The House of David

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Introduction

It is commonly assumed that David ruled Judah before he ruled Israel. In the past decade, literary historians have gone further, proposing that the oldest material in the David narrative in 1–2 Samuel is focused on David and Judah alone.1 This early David lore would have no connection to Saul, or to David’s rule over Israel. In this scheme, the material focused on Israel would be added after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, at which point Judah would claim the identity of Israel. This post-720 BCE, Israel-centered David story would address communities in the north and reflect a Judahite desire for a united kingdom under the Davidic dynasty.2 The difficulty with this reconstruction is that Judah appears remarkably few times as an acting political group (or polity)3 in 1–2

1. Cf. Alexander A. Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Studie zur Erzählung von König David in II Sam 1–5, BZAW 335 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004); Fischer, “Flucht und Heimkehr Davids als integraler Rahmen der Abschalomerzählung,” in Ideales Königtum: Studien zu David und Salomo, ed. Rüdiger Lux, Arbeiten zur Bibel und ihrer Geschichte 16 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 42–69; Reinhard G. Kratz, The Composition of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament, trans. John Bowden (London: T&T Clark, 2005); Jacob L. Wright, David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); also Nadav Na’aman, “The Israelite-Judahite Struggle for the Patrimony of Ancient Israel,” Bib 91 (2010): 1–23. Fischer and Kratz are reviewed in Jeremy Hutton, The Transjordanian Palimpsest: The Overwritten Texts of Personal Exile and Transformation in the Deuteronomistic History, BZAW 396 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 142–46; and in Daniel E. Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98–100. 2. See Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem, esp. 1–12, 49, 209–11, and 275; also Wright, David, King of Israel, 47. I use the terms “Judahite” and “Judean” interchangeably to represent the kingdom of Judah. 3. Names to define places or people in the ancient world can be used geographically, politically, or socially. When names are used politically, they often define a body of people capable of action, though this can also be entangled in social definitions. I define the term “polity” as “a unified political body capable of action.” See Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 240.

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Samuel. Judah is generally attested as a population or a geographical area, particularly during David’s escapades in the south while fleeing from Saul. Such a population is never envisioned as a unified polity, but rather as roaming or disconnected peoples who take their name from the southern geographical region.4 Where Judah appears as a polity, it is within the framework of editorial statements regarding “Israel and Judah,” or in the context of categorical information, such as numbers of troops.5 In the books of Samuel, the centrality of Judah is limited to two key sections, both in 2 Samuel: David’s anointing as king over Judah in 2 Sam. 2:4a (part of a larger unit in vv. 1–4a), and Judah’s dominance at the end of the lore concerning Absalom and the beginning of the Sheba story in 19:9bβ–15, 16b–18a; and 19:41–20:5. These are the sole sections in the Saul-David and David material that contain a concentrated focus on Judah as an acting political body. In both sections, Judah is identified specifically with David. Setting aside these two segments for the moment, there are ten

4. References to Judah as a geographical region or as disconnected populations include 1 Sam. 17:1, 12; 22:5; 23:3, 23; 27:10; 30:14, 16; 2 Sam. 2:1; and 6:2. In 1 Sam. 17:1 (“Socoh of Judah”), 1 Sam. 17:12 (“Bethlehem in Judah”), and 2 Sam. 6:2 (“Baalah of Judah” or “Baale-Judah”), Judah is presented as a component of geographical names for particular locations (see n. 9 on 2 Sam. 6:2). In 1 Sam. 22:5, the “land of Judah” is a geographical destination for David and his men; the term is shortened in 23:3 when David’s men state that they are “afraid here in Judah.” The same “land of Judah” is attested in 30:16 alongside the “land of the Philistines.” Neither of these “lands” is associated with a single polity defeated by Amalek in the context of 1 Samuel 30, but rather as a general geographical region for different populations of people. Similarly, the “Negeb of Judah” is identified as a geographical area for disconnected groups of people in 27:10 and in 30:14, alongside the “Negeb of the Jerahmeelites” and the “Negeb of the Kenites” (or “Kenizzites,” as attested in the LXX and in 4QSama) in 27:10, and the “Negeb of the Cherethites” and the “Negeb of Caleb” in 30:14. The same description of disconnected groups is attested in 1 Sam. 23:23, when Saul states that he will search out David “among all the clans [or “thousands”: ʾalpê] of Judah,” and in 2 Sam. 2:1, when David inquires of Yahweh whether he should “go up” to any of the “towns of Judah.” 5. These attestations include 1 Sam. 11:8; 15:4; 17:52; 18:16; 2 Sam. 11:11; and 12:8. Two exceptions are 1 Sam. 27:6, a narrative interruption that explains why Ziklag belongs to the kings of Judah “to this day”; and 30:26, in which the “elders of Judah” receive David’s spoil from his war with the Philistines. First Samuel 30:26 frames a population list (vv. 27–31) that sets Judah parallel with the Jerahmeelites and Kenites (or Kenizzites), therefore complementing 1 Sam. 27:10 (see n. 4). Following the “elders of Judah” (30:26), other populations to which David sends his spoil are listed in the geographical south (vv. 27–31), including Bethel (likely Beth-zur from Josh. 15:58; see P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 8 [New York: Doubleday, 1980], 434 and 436), Eshtemoa and Jattir, as well as the “towns” of the Jerahmeelites and Kenites (or Kenizzites). Judah is cast as one population within this larger set, and the list concludes with Hebron in v. 31, the ultimate focus of David’s interest in 2 Sam. 2:1–4a. Notably, Judah does not fight alongside David and “his men” in 1 Samuel 30, but only receives a share of the spoil at the end of the chapter. Overall, this list anticipates a political bond between David and Judah that is present in 2 Sam. 2:4a, yet is anachronistic to 1 Samuel and otherwise absent in the Saul-David material.

