Lecture 4 -- The Jerusalem of David and Solomon

Summary Overview

In 1993 at Tel Dan, in the very northern part of the country, excavators
found part of a stele, a big inscribed stone, which actually mentions the
House of David and dates to the middle of the 9th century B.C.

In this lecture, we will look at the archaeology of Jerusalem in the biblical
period, focusing especially on the time from David and Solomon to 586
B.C. When we talk about biblical Jerusalem, people often ask about the
remains of Solomon’s Temple-the First Temple-which originally stood on
top of the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, we don’t have any archaeological
remains at all of this building, though we have descriptions of it in the
Hebrew Bible.

We do, however, have archaeological remains in the City of David that go
back to the time of David and Solomon and even earlier. Those remains are
concentrated on that little spur to the south of the Temple Mount that was the
original Jebusite city of Jerusalem. There have been excavations during the
last century focusing on the northern part of this site, which was higher in
elevation than the rest of the City of David. Here, a massive step-stone glacis
(slope or incline) has been discovered, which would have supported some large
structure further up the steep slope. Recently, remains of a monumental
building have been found above the glacis. Probably this structure was part of
the original acropolis of the city before Solomon extended the city to the
north to include the Temple Mount.

Excavations have also revealed in the City of David the remains of Israelite
houses dating to as early as the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. In some of these
houses have been found clay figurines that almost always depict a woman naked to the
waist and cupping her breasts under her hands. Thus, we have some physical
evidence for the very kinds of pagan practices that the prophets warned the
Israelites about. And we know these houses could have been Israelite because
in at least one of them was found more than 50 bullae with Hebrew names
written on them. Bullae are clay seals for scrolled documents.

At least one bulla seems to refer clearly to a person mentioned in the Hebrew
Bible, Gemaryahu, son of Shaphan. This name is unusual, and a passage
in Jeremiah refers to a scribe with this very name. Further, a scribe is the
sort of person we would expect to use a personal seal on documents. This
Gemaryahu was active in the court of the king of Judah roughly around 600
B.C., and the excavated house was destroyed in 586 B.C., so the dates fits
very nicely together. We can say, therefore, with about as much certainty as
possible, that this seal was affixed by the same figure who is mentioned in
the book of Jeremiah.

We have talked in this lecture about Jerusalem in the biblical period, focusing
especially on the remains in the City of David. In our next lecture, we’ll look
at the water systems that supplied the biblical city of Jerusalem.

Important Terms
bullae: A clay sealing.
glacis: In general, a plastered mound of earth piled around a town, with a
fortification wall on top; a rampart.

Questions to Consider
1. What does archaeology tell us about Davidic and Solomonic Jerusalem-
and, by way of extension, about David and Solomon?

2. What do the finds from houses of the 8th-7th centuries B.C. in the City of
David tell us about the Israelite population of Jerusalem?

Lecture 4-Transcript
The Jerusalem of David and Solomon

In our last lecture, we surveyed the history of biblical Jerusalem focusing
especially on the period from the reigns of David and Solomon and ending
with the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C. This sets the stage for looking
at the archaeology of Jerusalem in the biblical period, focusing especially on
this very same time from David and Solomon to 586 B.C.

What I’d like to do in our first lecture on biblical Jerusalem is look at the
archaeological remains of the settlement in the city and then in the next
lecture look at the water systems that supplied biblical Jerusalem. The first
thing that people want to know when we talk about biblical Jerusalem is
what remains do we have of Solomon’s Temple, the First Temple, which
originally stood on top of the Temple Mount. Unfortunately we don’t have
any archaeological remains at all of this building.

We do however have literary references to Solomon’s Temple, specifically
descriptions in the Hebrew Bible, and we can also get a sense of what the
temple looked like or might’ve looked like by comparing it with contemporary
ancient temples, something that we will be doing in some of our lectures.
When we look at the biblical city of Jerusalem we see the Temple Mount
physically dominating the City of David and we have to imagine Solomon’s
Temple originally sitting on top of that high place overlooking the city and
next to it and just a little to the south of it originally his palace.

