In Search of King David’s Lost Empire
The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.
Their leader is a wily, resourceful man from Bethlehem, who decides that his people are meant for more than lightning raids and mercenary stints. He sends his men to rout an advancing force, then shares the loot with the highland elders. This wins over the highlanders, and, in time, they make him chieftain of the southern hill area. He takes over the tribal center of Hebron, and later captures Jerusalem, another hilltop stronghold. The chieftain moves his extended family to the main homes of the Jerusalem village, and settles in one himself—a palace, some might call it, though there is nothing extravagant about it. He rules over a neglected chiefdom of pastoralists and outlaws. His name is David.
Israel Finkelstein’s vision of King David—the vagabond, the racketeer—helped make his career as an eminent Biblical archeologist. But, when he began his research in the area, he was interested less in the Bible than in migration patterns. In 1993, Finkelstein was a newly tenured professor at Tel Aviv University, forty-four years old and known as something of an iconoclast. He was working on a book called “Living on the Fringe,” which took up questions of human habitation in the ancient southern Levant—particularly Canaan, the site of what is now Israel. Finkelstein argued that the first settlers came there as a result of internal changes in the region; nomadic societies became sedentary for a few generations during periods of successful trade, then uprooted themselves, then settled again. The Israelites, he claimed, were “of local stock”—that is, Bedouin nomads.
The Bible, of course, tells it differently. In the Old Testament story, Canaan is where the Hebrews ended their exodus, and where David secured for his people a glorious kingdom. From about 1,000 B.C., he and his son Solomon ruled over a vast monarchy that encompassed four defeated kingdoms, stretching as far north as the Euphrates River and as far south as the Negev Desert. (Archeologists derive the date from an inscription on a portal gate in the Egyptian city of Karnak, which lists the military conquests of King Shoshenq—thought to be the same king mentioned in the Bible as Shishak.) The United Monarchy, as it is known, represented the golden age of ancient Israel; though it probably lasted no more than a generation or two, its legacy has persisted for thousands of years. For Jews, Finkelstein told me, David “represents territorial sovereignty, the legend of the empire.” For Christians, he is “directly related to Jesus and the birth of Christianity.” For Muslims, he is a righteous prophet who preceded Muhammad. The story of David, Finkelstein added, “is the most central thing in the Bible, and in our culture.”
The Bible depicts David as a brilliant but flawed figure, capable of unspeakable violence but also of remorse and tenderness—perhaps humanity’s first antihero. He is anointed by God to replace Saul, the first king of Israel, whose short rule was marked by bouts of rebellion. David is a handsome shepherd; he has a way with the lyre and a way with women; he slings a fatal stone at a giant. So far, these are the familiar tropes of the ancient hero. But David is also said to have impregnated Bathsheba—a married woman—and sent her husband off to die in battle.
Nadav Na’aman, an authority on Jewish history and a colleague of Finkelstein’s at Tel Aviv University, describes David’s story as “extraordinary fiction.” But he believes that it contains kernels of truth, preserved as the tale was passed down by oral tradition. The story, for instance, frequently mentions the Philistine city of Gath, which was destroyed in the late ninth century B.C.—a clue to its origins.
In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero. There is no archeological record of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no Noah’s Ark, nothing from Moses. Joshua did not bring down the walls of Jericho: they collapsed centuries earlier, perhaps in an earthquake. But, in 1993, an Israeli archeologist working near the Syrian border found a fragment of basalt from the ninth century B.C., with an Aramaic inscription that mentioned the “House of David”—the first known reference to one of the Bible’s foundational figures. So David is not just a central ancestor in the Old Testament. He may also be the only one that we can prove existed. Yet to prove it definitively would be exceptionally difficult; Jerusalem of the tenth century B.C. is an archeological void. “I can take a shoebox and put inside everything we have from that period,” Yuval Gadot, an archeologist from Tel Aviv University, said.
Finkelstein has pushed Israeli research to the forefront of science, employing precision radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and image processing that can examine a three-thousand-year-old potsherd and determine how many ancient scribes were involved in its making. An archeology lab run by Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science has employed the chief forensic investigator of the Israel Police. Despite their advanced technology, these researchers are still engaged in questions that have persisted for more than a century. From where did the early Israelites emerge? When do we first see signs of a centralized cult with a single deity? More prosaically, but no less crucially, who was David? Was he the all-powerful king described in the Bible? Or was he, as some archeologists believe, no more than a small-time Bedouin sheikh?
