Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 121
and Gezer, and Yigael Yadin located in the grand structures of Hazor the city of
Solomon the Wise. He also found palaces from the time of the united kingdom
in Megiddo, and discovered the famous Solomonic gates in all three ancient
cities. Unfortunately, the building style of these gates was found to be later
than the tenth century BCE—they greatly resembled vestiges of a palace built
in Samaria in the ninth. The technological development of the carbon-14 test
confirmed that the colossal structures in the area dated not from Solomons reign
but from the time of the northern kingdom of Israel. Indeed, no trace has been
found of the existence of that legendary king, whose wealth is described in the
Bible as almost matching that of the mighty imperial rulers of Babylonia or
Persia.
The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political
entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem
was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a
dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in
1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior
to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed.
The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century
BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands
of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an
entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth
century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank
during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two
mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens
of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages
in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable
and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated
and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two
distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically
related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both.
The kingdom of Israel under the Omride dynasty was clearly greater than
the kingdom of Judah under the House of David. It is about the former that
we have the oldest extrabiblical evidence: the inscription on the so-called
Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III of Assyria, the famous Mesha stela, and the
inscription found at Tell Dan. All the grand structures previously attributed
to Solomon were in fact later projects of the kingdom of Israel. At its zenith,
it was one of the most populated and prosperous kingdoms in the territory
between Damascus in the north, Moab in the east, the Mediterranean Sea in
the west, and the kingdom of Judah in the south.