So what do we have in the way of literary sources? We have the biblical
account. Although we have quite a detailed description in the Hebrew Bible,
it is nevertheless difficult for us to put together the elements as they would’ve
originally existed. One of the interesting things about Solomon’s Temple is
who it was constructed by.

The Hebrew Bible actually tells us that Solomon’s Temple was built using
workmen from Phoenicia. Specifically the biblical passage reads, “Now
King Hiram of Tyre sent his servants to Solomon, when he heard that they
had anointed him king in place of his father; for Hiram had always been a
friend of David.” One of the interesting things parenthetically to note about
this passage is that what we have here is a Phoenician king ruling over the
city of Tyre. Remember that Phoenicia was just to the north of the Israelite
kingdom and that Solomon. in fact. had intermarried with princesses of the
neighboring kingdoms including Phoenician princesses in order to form
political alliances.

So the biblical passage continues, “Solomon sent word to Hiram, saying, …  
‘I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God. … Therefore
command that cedars from the Lebanon be cut for me … for you know that
there is no one among us who knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians.' ”
Well this is again very interesting for the following reason. First of all not
only is Solomon forming an alliance with the Phoenician king, but also
importing raw materials, cedars of Lebanon, which of course were desirable
because they were the longest pieces of wood in the area that you could
obtain and also the expertise to cut and shape those wooden timbers by
bringing workmen from Phoenicia as well.

It’s clear that Solomon’s Temple, even though we don’t have physical
remains of it, would’ve incorporated both Phoenician materials and also
some Phoenician elements, for example, in the style of architecture and in
the decoration. If we can’t say much archaeologically about the remains of
Solomon’s Temple, the situation is actually different when it comes to the
biblical city of Jerusalem and specifically the City of David because we do
have archaeological remains in the City of David that go back to the time of
David and Solomon and even earlier.

Those remains are concentrated on that little spur to the south of the Temple
Mount, which was the original Jebusite city of Jerusalem. There have been
some excavations conducted around the area of the City of David over the
course of let’s say a century or so. Most of those excavations however have
focused on the northern part of the City of David; that is the area just to the
south of the Temple Mount. Remember what the configuration of bedrock is
in this area; that the bedrock rises up as you go north and slopes down as you
go south to the southern tip of the City of David.

In other words, excavations in the City of David have focused not only at the
northern end of the area of this hill, but at the end that was physically higher
in elevation than the rest of the City of David. The reason this is important
is because likely this is the same area where the original acropolis of the city
was located before Solomon extended the city to the north to include the
Temple Mount. This is something we will be returning to in a little while.

The area that has been so intensively investigated is located specifically
on the northeastern side of the city, the area around the Gihon Spring and
the area above the Gihon Spring; that is the slope of the hill going up to
the crest above the Gihon Spring. This area has been explored by various
archaeological expeditions over the course of a number of decades. In fact,
the first archaeologist to come and investigate this area at the crest of the hill
on the northern side was a British archaeologist named Robert Macalister
who came here in the 1920s.

In the 1960s, another archaeologist, British archaeologist named Kathleen
Kenyon, conducted excavations here as well. In the 1970s, an Israeli
archaeologist named Yigal Shiloh investigated this very same area.

What did Robert Macalister find back in the 1920s, the very first archaeologist
who excavated at the crest of the northern end of the City of David? Robert
Macalister came to the City of David looking for the Jebusite fortifications.
Macalister literally came to the City of David with a spade in one hand and
with the Bible in the other hand. He knew from reading the biblical account
that the City of David under the Jebusites was strongly fortified, so strongly
fortified that the Israelites were not able to take the city until the time
of David.

Macalister, knowing that there were Jebusite fortifications, came and looked
for those Jebusite fortifications. He started to dig on top of the crest of the hill
or very close to the top of the crest of the hill and ahnost immediately came
down on the remains of a city wall, a fortification wall with two towers. On
the basis of no good archaeological evidence really, Macalister automatically
ass-tuned that this must be the Jebusite fortification wall, and so he dated it to
the Jebusite period, the biblical period.