2 INTRODUCTION

additional references to Judah scattered throughout 2 Samuel. The first is the introductory statement to the “Judahites” (bəne-yəhû ̂dâ) in 2 Sam. 1:18, which leads into David’s elegy to Saul and Jonathan in 2 Sam. 1:19–27.6 Three references follow Judah’s anointing of David in 2 Sam. 2:4a (vv. 7, 10, and 11); v. 7 reiterates that Judah anointed David as king, while vv. 10–11 contain parenthetical information regarding a particular chronology for the length of David’s rule over Judah. This chronology should be seen on analogy with 2 Sam. 5:4–5 and 1 Kgs. 11:42: we are told that David reigns forty years in 2 Sam. 5:4, equal to the reign of Solomon, who is said in 1 Kgs. 11:42 to rule from Jerusalem over “all Israel” for forty years. Yet David’s forty-year period is split between Israel and Judah: seven years, six months over Judah in Hebron, and the remaining thirty-three years over Israel. The parallel framework between 2 Sam. 5:4–5 (cf. 2:10–11) and the reference to Solomon’s forty-year reign over “all Israel” in 1 Kgs. 11:42 suggests this chronology is secondary to the core David material and organized according to the regnal framework of 1–2 Kings.7 The notion of a separate, seven-year rule for David over Judah subtracts out a number vis-à-vis the parallel scheme in 1 Kings in such a way that David’s rule over Judah is secondary to the primary focus on Israel. Judah is attested twice more in the section detailing David’s anointing as king over Judah and Israel in 2 Sam. 2:1–5:3. The first, 3:8, is a masoretic textual gloss to Abner’s rhetorical question “Am I a dog’s head” (i.e., a phrase omitted in the Septuagint): “which belongs to Judah” (ʾăseř lihû ̂dâ). The shorter Greek text offers the better reading, while the gloss in the Masoretic Text attempts to increase Judah’s

6. David’s lament is considered to be one of the oldest biblical poems, though its origin and date of inclusion in the David narrative are debated. The introductory statement in v. 18 also appears secondary to the core poetry, as it alters the framework of the lament. Note that throughout 1 Samuel, David has never been identified as leader over the “Judahites,” nor do they fight alongside him. On this opinion, see also Jacques Vermeylen, La loi du plus fort: Histoire de la redactioń des recitś davidiques de 1 Samuel 8 à 1 Rois 2, BETL 154 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 185–88; and Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem, 278n15 and 333; contra P. Kyle McCarter, II Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 9 (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 78–79; and William L. Holladay, “Form and Word-Play in David’s Lament over Saul and Jonathan,” VT 20 (1970): 153–89, esp. 154. 7. See also McCarter, II Samuel, 88; and Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 95, on the secondary nature of these verses. The notes regarding David’s reign in 2 Sam. 5:4–5 are missing from the Samuel scroll at Qumran, as well as in the text of 1 Chron. 11.

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presence in the narrative. The second, 3:10, contains a noticeable shift in language: Abner swears he will move the kingship from the House of Saul to David, placing the throne of David upon Israel and Judah, from Dan to Beer-sheba (vv. 9–10). These verses assume knowledge of key sections throughout 1 Samuel in which Yahweh condemns Saul and promises to transfer his kingdom to David, whom he chooses as successor.8 Verses 9–10 pack these ideas together into ideological language that exposes the interest of a later Judah by validating David’s dynastic claim. After Ishbaal (Ishbosheth) dies in 2 Samuel 4 and Israel comes to Hebron to anoint David in 2 Sam. 5:1–5, Judah disappears and is mentioned only a handful of times throughout David’s struggle to maintain rule over Israel (5:5; 6:2; 11:11; 12:8). These references to Judah are all but negligible: 5:5 is an annalistic note providing a chronological link back to 2 Samuel 2; 6:2 is a geographical reference to “Baalah of Judah” or “Baale-Judah”;9 and in 11:11 and 12:8, Judah is attested within the framework of statements regarding “Israel and Judah,” while otherwise excluded from the narrative.10 Judah then enters as a key player in 19:9bβ–15, 16b–18a, and 41–44,11 and continues as part of the bridge into Sheba’s rebellion in 20:1–13 (esp. vv. 1–5). If the Judah material were indeed primary to the David story, the story would collapse from lack of self-standing, independent lore. Very rarely does Judah play an active role, and very few Judah references

