologists and historians. Debate has raged over whether the archaeological record of the 10th century BCE in Israel really reflects the existence of such a kingdom as the biblical authors describe. The intricacies of this debate are quite complicated, but differing archaeological chronologies for the 10th century BCE and the character of the broader Iron Age I-IIA period (ca. 1200-840 BCE) have been at its core. Whatever side you look at though, you will find one basic assumption that is common: if this kingdom was like the Hebrew Bible describes, it must have been a state.

But this is a more than a somewhat problematic assumption. A state is not just a neutral shorthand term for any kind of discrete, organized political community, or what archaeologists like to call a “polity”. The state is actually a very particular kind of polity, with its own peculiar characteristics. For centuries philosophy and the more recent fields of sociology and political science have dealt at length with what defines the state and what its characteristics. Looking at what important thinkers like the German theorist Max Weber (1864-1920) had to say about the state points us to its most fundamental characteristic, that the state is a political order that exists unto itself, externally and independently from those who live under it. Although people in positions of authority and an administrative hierarchy operate the state, so to speak, they do not set their own rules for how they do so, because those rules are typically set out in constitutions and laws. The state is “out there;” it is a real if impersonal entity, outliving any one leader or government.

Max Weber. Public Domain.

Max Weber. Public Domain.

That states exist today is a given. They are the very context in which scholars work, so it is not a surprise that the term “state” crops up so frequently in scholarship on ancient polities. Is projecting our familiar reality back into antiquity justified? Consider the two critical points brought up in this nifty quote from a paper by Egyptologist John Baines: “From the beginning the king could have said “L’Etat, c’est Moi, I am the State” except that such a sentence is impossible in Egyptian, which lacks a word for the State”. But it is not only the Egyptian language that is lacking such a word, for so are Hebrew, Akkadian and other Near Eastern languages. If we agree that a language is basically reflective of the concepts extant within the culture of its native speakers and writers, then we cannot really say that the state was even a concept known to the ancient Israelites and their immediate neighbors. To be sure, they did have their cultural concepts and customs of authority. Rather, as Baines alludes to, these politics were rooted in the personal power and status of figures in positions of authority, rather than some impersonal order and its rules.

The Ancient Near Eastern polities for which we have good records are of course overwhelmingly kingdoms, where ultimate power and authority resides in the person of the king (or more rarely a queen), who derives his authority from the “real” king, his patron deity. Archaeologist David Schloen explained in his book The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol, how an ancient Near Eastern kingdom was understood by its citizens as a great, extended household of which the king was the patriarch, what Weber called “patrimonialism.” The United Monarchy as it appears in the biblical text is a superb example of this; just think of the “House of David” or the language used regarding the relationship between David’s dynasty and YHWH in 2 Samuel 7. Though English terms like “king” and “kingdom” do not capture the exact meaning of the Hebrew terms they translate, they are essentially equivalent and certainly more appropriate than something like “state.” This is an important clue regarding how the Israelite polity regarded itself when it looked inward at its own structures and legitimacy, and when it compared itself to other ancient Near Eastern polities.

"House of David" highlighted on the 9th century BCE stela from Tel Dan. Photo by Oren Rozen, CC-By-SA 4.0.

“House of David” highlighted on the 9th century BCE stela from Tel Dan. Photo by Oren Rozen, CC-By-SA 4.0.

So whatever your view of the historicity of the biblical account may be, it is anachronistic to understand kingdoms like the United Monarchy as states. Is this just a matter of terminology and theory? What does this have to do with the archaeological record of Israel in the 10th century BCE? Quite a lot, because if we uncritically assume that the United Monarchy was a ‘state’ then we are only going to look for elements of a state in our archaeological evidence. This in turn directly affects how assess that archaeological evidence against the biblical text.

Scholarship on the “archaeology of the state” is global in extent and vast in quantity, but archaeologists working in Israel are long predisposed to search for certain indicators. States are administered through a bureaucracy, a professional cadre of trained administrators producing records and communiqués, so we ought to have plenty of evidence for writing. State activities like bureaucracy and taxation take place separately from private life, so there should be “public” buildings to facilitate these activities. States and their ruling elites are often insecure about their power; they like to show off how they control the resources (physical, technical or human) of their domain, so there should be monumental architecture, inscriptions and art. The spatial organization of society reflects the organization of the state, so we should see a hierarchical settlement pattern of cities, towns and villages. In particular we should see all of this in Jerusalem, given that according to the Biblical texts it was David and Solomon’s capital.

An older view of the Temple Mount and City of David, the maximum extent of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE. ©2002 Brigham Young University.

An older view of the Temple Mount and City of David, the maximum extent of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE. ©2002 Brigham Young University.

Parliament House, Canberra. Photo by Jim Bowen, CC-By-3.0.

Parliament House, Canberra. Photo by Jim Bowen, CC-By-3.0.

Whether or not we find these indicators in 10th century BCE Israel very much depends on what chronology you use, and in the case of Jerusalem this is even more difficult owing to how complicated the archaeological record is there. Moreover, monumental inscriptions and art are essentially absent in Israel in this period. At some other sites associated with Solomon in the biblical text, such as Megiddo, we do have what are often thought of as monumental, public structures that could date to the 10th century, but we lack clear evidence that they served an exclusively governmental role. We should also remember that thinking of such buildings as ‘public’ is more matter of our pre-conceptions than of Israelite perspective; there is no more evidence that the Israelites had the concept of a “public building” than they did the “state.”

Megiddo Palace 6000. Photo by Matthew J. Adams.

Megiddo Palace 6000. Photo by Matthew J. Adams.

But these indicators are also only useful if we assume that we will always find some material remains of ancient life and political relationships. On the basis of his recent excavations in the Aravah region of the southern Negev, Erez Ben-Yosef recently argued the population of Israel’s neighbor Edom was still nomadic in the 10th century BCE and that nomads likely also made up a large portion of the population in Israel. Since nomads are usually very hard to detect archaeologically, this would mean that we cannot even see a large portion of 10th century BCE Israel’s population, much less how their lives, organization and economic output might have been affected by David and Solomon’s rule. Even if we focus only on the settled population, it is difficult to see what a clear or necessary archaeological marker of a patrimonial kingdom would be, especially when we are dealing with a kingdom still in the early decades of its existence.

The Timna Valley in the Aravah, the site of copper mining by nomadic Edomites in the 12th-9th centuries BCE. Photo courtesy the Central Timna Valley Project.

The Timna Valley in the Aravah, the site of copper mining by nomadic Edomites in the 12th-9th centuries BCE. Photo courtesy the Central Timna Valley Project.

These cautions certainly do not mean that we should stop trying to understand how archaeological evidence relates to the political reality of Israel in the 10th century BCE. But we clearly need to recalibrate our thinking and cease looking at it only through the anachronistic lens of the state writ large and start imaging how the Israelite’s understood – and organized – their own reality.

Zachary Thomas  has a PhD in the archaeology and history of ancient Israel from Macquarie University, Sydney. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and is currently Lecturer in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

How to cite this article:

Thomas, Z. 2021. “David and Solomon’s Kingdom as a State: An Archaeo-Historical Anachronism.” The Ancient Near East Today 9.11. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/david-and-solomons-kingdom/.

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