William Albright, the father of Biblical archeology, seemed ill-suited to field work. Born in 1891, to Methodist missionaries from Iowa, Albright suffered from extreme myopia—likely the result of typhoid fever in infancy—and a left hand that had been mangled in a farming accident. At ten, though, he cobbled together enough money to buy a two-volume history of Babylon and Assyria. By sixteen, he was teaching himself Hebrew. In college, he studied Greek, Latin, Akkadian, Ancient Ethiopian, Syriac, and Arabic, with breaks to travel to New York for meetings of the American Oriental Society.
Albright was a faithful Christian, and the inerrancy of the Bible was then under attack. Critics, mostly in Europe, argued that the first five books of the Old Testament were written not at the time of Moses, as the Scriptures claim, but by authors working centuries apart, weaving a patchwork of tales from early Judeans and later priests, and even from Babylonian myths. For Albright, the Bible was nevertheless a compendium of verifiable fact. In 1919, he arrived in Palestine, and began scouring the land of ancient Israel for findings that would illustrate and historicize the Scriptures.
In 1936, Albright named a successor in Palestine: Nelson Glueck, an American who is said to have boasted of digging “with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other.” He surveyed hundreds of sites in Transjordan, and found evidence of an ancient copper industry so extensive that he nicknamed the area “the Pittsburgh of Palestine.” By comparing potsherds he found there with those from other sites, Glueck grew convinced that the mines dated to the tenth century B.C. For Biblical archeologists, this was akin to striking gold—“the ultimate fantasy,” one told me.
In the nascent State of Israel, there was real currency to research that could demonstrate the Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral land—especially if it ignored the other people living there. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, said, “Jewish archeology present-tenses our past and shows our historic continuity in the country.” His Army’s legendary chief of staff, Yigael Yadin, became the country’s leading archeologist. In 1955, Yadin began an epochal excavation of the ancient city of Hazor, which, in the Bible, is destroyed by Joshua during his conquest of Canaan, and later rebuilt and fortified by Solomon. Yadin approached the dig like a military operation. He employed two hundred diggers, mostly immigrants from North Africa, and installed a network of field telephones and a miniature railway for transferring dirt. His men unearthed a six-chambered gate made of ashlar stones, which looked identical to a gate that Yadin had previously discovered in Megiddo—another city thought to have been built by Solomon. Here was evidence of a grand design, Yadin concluded. “Both gates were built by the same royal architect,” he wrote in 1958.
Finkelstein was nine years old at the time, and the romance of such finds was helping to inspire what one historian described as a “popular national cult” of archeology. The cult didn’t extend to Finkelstein’s house. He was raised outside Tel Aviv, in a family of citrus farmers. His father was a talented athlete and, he says, a “big macho,” who emigrated from Ukraine, joined his in-laws’ orchard business, and went on to become a successful sports executive. At age four, Finkelstein was considered a math prodigy. But, he said, “my parents did what you’re not supposed to do, which is to show off my skills with a slide rule in front of guests.” His father wanted him to be a nuclear physicist, and was baffled by his decision to go into archeology: “Until his last day, he couldn’t understand why someone would pay me a salary—‘Who cares? What good does it do?’ ”
After serving in the Israeli Air Force, Finkelstein landed, in 1970, in the archeology department at Tel Aviv. The field was embroiled in debate. “There was a world war going on over whether Abraham was historical,” he said. “Then there was a big debate over the conquest of Canaan. Today, there isn’t. We know these things didn’t happen. But that’s how it all went—the salami method.” The most momentous events in the Scriptures were being pared away, one after another. Finkelstein found it easy to wonder whether any of the Biblical narrative was based on historical fact.
Thomas Römer, the head of the Collège de France, told me that Finkelstein developed “a reputation as one of the young generation who were about to challenge the traditional way of how Israel was doing archeology.” He also developed a reputation as a playboy. “I needed to calm down in every respect” is how he puts it. He was married when he accepted a two-year teaching position in Chicago, in the mid-eighties, but the marriage collapsed soon after his return home. He met his second wife, Joëlle Cohen, a Parisian émigrée, on a dig in southern Israel. By then, he was forty—and calmer.