8. Condemnations of Saul in 1 Samuel include 1 Sam. 13:13–14; 15:26–28; and 15:35–16:1. 9. Baalah is referred to as part of the northern boundary of Judah in Josh. 15:9–10, and is also identified as Kiriath-baal (Josh. 15:60 and 18:14) and Kiriath-jearim (Josh. 15:9). First Samuel 6:21 and 7:1–2 similarly refer to this location as Kiriath-jearim. For a literature review and discussion of the relationship between 1 Samuel 6–7, 2 Samuel 6, and the broader David story, see Hutton, Transjordanian Palimpsest, 279; also Erik Eynikel, “The Relation between the Eli Narratives (1 Sam. 1–4) and the Ark Narrative (1 Sam. 1–6; 2 Sam. 6:1–19),” in Past, Present, Future: The Deuteronomistic History and the Prophets, ed. Johannes C. De Moor and Harry F. Van Rooy, OtSt 44 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 88–106. As discussed in Eynikel, some would interpret Baalah of Judah as Baale-Judah or “inhabitants/lords [baʿăle]̂ of Judah” (cf. Judg. 9:2 and the “inhabitants [baʿăle]̂ of Shechem”). In 2 Samuel 6, with the exception of the reference to “Baalah of Judah,” the return of the ark is associated entirely with David and Israel; David retrieves the ark from “Baalah of Judah” with the “chosen” (bāḥûr) of Israel (v. 1) and the “House of Israel” (vv. 5, 15), then celebrates the return of the ark with the “multitude” (hămôn) of Israel (v. 19). 10. In 11:11, David is told that “the ark and Israel and Judah remain in Succoth” (sukkôt; also translated “booths”), while 12:8 mentions the “House of Israel and Judah” in conjunction with Nathan’s oracle. 11. All citations of texts follow the numbering of the Masoretic Text.

4 INTRODUCTION

are integral to the narrative. In both cases in which Judah is central, the polity seems to materialize out of nowhere and evaporate just as quickly, leaving David’s rule of Israel as the dominant story line. In 2 Samuel 2, the anointing of David by Judah is fronted to a section that is otherwise entirely focused on David’s struggle to win over Israel. In 2 Samuel 19–20, Judah enters in at the end of the story, in the context of David’s return to Jerusalem from Mahanaim. These two blocks of Judah material transform a broader story line that otherwise does not even distinguish between the constituents of the struggle as “Israel” and “Judah.” As such, the Judah material interrupts the flow of the narrative, shifting and reorienting the direction of the story in favor of Judah. The fact that Judah is so rarely seen is notable, for if the Judah material is indeed primary to the David story, and if David is identified so particularly with Judah, then where is Judah? One possible answer lies in the House of David, which is often identified with Judah in the biblical sources and is associated with the ruling family. In fact, the House of David (not Judah) is our first extrabiblical witness to the Southern Kingdom, attested in the ninth- century Aramaic Tel Dan Inscription.12 This inscription pairs the northern kingdom of Israel with the House of David (byt dwd) to its south.13 Most discussions about the inscription assume that the House of David is synonymous with Judah or the Davidic dynasty centered in Jerusalem, and most biblical examples of the House of David corroborate this assumption. Yet the “House of David” terminology is attested only twice in the David story. It first appears in conjunction with the House of Saul in 2

12. In contrast to the House of David, the first external evidence for Judah as a polity is not until the eighth-century Assyrian royal annals of Tiglath-pileser III (ca. 734 BCE). Israel is first attested a century earlier, in the annals of Shalmaneser III (ca. 842 BCE), while the “land of Omri” and “land of Samaria” appear in the annals of Adad-nirari III (811–783 BCE). 13. See chapter 8 for the transliteration, translation, bibliography, and discussion of the Tel Dan Inscription. The House of David may also appear in the ninth-century Mesha Inscription, as reconstructed by André Lemaire. This possible reconstruction could provide a separate geographical and linguistic witness to the pairing of “Israel” with the “House of David,” rather than with “Judah” (André Lemaire, “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” BAR 20, no. 3 [1994]: 30–37). Heather Parker has recently questioned the plausibility of this reconstruction (Parker, “The Levant Comes of Age: The Ninth Century BCE through Script Traditions” [PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2013]).

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Sam. 3:1: “The war was long between the House of Saul and the House of David; and David was growing stronger, while the House of Saul was growing weaker.”14 Notably, this is the first reference to the House of Saul in the books of Samuel; as such, Saul’s “house” represents Saul’s dynastic line after his death. In contrast, the contextual framework of the House of David does not match other dynastic expressions of this terminology. It appears to depict David himself and the small body politic that supports him, though without suggestion of a dynastic “house” based in Jerusalem. The same is true of the second attestation, not to the House of David but to David’s “house” in 2 Sam. 15:16a. In this case, David leaves Jerusalem with his group of supporters when his rule of Israel is threatened. If these depictions are accurate, then the “House of David” terminology has a greater breadth of meaning than previously imagined. This calls for heightened literary sensitivity to “House of David” attestations in biblical and extrabiblical witnesses. In contrast to Judah and the House of David, the majority of the David material is focused on David’s rule of Israel alone. From David’s struggle to become king over Israel (2 Samuel 2–5) to his struggle to maintain rule in the Absalom-Sheba rebellions (2 Samuel 15–20), the preoccupation is David’s right to rule Israel. If the Israel material were indeed added after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, then almost the entirety of the David narrative would be invented from scratch post-720 BCE. One major difficulty with this reconstruction is that the geography of the narrative does not reflect that of the late eighth or seventh century BCE. There is no clean geographical division between “Israel” and “Judah,” and Israel does not extend north of the Jezreel Valley. Rather, the narrative envisions “Israel” as a body politic operating in the central highlands and utilizing the Transjordan and the far south as temporary, liminal bases of power. With the exception of Sheba’s rebellion in 2 Samuel 20, none of these stories mentions the far northern territories. Insofar as the narrative is focused in the central highlands, it reflects Israelite geography prior to the ninth-century northern expansion,

14. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of biblical texts are my own.

