Archaeology in the News

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Jerusalem in King David's Time Was Much Larger Than Previously Thought, Researchers Say

First large-scale radiocarbon study of Jerusalem casts doubt on the paradigm that David's capital was a small village. It already extended over a vast area more than 3,000 years ago


Remains of the Iron Age wall in the City of David in one of the areas samples by the radiocarbon study.Credit: Ariel David


In the age-old debate about how much of the Bible is a true story, size matters. Was there really a grand United Monarchy of the ancient Israelites under David and Solomon as the Bible relates? Was Jerusalem truly built by Solomon into the magnificent capital of an empire, or was it a tiny backwater?

A first-of-its-kind radiocarbon study of Jerusalem in the First Temple Period is now offering new insight into the city's history in biblical times. On one hand it brings tantalizing clues that the city was already an important urban center in David and Solomon's time and not an insignificant village, as scholars more skeptical of biblical historicity have long maintained .

On the other hand, the new radiocarbon data contradict the biblical text on who exactly built what and when in Jerusalem during the First Temple Period.

The study, published Monday in PNAS, is the first large-scale project to reconstruct the city's distant past through radiocarbon dating. It is being hailed as a breakthrough in the field because scientists managed to extract reliable data for a period in which radiocarbon dating is notoriously unreliable. Despite this, it is unlikely that the study will put an end to the complex debates on how much history the Bible contains, particularly when it comes to the stories about the fabulous kingdom of David and Solomon.

The Israelite entities

Extra-biblical texts and archaeological evidence tell us that in the Iron Age, which roughly coincides with the First Temple Period, two separate Israelite entities developed in the Levant.


The larger and more powerful one was the Kingdom of Israel, centered on the modern-day Galilee and the northern West Bank, with its capital in Samaria. Israel's smaller neighbor was the Kingdom of Judah to the south, with its capital in Jerusalem.

But no clear-cut textual or archaeological evidence has so far confirmed the biblical claim that these two kingdoms were once joined in a vast United Monarchy under David and Solomon, who would have ruled sometime in the 11th-10th centuries B.C.E.

Many scholars have thus concluded that, even if David and Solomon did exist, they were little more than local chieftains, ruling over the nascent Kingdom of Judah from a tiny Jerusalem. Their great empire was but a later aggrandizement by the redactors of the Bible, who wanted to emphasize the prominence of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Davidic dynasty.

Other researchers have attempted to assail this skeptical paradigm by pointing to some remains in Jerusalem and its environs, which they claim support the existence of a large kingdom and a well-developed capital already in the purported time of David and Solomon.

Dating King David

A lot of this debate boils down to whether archaeological remains can be solidly dated to the 11th-10th centuries B.C.E. A big kingdom needs a big capital, so if there is monumental architecture in Jerusalem that was built in this period, then the biblical account may hold some water, otherwise it must be dismissed as mostly mythological.

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The Weizmann researchers worked closely with archaeologists to collect short-lived organic materials, mainly charred seeds, from archaeological digs of Iron Age sites across the so-called City of David, a narrow ridge that runs south of the Temple Mount, and which most archaeologists (though not all) identify as the original core of ancient Jerusalem.

The result is more than 100 secure dates ranging from the early Iron Age in the 12th century B.C.E. to 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, the researchers report in PNAS.

The paper doesn't openly address the debate on the historicity of David and Solomon, in fact it doesn't even mention them. But some of the findings have interesting implications for the big open questions about the history of Jerusalem in their time.

One highlight of the study is that almost 20 percent of the samples analyzed were dated to the 12th-10th century B.C.E., a period that includes the time of David and Solomon, and were found across the City of David.

"This clearly indicates widespread occupation of yet undetermined character," write the researchers, who were led by Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto and Dr. Johanna Regev of Weizmann's Dangoor Research Accelerator Radiocarbon Laboratory.



For the rest of the article, see

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2024...ffc4a20000