After years of researching the highlands, Finkelstein wanted to take on a site in the lowlands, to see whether social structures emerged differently there. He chose Megiddo, Yadin’s old territory. It was the “switchboard of the Levant,” Finkelstein told me one afternoon a few months ago. We were in his office in the Tel Aviv University humanities building. He had settled in a lime-green armchair, and gestured for me to sit on a wooden daybed. An electric bicycle, which he calls his “Mercedes,” was parked in a corner. At seventy-one, Finkelstein is six feet two, bearded, with a deep baritone and elegant hands that always seem to be conducting an invisible orchestra. (I heard a janitor on campus address him as “Sean Connery.”) He is generous, witty, courtly, overwhelmingly charming—and he knows it. “Israel Finkelstein is Israel Finkelstein’s greatest fan,” one scholar told me. More than once, when we spoke, he compared himself to Baruch Spinoza, “a great Jew,” who, in 1656, was excommunicated for challenging Biblical orthodoxy. In conversation, Finkelstein often refers to himself as “your slave,” “your loyal slave,” or “your wretched slave,” which has the strange effect of further elevating his self-image.
Finkelstein spent a year preparing for Megiddo, poring over stratigraphy and chronological charts. The more he read, the more confused he grew. Yadin had dated the site’s most substantial layer to Solomonic times. But there was confounding evidence, in the form of relics from a long-collapsed palace. The relics were inscribed with stonemason marks strikingly similar to those from a palace in the ancient city of Samaria—which had been persuasively dated to a century after Solomon’s rule. As Finkelstein considered this, he visited a friend’s dig in the Jezreel Valley, where excavators had noticed that the pottery—burnished by hand and painted red—was much like the ceramics of Megiddo. But his friend’s site was from the time of the Omrides, who ruled Israel in the ninth century B.C. Again, Yadin’s dating seemed to be off by a hundred years. “Something fundamentally didn’t make sense,” Finkelstein told me.
He began to think more broadly about ancient Israel in relation to its surroundings. For three centuries before the time of David, the pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom had ruled over Canaan. But, by the tenth century B.C., the Egyptian empire had long receded, diminished by a withering regional drought. The same drought had also vanquished the Hittite empire, of present-day Turkey, and the Mycenaean empire, of Greece. What were the chances that a single empire would suddenly appear on the world stage—and in the neglected highlands of Judah, of all places? “An empire needs a capital,” Finkelstein has said. “There’s almost nothing in Jerusalem; a very small village. An empire needs manpower. There’s nothing in Judah; a few small villages. An empire needs administration. There’s no administration. There’s no scribal activity. Where is the empire?”
In 1996, Finkelstein published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Levant, with a modest title, “The Archeology of the United Monarchy: An Alternative View.” To the uninitiated, his argument was technical and narrow: the stratum at Megiddo that had yielded the palace and other monumental architecture should be down-dated to the ninth century B.C., as should comparable layers at other sites. In effect, however, Finkelstein was stripping David and Solomon’s United Monarchy of any ruins attesting to splendor, and reattributing those ruins to the Omride kingdom of northern Israel. Omri is presented in the Bible as a marginal king—but, according to Finkelstein, that only underscores the authors’ Judean bias. The archeological record suggests that Omri’s kingdom was a dominant regional power, with the House of David serving as its vassal.
“The new dating calls for a re-evaluation of the historical, cultural and political processes that took place in Palestine in the eleventh-ninth centuries B.C.,” Finkelstein wrote. A “re-evaluation,” in other words, of the rise of ancient Israel. In a later addendum, he went further, accusing Yadin, who died in 1984, and his acolytes of being led astray by “irrelevant sentiments” regarding the “grandeur” of early Israel.
Finkelstein thought that he had settled the issue; the scholarly world would accept his theory, which came to be known as the “low chronology,” and move on. “I was naïve,” he told me. “I didn’t know what kind of battle I was getting myself into.”