6 INTRODUCTION

which Daniel Fleming and Lauren Monroe refer to as “Little Israel.”15 The location of Jerusalem is key, not as the dominant settlement of the south, but rather as a logical alternative capital of Israel. Situated side by side with Gibeah of Saul, Jerusalem is nonetheless independent from Saul’s sphere of influence while maintaining an eye to the south. In addition, the narrative perceives Israel as a collective, mobile body politic rather than a division of groups or tribes. This political body is separate from David and any particular dynastic line, and is capable of rejecting or choosing its king. This political characterization of Israel would be foreign to the Jerusalem-centric kingdom of Judah in the late eighth or seventh century, and arguably part of the actual kingdom of Israel rather than the experience of Judah. If the Israel material in the David narrative were created after 720 BCE, then this material should demonstrate ultimate ignorance of an earlier Israelite political and geographical landscape.16 Yet the David material does not. Building from the evidence, including Judah’s absence, Israel’s dominance as a body politic, and the restricted geographical landscape, the logical conclusion is these stories about King David derive, at least in part, from a Judahite perspective prior to the northern expansion. Therefore, the fascinating question is how Judah could see itself bound up in the story of David as king of Israel while Israel still existed as a rival kingdom not ruled by David’s line. The aforementioned observations and questions compel this study,

15. In an ongoing, yet unpublished study on Benjamin, Fleming and Monroe propose that certain biblical texts provide a historical bridge between the Israel of Egypt’s Merenptah stele and the kingdom of the ninth and eighth centuries that encompasses a much larger physical geography. They call the Israel of the larger kingdom “Greater Israel,” in contrast to the more limited geography of “Little Israel.” They examine biblical writing that assumes Israel to be of modest geographical scope, which contrasts with the extent of the northern kingdom in the ninth and eighth centuries, and with the Bible’s ideals of tribal territory in the book of Joshua and of expanse from Dan to Beersheba. Extrabiblical inscriptions demonstrate the “Greater Israel” of Omri and Ahab, who are shown to have had a durable presence in the east in the Mesha Inscription; the Tel Dan Inscription also suggests conflict between Israel and Aram in the region well north of the Jezreel Valley. In the Bible, texts that assume a smaller or “Little Israel” focused on the central highlands include the Saul and David lore of 1–2 Samuel, the core accounts of military conflict in Joshua 2–10 (not including the two regional campaigns), and the Benjamin war of Judges 20. Outside of the Bible’s primary narrative, Fleming and Monroe argue that other texts preserve an identification of Israel with Joseph rather than Jacob, a connection that involves a smaller geographical range; these texts include Psalm 80:2, Amos 5, and the birth narrative of Genesis 29–30. 16. See Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 7.

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the purpose of which is to reevaluate the relationship between the House of David, Judah, and Israel in the early monarchic period. I have two driving hypotheses that combine a historical and literary- historical focus. First, the House of David may predate Judah as the collective political group affiliated with David. Second, Israel is primary to the literary development of the David story, while the “Judah additions” are secondary and serve to reorient the narrative in favor of Judah.17 The first hypothesis is addressed in part 1 (chapters 1–3), which seeks to understand the terminology of the “House of David” in the early first millennium BCE. The House of David is central to the later Jewish and Christian concept of the messiah, rooted in a theological notion that the true kings of Judah are divinely anointed descendants of this “house” or dynasty. The majority of biblical references to the House of David already participate in this vision, equating the House of David with the Davidic dynasty centered in Jerusalem. It is therefore difficult to analyze the House of David using the Bible alone. Yet the “House of X” terminology is also applied with regularity to early first- millennium political groups in ancient Syria. The Assyrians utilize this terminology during their campaigns westward as a way of defining polities on the fringe of their control. The House of David is therefore not an isolated phenomenon, and it is this external evidence that provides some historical context for understanding the identification of the House of David with Judah. Part 2 (chapters 4–6) then shifts to the David narrative. One goal of these chapters is to explore the political framework of the House of David in the early monarchy, specifically those references that depict the House of David as a polity, similar to the Syrian “House of X” model, and lack a clear dynastic framework. Three specific biblical witnesses to the House of David or David’s “house”—2 Sam. 3:1; 15:16a; and 1 Kgs. 12:16—describe this “house” as a small body politic connected with David as a leader, yet dissociated from the Judean dynastic context.

17. This theory was first presented as “The Centrality of Israel in the David Story,” Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2011. See also Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 98–109.