In the 1960s, Kathleen Kenyon came to the same area and conducted
excavations just underneath the wall that Macalister found. While excavating
the wall she found that it dates not to the Jebusite period, that is not to the
biblical period, but instead much later. It dates to the Second Temple period.
It dates to after 586 B.C.

Kathleen Kenyon then re-dated the wall. Not only did she re-date the wall
though, but she found that the wall sits on top of a massive step-stone
structure which archaeologists sometimes describe as a glacis. It looked to
Kathleen Kenyon as though this step-stone structure or glacis had been built
to buttress the city wall above and so she dated the glacis also to the Second
Temple period to after 586 B.C.

In the 1970s another archaeologist, Yigal Shiloh, an Israeli, came and
continued to investigate this area. As Yigal Shiloh pulled down the slope of
the hill he exposed more of this massive step-stone structure, more of this
glacis, and he found sitting on top of the lower part of the glacis ancient
Israelite houses dating to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. If the houses sitting
on top of the glacis date to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. then the glacis itself
must be earlier than that, which means that Kathleen Kenyon was wrong.

How does this all work out? At the very top we can see, very close to the crest
of the hill, the original wall with the towers that Macalister found, which he
dated to the Jebusite period, but in fact dates to the Second Temple period.
Then below that we can see this massive step-stone structure, or glacis, and
down below sitting on top of the glacis we can see Israelite houses that Yigal
Shiloh found.

How do we put this all together then? What is the correct sequence of
remains in this excavated area, an area by the way which in Yigal Shiloh’s
excavations was called Area G? The step-stone glacis must be the earliest
thing that existed here. What is the date of this massive step-stone glacis?
Apparently it’s either Jebusite or Davidic; that is from the time of King David.
The Israelite houses which sit on top of the glacis then were built a few
centuries later in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. All of this was wiped out,
destroyed, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in the year 586 B.C.
Then after 586 B.C. when the city was rebuilt, the fortification wall and
towers were built at the crest of the hill without any direct connection with
the glacis or the early Israelite houses. That then is the correct sequence.

I it still leaves one big problem unsolved. If the glacis was not built in order
to buttress that wall at the top that Macalister found and thought was Jebusite,
but is much later, then what was it built to buttress? It’s clear that it was built
to buttress something. It is a massive structure and it must’ve been built as a
buttress because it strengthens and supports the very steep slope of the hill.
So what originally stood above it?

Remember the configuration of bedrock here in this area in the City of David.
The bedrock rises up as you go north and drops off as you go south; where
the natural high point here in the City of David what would’ve been the area
of the original acropolis of the city before Solomon expanded the city to the
north to include the Temple Mount. In other words we should expect that the
original royal citadel of the City of David was located in this area.

You may have actually caught some of this in recent news reports because
excavations in the City of David are still ongoing. These ongoing excavations
have brought to light ancient remains in the area above the glacis, remains
of a large and monumental building which the excavator Eilat Mazar claims
is the palace of King David. This identification has been the subject of lot of
controversy because the dating evidence for the building is not secure, it’s
not that good. It’s not clear that the date of this building really is from the
time of David or could it be that some or all of the building is later than the
time of David.

Archeologists have been going back and forth on this. But whether or not
this is in fact the palace of David, we can actually assume that the area where
this monumental building is located was the original acropolis of the biblical
city of Jerusalem before the time of Solomon.

In his excavations in the 1970s, Yigal Shiloh found the remains of early
Israelite houses dating to the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. sitting on top of the
lower part of the glacis. By the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. the acropolis, of
course, had moved further to the north and so houses were built then on the
lower part of the glacis. Shiloh excavated a series of these early Israelite
houses which are very interesting because they’re very typical examples of
Israelite houses, typical of Israelite houses not only in the area of Jerusalem
but actually all throughout the country.

The best preserved example of one of these houses is a house that Yigal
Shiloh called the House of Ahiel because inside this house he found an
inscribe potsherd with the name Ahiel, a Hebrew name, on it. Whether or not
this house really belonged to somebody named Ahiel or somebody named
Ahiel lived there we don’t know. But anyway that’s what we call it now.