Finkelstein’s paper unleashed a torrent of academic rejoinders. His friend Amihai Mazar, a renowned professor of archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote that Finkelstein’s conclusions were “premature and unacceptable.” Amnon Ben-Tor, also of the Hebrew University, and long regarded as Yadin’s successor, accused him of employing a “double standard”: citing the Biblical text where it suited him and deploring its use where it did not.
In 1999, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a front-page story about this controversial new frontier in archeology. Written by Ze’ev Herzog, a colleague of Finkelstein’s, it was titled “The Bible: No Evidence on the Ground.” Herzog wrote, “Following seventy years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israelis are a stubborn people, and no one wants to hear it.”
For insiders, the Haaretz article read like a long subtweet of the archeology department of Jerusalem and its “stubborn people.” It drove a wedge between the Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem schools, which still holds twenty years later. Ben-Tor told me, “Because we have no evidence of Solomon, and there was no statehood, what do they say about him in Tel Aviv? ‘Chief.’ ‘A neglected backwater.’ What kind of talk is that? Chief? I can say, ‘The idiot that teaches archeology.’ Prove that he’s a chief! A hundred and fifty years later someone in Aramaic still talks about the ‘House of David.’ That’s more than a chief, no?”
Whenever Finkelstein visited the United States, with its heavy influence of religious seminaries, he was met with antagonism. At a conference in San Francisco, an audience member beseeched him, “Why are you saying these things?” The highly regarded Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research began rejecting his papers but continued to publish his detractors. In hindsight, Finkelstein told me in his office, he understands the uproar over the United Monarchy. “The description is of a glorious kingdom, a huge empire, authors in the king’s court, a huge army, military conquests—and then someone like me comes along and says, ‘Wait a minute. They were nothing but hillbillies who sat in Jerusalem in a small territory, and the rest of it is either theology or ideology,’ ” Finkelstein said. “So someone for whom the Bible represents the word of God views what I have to say with complete shock.”
For decades, Israeli archeology mirrored the country’s politics: it reconstructed the story of an unlikely conquest and a spectacular military expansion. Finkelstein opened up the discipline to larger questions of how peoples move and states form. William Schniedewind, a professor of Biblical studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, told me, “He’s an incredibly original thinker, and also a really brilliant scholar. But he’s also a person who’s trying to win the game of scholarship. So he’s laying down facts on the ground.”
Finkelstein is the author of several books, including two mass-market titles that he wrote with Neil Silberman, a journalist and historian. These books advance his belief that the Bible should be understood from the perspective not of the events it depicts but of the period in which it was written. That period begins around 722 B.C., when the mighty northern kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, leaving only its lesser southern neighbor, Judah. Like some other scholars, Finkelstein argues that, when the Assyrians seized Israel, waves of refugees began to flood Judah. In just a few years, he asserts, Jerusalem’s population grew from a thousand to twelve thousand. This mass migration brought with it the need to form a communal identity, backed by a “dream of a past golden age—real or imagined—when their ancestors were settled securely in well-defined territories and enjoyed the divine promise of eternal peace and prosperity,” Finkelstein and Silberman write, in “The Bible Unearthed,” from 2001.
That job fell mostly to Josiah, a direct descendant of David’s, who ruled Judah in the seventh century B.C. Josiah is described in the Scriptures as the saintliest of kings. No wonder, Finkelstein argues. The core of the Bible was composed during his time, as an attempt to lend his rule divine legitimacy by rewriting the stories of his ancestors—Moses, Joshua, and David. “The very outlines of those great characters,” Finkelstein and Silberman write, “seem to be drawn with Josiah in mind.”
The Times, reviewing “The Bible Unearthed,” praised its “bold imagination and disciplined research.” Not everyone agreed. William Dever, the longtime director of the Albright Institute of Archeological Research, in Jerusalem, wrote in the Biblical Archaeology Review that the book was “an archeological manifesto, not judicious, well-balanced scholarship.” Dever, who is eighty-six, is a swaggering, charismatic, and prolific author and excavator of ancient Israel—not unlike Finkelstein. For many years, the two men engaged in amicable competition. Finkelstein considered Dever a Bible literalist disguised as a liberal; Dever has never accepted Finkelstein’s low chronology.