8 INTRODUCTION

These three references have considerable impact on how we understand both the terminology and the biblical treatment of David. They do not appear to be derived from any other biblical texts, and as such are unique and invaluable witnesses. The second goal of part 2 is to examine the primacy of Israel and the relationship between Israel and Judah in the David story. In conversation with other scholars, I propose two main processes or “phases” of literary composition in the David narrative. The story of David as king of Israel is developed in the primary phase, which represents the majority of the David narrative in 2 Samuel. The secondary phase centers on David as king of Judah and Israel, shifting the framework of the narrative toward the priority of Judah’s relationship to David. This irrevocably alters the logic of the narrative from David’s rule of Israel to David’s struggle to maintain a united monarchy. In this secondary phase, Israel plays the role of the wild card and Judah steps into the role of David’s primary political relation and loyal kin. This is perhaps most apparent in 2 Samuel 19–20, which draws Judah into the narrative and transforms Absalom’s revolt into a revolt of Israel against David, in which the people “Judah” are depicted as David’s loyal followers. Moving backward from 2 Samuel 19–20, the only other textual unit to present Judah as an active player is Judah’s anointing of David in 2 Sam. 2:1–4a. This “Judah addition” is fronted to a section that culminates in the anointing of David as king over Israel in 5:1–3, reshaping the narrative so that the anointing over Judah appears to be central. Biblical scholars have long since used the Bible to ask historical questions of ancient Israel. Yet the assumed framework for understanding the Bible’s relationship to history needs to be reconsidered. There is room for fresh analysis of the David narrative with history in view, an analysis that pays adequate attention to the narrative and its foundations, without becoming trapped in simplistic traditional readings of the text. My questions are ultimately historical, yet history is an elusive category, particularly when dealing with

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ancient witnesses, and I treat these sources cautiously insofar as they may contain useful historical information.

History and Historiography

At present, the question of the relationship between history and the biblical narrative is often divided among those who find evidence for Israel’s history in the Bible, and those who believe the “history” elucidated by the Bible simply derives from a later period in which the text was written.18 For a historical study such as this, it is this latter group, those defined by others as “minimalists,”19 that provide the most helpful critique and caution. In terms of the House of David, the Bible often presents this category from a considerably later perspective, in which the House of David features as synonymous with a developed Judean dynasty centered in Jerusalem. However, this older category and the events woven around it have been transformed, reinterpreted, or completely discarded in order to tell a story that makes sense from the later perspectives of people with different identities. In reconstructing the relationship between the House of David and Israel or the highland peoples, then, the historical question is what the biblical writers were working with and when, and to what extent older realities appear beneath the surface of finished biblical history and composition. Philip Davies has argued that the ancient Israel presented in the

18. Megan Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel, LHBOTS 435 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 77. 19. The so-called minimalists can be said to minimize the Bible as a historical source, though not history itself, as Philip R. Davies would argue (“Whose History? Whose Israel? Whose Bible? Biblical Histories, Ancient and Modern,” in Can a “History of Israel” Be Written?, ed. Lester L. Grabbe [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997], 104–22). Scholars have also resisted the label of “minimalist.” Thomas L. Thompson argues that the term is created by American scholars against a general European orientation to the text; he states that the only common binding factor is that “none of us shares either the neofundamentalistic-‘literary’ nor the biblical archaeological- harmonistic presuppositions common to much American reading” (“A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?,” JBL 114 [1995]: 683–98, esp. 695–96). Davies calls this terminology “ridiculous” and claims that it “betrays the extent to which the writing of histories of ancient Israel is still driven by an agenda concerned with the reliability of the biblical sources” (“Whose History?,” 109). Lester L. Grabbe describes the recent scholarly debate regarding the history of Israel, including the “pejorative” use of the terms “maximalist” and “minimalist” (“Writing Israel’s History at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Congress Volume Oslo 1998, ed. André Lemaire et al., VTSup 80 [Leiden: Brill, 2000], 203–18).

10 INTRODUCTION

Bible is entirely a Judahite product from the Persian period, and, unlike the “historical” Israelite kingdom centered in Samaria, this ancient Israel never actually existed.20 Davies’s perspective is important in acknowledging that the “biblical Israel” is a fabrication, and that it maintains an uncertain relationship to the historical Israel and to related ancient histories of this period. Yet the clear-cut idea that a biblical Israel either exists or does not seems to treat biblical stories as capable of simple proof or disproof, rather than letting them be examined for potential historical interest in various shades and dimensions. Davies’s argument draws on the work of John Van Seters, who argues that the Bible’s “history” reflects not Israel’s history, but the historiography or history-writing enterprise of a Deuteronomistic Historian.21 Davies similarly distinguishes between history as “the past” and the Bible as historiography, a narrative that claims to relate that past. He classifies historiography as a “metagenre,” in which the historiographer embraces such genres as myth, legend, historical fiction, and autobiography.22 For both of these scholars, the distinction

20. Philip R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel (London: T&T Clark, 2007). This book takes a more extreme stance than his 1992 study, in which Davies stresses that “ancient Israel” is an amalgamation of a literary biblical world and a real ancient society, the historical Israel, constructed in the Persian period (In Search of “Ancient Israel” [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992]). For a more radical position, Thomas Thompson argues against the use of the Bible in historical reconstructions and does not believe that the biblical narrative portrays any particular historical context (Early History of the Israelite People, SHANE 4 [Leiden: Brill, 1992]). In his later book, he argues that nothing in the Bible portrays a real historical context (The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past [London: Jonathan Cape, 1999]). Davies takes Thompson’s position to task, arguing that the biblical narrative does portray a real historical context (the Persian period). While biblical writers do not try to produce “history” in the same way as modern scholars, they also do not “construct a past entirely in a metaphorical or allegorical way,” as Thompson suggests (Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008], 152). See also Gary Knoppers, who argues that a future ideal envisioned in the creation of a narrative such as the books of Chronicles is never completely separated from the present context and older available traditions (Knoppers, I Chronicles 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 12 [New York: Doubleday, 2003], 470–71). 21. John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of the Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 356–57. 22. Davies, “Whose History?,” 114–17. For an alternative opinion, Hayden White argues that historiography can give access to the past, provided we recognize its literary forms and tropes. He describes historiography as “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973], 2). Thompson, however, critiques the use of the term “historiography” for biblical literature, particularly as defined