The house has been partially reconstructed and what we can see is a house
that consists of three long, narrow, side by side rooms in the front and one
room running along the back along its width. Furthermore outside the main
entrance to the house and in front of the house we can see a stone staircase
or part of a stone staircase that originally led up to a second story level. This
very typical kind of Israelite house is the kind of a house that archaeologists
call a four-room house because the ground floor of the building had four
rooms, three long, narrow, side by side rooms in the front and one room
running along the width of the back. But originally actually there were more
than four rooms because there was a second story level.

In the City of David Yigal Shiloh found remains of very typical Israelite
houses. Inside these Israelite houses Shiloh found something surprising.
Pillar figurines, a kind of figurine that is kind of schematic, made out of
clay, fairly small, and which almost always depicts a woman naked to the
waist and cupping her breasts under her hands. Well it’s kind of surprising
actually to see figurines like this coming from an Israelite context. What’s
so interesting about it of course is that this is the very same kind of practice,
the adoption of sort of pagan practices that the biblical prophets warned the
Israelites about.

For example Isaiah, “Whoever, then, fashions a god or casts an image that
is good for nothing, all who hold it will be put to shame, since the workmen
are all human beings.” How do we then explain the discovery of these sorts
of figurines in an Israelite context and not only in Israelite context, but in
Jerusalem within viewing distance of the temple on the Temple Mount?
Obviously the prophets would not have been cautioning the Israelites against
adopting these sorts of practices unless some people were actually doing
that. So we see here some physical evidence for the very kinds of practices
that the prophets warned the Israelites about.

You may be wondering well gee are these really Israelite houses? But we do
have evidence that they are, because in one of the houses that Yigal Shiloh
excavated he found a cache of over 50 bullae. What are bullae? Bullae
are little lumps of clay that were used as sealings. Let me explain this. In
antiquity when you had a document and you wanted to seal it, what did you
do? They didn’t have envelopes back then so you didn’t have the option of
folding up your letter, putting it in an envelope and licking the envelope shut
in order to seal it.

What you had back then of course were scrolls. How do you seal a scroll?
You roll it up; you take a piece of string, wrap it around it, and then take
a lump of raw clay and put it over the string. A lot of times then what you
would do is take your personal seal; that is a piece of jewelry that you would
wear around your wrist or as a ring or maybe around your neck, which had
either your name or your personal symbol on it, and you would impress it
into that lump of raw clay. Whoever wanted to open the document then had
to peel that lump of raw clay off of the string, thereby breaking the seal.

That’s what a bulla is. In one of these houses in the City of David, in Area G,
Yigal Shiloh found over 50 bullae. The fact that he found over 50 bullae in
this house indicates that once upon a time there was an archive of documents
in this house. Let’s think about this for a minute. Why did Shiloh find bullae,
but Why did he not find documents? Very simple! Because in 586 B.C. all
of these houses were destroyed by the Babylonians, set on fire and burned
down. The lire that destroyed these houses burned the documents, but also
fired the little lumps of raw clay and preserved them, because ordinarily
lumps of raw clay would not be preserved after thousands of years, they
would’ve turned back into mud. But the fire that burned the houses fired the
little lumps of clay and preserved them.

If we look at these little clay sealings then, these bullae that Yigal Shiloh
found in the house, they indicate that there was once an archive of documents
stored in this house. They’re also interesting for another reason, because
these bullae are inscribed with names in biblical Hebrew that presumably
indicate the name of the owner, that is the person who made the impression
into the lump of raw clay. These inscriptions in biblical Hebrew are extremely
important for telling us about the population of Jerusalem in the 8“‘ and 7‘*‘
centuries B.C.

One of the first things of course that we want to find out is, is there anybody
mentioned, named, on these bullae who we can match with a figure
mentioned in the Hebrew Bible? The problem here is that most people in
biblical Jerusalem had the same names; that is the same small pool of names
was used over and over again for the majority of the population. In most
cases the names are so generic that we cannot say with certainty that the
person whose name appears on the sealing is the same as a person mentioned
in the Hebrew Bible.