When Dever’s review of “The Bible Unearthed” came out, Finkelstein was enraged. “His fury extended not only to Dever, but to me,” Hershel Shanks, who edited that review, wrote in a blow-by-blow account of the feud, in the Biblical Archaeology Review. In 2002, Dever and Finkelstein met in a Toronto hotel room, agreed to put their differences behind them, and signed a joint letter deploring the “polemics which all too often embarrasses our profession.” Finkelstein didn’t mention that he had recently given an interview describing Dever as a “jealous academic parasite,” or that he had written an article that called Dever’s lifework of excavating the city of Gezer a “debacle,” and accused him of bulldozing part of the dig—a cardinal sin in archeology. Dever, who has said that he used a bulldozer only to remove dirt left by a previous excavator, withdrew his signature from their letter, and told Shanks that Finkelstein’s attack amounted to “character assassination.”
Once, after Finkelstein gave a lecture, Dever went onstage and accused him of pushing post-Zionism—the idea, popularized by some left-leaning Israeli historians, that the Jewish state has served its purpose. Finkelstein was affronted. “I don’t recall you standing next to me when I cast my vote in the last elections in Israel!” he snapped. In recent decades, post-Zionism has spread through academic circles, and the debates that it inspires have inevitably circled back to the Bible—specifically to a dispute between two opposing camps of Biblical scholars known as the maximalists and the minimalists. If maximalists treat the Bible as verifiable fact, the minimalists treat it as fiction: a near-mythological account, composed between 500 and 200 B.C., that should be understood within a purely literary framework. Their skepticism often manifests in a fondness for scare quotes. One book, from 1992, is titled “In Search of ‘Ancient Israel.’ ” Another, from five years later, asks, “Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?” To the minimalists, David was an invention, and the inscription bearing his name was likely a forgery. “Just as Shakespeare’s play ‘Julius Caesar’ doesn’t teach us about ancient Rome, the Bible can’t teach us historic facts,” the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand said in an interview, from 2012, in which he praised Finkelstein’s work.
Finkelstein, whose theories call for the Davidic story to be reassessed, not abandoned, rejects post-Zionism and minimalism. Like Dever, he dates the bulk of Deuteronomistic history (the Books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) to the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., bringing it much closer to the events described. But the minimalists do not rile him. The maximalists do. “For me, the literal reading isn’t only wrongheaded but it actually detracts from the Biblical authors,” Finkelstein told me. “Only when you read them critically do you understand their genius.” He is especially disdainful of scholars who claim to have found archeological proof of the Bible’s veracity. “Just provide me with a few eroded sherds and the nightmare of critical scholarship will be beaten off,” he said in a speech in 2017. This was seen as a thinly veiled attack on one scholar in particular: Yosef Garfinkel, the head of the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In the past decade, as Finkelstein’s revisionist chronology of ancient Israel has come under fire, Garfinkel has emerged as its most prominent critic. Garfinkel is sixty-three, bald, round, and jocular, with a dimpled chin and a folksy, affable manner. When I visited him on a dig a few months ago, he offered me dried figs and dates, in celebration of Tu Bishvat, the Jewish new year for trees, and made me promise that I would return to the site with my children to see the “waterfalls of anemones” that were about to blossom.
The excavation was of Khirbet al-Ra’i, in the rolling Judean foothills of central Israel. Usually, an archeological site in Israel is categorized as either a tel, meaning a mound formed during thousands of years of human habitation, or a khirbe, Arabic for “ruin,” a place of relatively short duration before its destruction. Finkelstein is drawn to the complexity of the former; Garfinkel likes the simplicity of the latter. “Destruction is a tragedy for the ancient people, but for us it’s a hidden treasure,” he told me.
Khirbet al-Ra’i is dotted with almond trees and wheat fields—a green horizon stretching north toward Jerusalem and west toward the coastal plains. Garfinkel is “ninety per cent certain” that it is also the Biblical city of Ziklag, where David sought refuge after fleeing Saul’s envy. In the weeks before my visit, rainstorms had swept through the country, leaving the team of thirty excavators, most of them fresh-faced students from Australia’s Macquarie University, to sit idle for days at a nearby kibbutz. Now the weather was clear, and they were back, and eager. Their energy was devoted to a silo in one corner of the dig, where last year’s delegation had unearthed two potsherds bearing a script of five proto-Canaanite letters.
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