11 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

between history and historiography is crucial. Like Johan Huizinga, Van Seters defines historiography as any written form by which a civilization depicts its past, comparing biblical historiography with ancient Greek history writing. He refers to the “genius of the Dtr history,” specifically its attempt to integrate a variety of forms of history writing in the biblical narrative, including chronologies, royal inscriptions, and chronicles.23 When it comes to the impact of later historiographical frameworks on whatever information they may have had about earlier times, Van Seters is right. On the one hand, the history/historiography debate is helpful as a reminder that history is always a subjective interpretation of the past. On the other hand, the distinction between history and historiography is illusory, particularly ancient history. There is no neutral, pure witness to history as “the past” that Davies speaks of, as this past disappears as soon as it happens, leaving only a body of subjective evidence behind. Walter Dietrich has written that the Enlightenment created a standard for ordering and mastering reality rationally: everything is to be understood as a chain of causal relationships or dependently originating events that allow us to find out “what actually happened back then when we study history.”24 For this mindset, historians want cold, hard facts, material evidence, lists, and data, even if these, too, disappear through the lens of subjective experience. It is no wonder that the biblical narrative, with its ancient understanding of record keeping and its inclusion of a wide variety of genres, does not seem to match modern understandings of history or

according to the classic Greek genre of historiography beginning in the fifth century BCE. Thompson would define historiography as a particular genre of literature “relating to critical descriptions and evaluations of past reality and events,” which would not exist in biblical literature prior to the Hellenistic period (Early History, 372–73). Recently, Diana Edelman has compared four current definitions of historiography and history writing, according to the works of John Van Seters, Thomas Thompson, Marc Brettler, and Baruch Halpern (“Clio’s Dilemma: The Changing Face of History-Writing,” in Lemaire et al., Congress Volume Oslo 1998, 247–55). See also the brief overview in Erik Eynikel, “Introduction,” in For and against David: Story and History in the Books of Samuel, ed. A. Graeme Auld and Erik Eynikel, BETL 232 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 1–14, esp. 1–7. 23. Van Seters, In Search of History, 1, quoting from Johan Huizinga, “A Definition of the Concept of History,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 1–10. 24. Walter Dietrich, The Early Monarchy in Israel: The Tenth Century B.C.E (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 101–2.

12 INTRODUCTION

literature.25 Yet to deny that any information about the past can be gained from the Bible demonstrates a bias, the opposite of which would be to read the Bible as an explicitly historical text, thus reflecting Enlightenment values. While scholars such as Davies and Van Seters offer an important critique of the quest for useful historical information in the Bible, they limit the possible utility of biblical writing for history to the time of the final casting of the text. As such, they neglect possible remnants from earlier periods, especially from the period of two kingdoms that may be preserved in stories about older times. In her recent study, Megan Bishop Moore evaluates the works of those best known among the “minimalist” school, including Niels Peter Lemche, Thompson, and Davies. She asserts that the strength of these scholars is in their focus on “persuasive theoretical and methodological prolegomena” to history, even while they fail to present substantial treatments of the past or make any attempt to draw historical conclusions.26 The purpose of Moore’s study is a neutral assessment of history writing in ancient Israel, and not a critique of these scholars. Yet her observation is supported by Davies’s list of three essential imperatives for the modern historian, which does not include the notion of building a systematic account of the past. One of his imperatives, however, is to “remain skeptical, minimalist and negative.”27 Considering this position, it becomes difficult to know how to incorporate these

25. Cf. Erhard Blum’s discussion in “Solomon and the United Monarchy: Some Textual Evidence,” in One God—One Cult—One Nation: Archaeological and Biblical Perspectives, ed. Reinhard G. Kratz and Hermann Spieckermann, BZAW 405 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 59–78. See also Marc Zvi Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. 11–12. Brettler understands history within biblical studies as “a narrative that presents a past.” 26. Moore, Philosophy and Practice, 141–42, 177–79. In Moore’s opinion, the only comprehensive history written by someone in this school is Thompson’s Early History, which nonetheless reflects a greater interest in the question of how historians construct the past than what actually happened in the past. 27. Davies writes: “There are three things a historian can (and perhaps should) do these days. One is not to discourage the production of good historiographies, and encourage people to read many of them, so that they may learn in how many different ways ‘history’ may be represented, and perhaps even ask themselves why these stories differ. The second is to expose deceits practiced in the name of history, dispel stories parading as truth, and enforced and fictive identities parading in the form of genealogies. And the third is to remain skeptical, minimalist and negative. We need not fear that we will ever be anything but a minority. The invention of history will never cease” (“Whose History?,” 122).