For example, I don’t know Joe Cohen, but actually it’s not Joe Cohen, that’s
not the formula, because the typical formula of these biblical names is Joe
son of Samuel let’s say. So the typical formula is so and so son of or daughter
of so and so and this is where the problem is that people didn’t have last
names. You were simply known as so and so the son of or daughter of so and
so. So the problem is that the names on these sealings tend to be from the
same small pool of names of fathers and sons that sort of repeat and they’re
very generic.

In most of the cases we cannot say for sure whether the person whose name
appears on the bulla is the same person mentioned in a given passage in the
Hebrew Bible. That’s the case for the most part. But there is at least one
bulla that Yigal Shiloh fotmd that we can say almost for a certainty is the
same person mentioned in the biblical account. It is inscribed Gemaryahu
son of Shaphan. That is not a typical name; it’s an unusual name.

Very interesting we have in Jeremiah a reference to somebody who has this
very same name, and here is the passage. It reads, “Baruch in the hearing of
all the people read from the book the words of Jeremiah in the house of the
Lord, from the chamber of Gemaryah the son of Shaphan, the scribe.” Notice
several interesting things about this. First of all Gemaryah in this passage is
described as a scribe, the very sort of person you would expect to be using a
personal seal to seal documents.

This Gemaryah, the scribe, who is mentioned in this passage in Jeremiah
was active in the court of the King of Judah roughly around 600 B.C. These
houses are destroyed in 586 B.C. so the timing fits as well. It all fits very
nicely together and therefore we can say, well with about as much certainty as
we can get, that this sealing was sealed by the same figure who is mentioned
in the book of Jeremiah.

These sealings are inscribed not just with biblical Hebrew names, but the
writing on them is in biblical Hebrew script. If you have ever studied Hebrew
and you look however at the sealing, you will see that you can’t read it, you
can’t make out the letters even if you know Hebrew today. The reason is
that the Hebrew alphabet that is used on these sealings is the ancient biblical
Hebrew alphabet, which is different from the Hebrew alphabet that is
used today.

Let me explain this. First of all we have to distinguish between language
and script, so the script is the alphabet and the language is the language. You
can write the same language in different scripts. In fact, a modern analogy
is that this happened in Turkey in the 20th century when Ataturk changed
the alphabet that was used to write the Turkish language. Up Lmtil then the
Arabic alphabet had been used, and now the Latin alphabet is used. So you
can write the same language in different scripts or in different alphabets.
This is what happened in the case of Hebrew.

Originally Hebrew was written using a script that is called the Paleo-Hebrew
or the ancient Hebrew or the Biblical Hebrew script and later a different
script, a different alphabet, was adopted and that’s the alphabet that’s used
today. How does this all sort of play out? What is this Biblical Hebrew script
or Biblical Hebrew alphabet that we see for example on the sealings that
were found in the City of David?

This Biblical Hebrew script or alphabet is not an alphabet that was
invented by the Israelites. It’s actually an alphabet that they adopted from
the Canaanites. Before the Israelites arrived in Canaan, the Canaanites had
started to write, and in fact the Canaanites had invented a very interesting
alphabet. What the Canaanites did was to modify some of the symbols that
were used in Egyptian hieroglyphs and turned them into their own alphabet
and they made some very significant changes when they did this.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs what you have is a system basically where each
symbol represents an entire word. The great stroke of genius of the Canaanites
was to take some of those symbols and adopt them into their alphabet, and
instead of having each symbol represent an entire word each symbol instead
represents a single syllable. Why is this a great innovation?

If you have an alphabetic system where every symbol depicts an entire word,
you’re going to need lots and lots of symbols for every different word. But
if you have a system where each symbol instead is only one syllable, then
you only need a small number of symbols because you can combine those
symbols together in order to form words. In other words, what we do in our
alphabet today. This was the Canaanite innovation. When the Israelite tribes
come in and settle down and eventually start to write, what they do is to
adopt the Canaanite alphabet; they make a few minor modifications, but they
basically adopt that alphabet, and by the way, the Israelites weren’t the only
ones who did. All of the neighboring peoples in the areas, the Moabites, the
Edomites, the Ammonites, they all adopted this alphabet for writing their
own languages.