13 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

methodological tools into historical studies in any practical way, other than to examine all the extrabiblical and biblical evidence, with an eye to historical-critical and literary-critical methodologies, and with the so-called minimalist position as a reminder and a warning of the fragility of what we take as history.28 In addition to the systematic study of the past, another crucial aspect of this historical project is the attempt to determine the origins of the Bible’s renditions of Judah and the House of David. With David and the history of Israel, I will argue for the priority of the kingdom of Israel in the David story, before the Judah additions subtly shift this priority toward Judah. I will also argue that the creation of a southern kingdom may have occurred through Israel’s rejection of the line of David’s right to rule, as depicted in 1 Kings 12, rather than by Israel seceding or splitting off from a fixed kingdom centered in Jerusalem. This rejection of a dynastic line would follow a political pattern confirmed throughout the rest of the books of Kings. In this way, the Southern Kingdom would be formed by the secession of the deposed ruler of the dominant kingdom, Israel, through the desire to continue to support the rule of David’s grandson. While Jerusalem became the base for this burgeoning Southern Kingdom, known at some point as the House of David, the city may have been identified earlier as the capital of Israel. All of these frameworks—David as king of Israel, the priority of Israel in the David story, and the notion that a southern kingdom was formed by the secession from Israel—would have been written and preserved in Judah, demonstrating a potentially long history of writing and redaction. Yet these are all distinct frameworks through which to understand the history of Israel, thus demonstrating the Bible’s various renditions of its political history. It

28. For examples of biblical scholars who have attempted to define history in terms of the Bible, see especially Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); and Brettler, Creation of History. Whereas Halpern defines biblical history largely in terms of the interests of the author, Brettler explores four key factors for the production of the Hebrew Bible, and specifically counters Halpern’s definition of biblical history writing (Creation of History, esp. 10–12).

14 INTRODUCTION

therefore becomes important to examine whence these renditions may come. In his recent project, Daniel Fleming attempts to distinguish specifically Israelite content in the Bible from the separate and often later perspective of Judah. With the Bible a product of Judah, in large part representing the history and traditions of these particular people, Fleming disentangles strands that may reflect Israelite concerns and interests, in order to understand these people as separate and distinct from Judah.29 In the same spirit, this project distinguishes the different political perspectives through which the histories of Israel, Judah, and the House of David are constructed. As the only ancient narratives available that describe the existence of these two kingdoms, evaluations of the varied frameworks for these biblical depictions of its landscape become significant for history. This book relies on two main sets of textual evidence: biblical references to the House of David, Israel, and Judah in the David narrative, and references to the “House of X” in tenth-/ninth-century Syria, in which a particular “House” is named for “X” ancestor or founder, witnessed primarily in the Assyrian royal annals. Both sets of evidence are problematic as historical sources. The biblical writer- editors sought to reconcile a chronologically diverse set of material, both in terms of composition and subject matter, and the Bible often reflects the concerns of later memory more than earlier events. In contrast, the Assyrian sources were recorded much closer to the events portrayed, yet the Assyrian royal annals could be labeled as ideologically driven political writing, focused on elevating the Assyrian Empire and magnifying its victories over surrounding populations. Moreover, evidence for the House of X polities in these annals is evidence for populations that the Assyrians encountered for the first time as they sought to expand their power westward. Therefore, these

29. Fleming writes, “To locate the biblical narrative in history, we must decide how to read the Bible’s representation of Judah as part of Israel. The question is not so much whether some connection existed but whether the people of Judah would have shared the same stories as Israel, with the same ideas about identity and the past. If the kingdoms of Israel and Judah reflect distinct peoples with deeply different notions of who they were and how they became so, it is essential to disentangle Israel’s and Judah’s stories” (Legacy of Israel, xii).

15 THE HOUSE OF DAVID sources must be analyzed carefully, with knowledge that we will never be able to understand fully the polities designated by the term “House of X” in the annals.

The Syrian “House of X”

Evidence for Syrian House of X polities has thus far been studied largely in the interest of understanding the history of the Arameans. As the Assyrians campaigned to the west in the early first millennium, they confronted these political bodies on the edges of their control, which they commonly categorized as mār X (son[s] of X) and bīt X (House of X) political systems. This terminology was deeply rooted in the political and social landscape, likely reframed and reinterpreted by the Assyrians as alternatives to the common Assyrian language of mātu (land) and ālu (town). Most of these tenth-/ninth-century polities were located in ancient Syria, and have often been labeled “Aramean,” an amorphous category of which I am wary. One problem is the difficulty of defining names and peoples as “Aramean,” as if language alone identified them. There is also the disputed question of Aramaic as a category for a single language during this period. These factors, coupled with the likelihood that West Semitic speaking groups shared the Assyrian mār X and bīt X terminology, make the word “Aramean” problematic as a defining term for these political systems. Desiring more than to focus solely on the Arameans as a political category, I choose to label these polities “Syrian” as a regional term, recognizing that the “House of X” may have been applied as a political category to polities that were not necessarily labeled Aramean. In addition, I refer to Syria in a broad sense for what would have overlapped roughly with modern Syria, with the Jazira and the middle Euphrates as particular subsets of this larger category. Chapters 1–3 examine the combined phenomena of the mār X and bīt X as terminology for naming political entities in Syria. These political systems create a broad base for understanding the House of X as a historical category in the early first millennium. Depicted as