All of these languages were actually related. They’re all part of the same
language family. They’re all Semitic languages. They’re all related but
different just in the way, let’s say, French and Spanish and Italian are related
but different languages. So all of these languages that were spoken by the
Israelites and their neighbors including the Phoenicians, who of course are
Canaanites in the Iron Age, these are all related languages and they’re all
basically using some form of what had originally been the Canaanite alphabet
to write their languages.

Biblical Hebrew is basically a form of Canaanite script, the Biblical Hebrew
alphabet is a form of the Canaanite script and is therefore closely related to
the alphabet that was used by the Phoenicians just to the north. This script,
the Biblical Hebrew script or alphabet, was used until 586 B.C. After 586
B.C., after the time of the Babylonian conquest, the Israelites stopped using
the Biblical Hebrew script and instead adopted a different script which is
related but different, called the Aramaic script.

That is the script that, that is the alphabet that is used to write Hebrew
up until today. Modern Hebrew, even though the language is Hebrew, is
written using the Aramaic alphabet or the Aramaic script. This isn’t the end
of the story. It’s even more interesting because our alphabet today actually
originally derives from the Phoenician alphabet; that is from the Canaanite
alphabet, because remember that basically the Phoenicians are Canaanites.
They’re the continuation of the Canaanites in the area of Lebanon after 1200
during the Iron Age.

The Phoenicians were writing in an alphabet that was derived from the
original Canaanite alphabet. How does that affect us? How do we get that
to where we are today? During the Iron Age there was no writing in Greece.
Before the Iron Age, in the Bronze Age, there had been writing in Greece,
but after 1200 there is no writing in Greece for several centuries. Greece
enters a Dark Age after 1200 as a result of the collapse of the Mycenaean
kingdoms. For several hundred years there was no writing at all in Greece.

In the course of contacts with the Greeks the Phoenicians apparently made
the Greeks aware of their alphabet; that is through trade, the Greeks became
familiar with the Phoenician alphabet, and in the 8th century B.C. adopted
that alphabet.

When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet they made some very
important changes. In Semitic languages you don’t write vowels, only
consonants, so there are no letters in the Phoenician alphabet that are the
value of a vowel. One of the changes that the Greeks made was to turn some
of the Phoenician consonants into. The best example of this is the first letter
of the alphabet. The first letter of the alphabet in Phoenician and also in
Hebrew is aleph, which is a silent letter, it’s a consonant, has no value in its
own in terms of being pronounced.

The Greeks took this letter which was useless for their purposes, they didn’t
need it, and they turned it on its side into the form of a letter A and gave it the
value of a vowel and called it alpha. The second letter of the Greek alphabet,
beta, comes from the Semitic bet and so on.

Eventually the Romans picked up the alphabet by way of the Greeks, and
so the Latin alphabet that we use today is ultimately derived from the Greek
alphabet, which originally goes back to the Phoenician alphabet and to
the Canaanites.

Examples of very early Israelite inscriptions are extremely rare. Apparently
there’s not a lot of writing among the Israelites before 1et’s say the 10th, 9th
centuries B.C. When we find inscriptions that date to this period they get a lot
of publicity. In the summer of 2005 for example an early Hebrew abecedary
that dates to the l0th century B.C. was found in excavations at a site called
Tel Zayit in Israel. An abecedary means somebody was practicing writing
the alphabet.

One of the most famous examples of one of these early inscriptions is an
inscription that was found in 1993 at Tel Dan in the very northern part of the
country where part of a stele, a big inscribed stone, was found that actually
mentions the House of David and which dates to the middle of the 9th century
B.C. This is extremely important because this actually suggests that by the
middle of the 9th century B.C. there was an established dynasty that was
referred to as the House of David tracing the ancestry back to the original
founder of this dynasty and presumably kingdom, a man named David
which of course then corresponds with what we know about David in the
biblical accounts.

We have talked here about Jerusalem in the biblical period and we have
focused especially on the remains in the City of David with the settlement
in the City of David. What I’d like to do when we tLu'n to our next lecture is
take a look at the water systems that supplied the biblical city of Jerusalem.