16 INTRODUCTION

multicentered systems with often-decentralized populations, though independent from larger coalitions, bīt X polities center on a specific leader rather than on a particular geographical area or town. In turn, the survival of the polity often depends on the survival of its leader and his descendants, rather than on a royal or central town. As such, these polities are distinct from the Assyrian mātu,30 and therefore represent a new and variable political phenomenon in the first millennium. Focused on a particular leader rather than single geographical centers or multipolity coalitions, this political phenomenon is nonetheless collaborative in nature.31 In chapter 1, I introduce the mār X and bīt X terminology and examine how it has been studied in recent scholarship, largely in connection with the history of the Arameans. Chapters 2 and 3 track the five Syrian polities most clearly defined in the annals as mār X and bīt X systems, from the campaigns of Adad-nirari II (ca. 894 BCE) to Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE). Chapter 2 analyzes Adini, Ḫalupe, and Zamāni, polities that are attested solely in the annals. Chapter 3 examines Agusi and Baḫiani, two bīt X systems attested in both the annals and in Aramaic inscriptions, namely, the eighth-century Sefire inscriptions and the ninth-century bilingual inscriptions from Tell Fekheriyeh. It is important to note that this book does not treat all mār X and bīt X systems in the tenth–ninth centuries. Other important Syrian systems include Sam’al (or Gabbari) and Hamath in the north, as well as Aram Damascus in the south. With limited evidence for these polities as mār X and bīt X systems, I have chosen to omit them from this study. Readers may consult the comprehensive studies of polities in northern

30. Although the Assyrians labeled the Syrian polities by this alternative designation, the mātu and ālu designated non-Assyrian as well as Assyrian polities, including Carchemish and Zamua (see chapter 2). 31. One example of “collaborative politics” is Amurru in the Bronze Age Mari evidence, which Fleming argues originally consists of allied people without any single center under Abdi-Aširta and his sons (Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 206). Similarly, Brendon Benz proposes that further south, a certain Lab’ayu governs a domain that includes Shechem but is not defined by any single center in the Amarna evidence (Benz, “The Varieties of Sociopolitical Experience in the Amarna Age Levant and the Rise of Early Israel” [PhD diss., New York University, 2012]). See also Fleming’s Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

17 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

and southern Syria, including the Jazira and the middle Euphrates, in Sader (1987), Dion (1997), and Lipiński (2000), all discussed in chapter 1.32 In addition, I have demarcated southern Mesopotamian mār X and bīt X systems attested in the eighth century and later as a separate topic, as the bīt X appears to represent a fixed name by the time of Tiglath-pileser III, consistently prefixed by the KUR (land) or (less often) the URU (city/town) determinative (see chapter 3 on Agusi).33

The Biblical “House of X”: An Acting Political Body

There are very few examples in which the biblical “House of X” (bet̂ X) unmistakably represents an acting political group or tribe. The term “sons of X” (bənê X) as related to a population or tribal group is attested with much greater frequency in the biblical material, while “House of X” references are weighted to the prophetic corpus and often represent a fixed name for the kingdoms of Israel or Judah.34 In this way, the House of X corresponds to the Assyrian trend for naming that begins in the eighth-century annals of Tiglath-pileser III. Biblical attestations of the House of X may also date to the mid-eighth century and later, reflecting the Assyrian trend. In addition, the biblical House of X may be secondary to the sons of X as a model for tribal or kinship bonds, while the sons of X more often represents a population or people. This is particularly apparent with the “sons of Israel” or “Israelites” (bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ ), a term found throughout the Bible, often a stock phrase that is attested in later, Judahite material. Yet the bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ is also

32. Note also the recently published study by K. Lawson Younger, A Political History of the Arameans: From Their Origins to the End of Their Polities, ABS 13 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2016). Unfortunately, Younger’s book came out too late to be used for this study. Of the five polities discussed in this study, both Younger and Dion would define Ḫalupe and Baḫiani specifically as Jezira polities, rather than Syrian. This categorization would likely also apply to Zamāni, though Dion does not discuss this particular polity. 33. The determinative is an unpronounced sign used to categorize subsequent words (e.g. male, female, land, city/town). Determinatives almost always come from logograms (signs that denote morphemes or words). 34. The House of Israel and House of Judah are the clearest examples of such “House of X” references and are often paired in prophetic texts: e.g., Jer. 3:18; 5:11; Ezek. 4:4–6; and Hosea 5:12, 14 (in Hosea, Ephraim takes the place of Israel). In addition, the House of Jacob is often equated with Israel, either as the northern kingdom or as all Israel (e.g., Isa. 2:5; 8:17; 46:3; 48:1); only a few times is the House of Joseph substituted for Israel (Amos 5:6; Obad. 18; Zech. 10:6).

18 INTRODUCTION

found in biblical material with an arguably northern genesis, and the expression is potentially native to Israel rather than to Judah. Potential northern texts that utilize the expression bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ include Gen. 32:33, the story of Jacob’s wrestling match at Penuel; and Exodus, in sections that may be considered part of an early Moses narrative, despite the lack of consensus on authorship and dating.35 The expression bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ is also found in various sections of Hosea (2:1, 2; 3:1, 4–5; 4:1) and Amos (2:11; 3:1, 12; 4:5; 9:7). However, this phrase is missing from what is often considered the oldest biblical material, including the Balaam material in Numbers 22–24, Judges 5,36 and other stories in Judges that are focused on local tales with no connection to the larger kinship association of “Israel” (e.g., Abimelech in Judges 9; Gideon in Judges 8).37 Thus the phrase “sons of Israel” may represent a later stage in northern tradition that involves a shift from intimate, local lore to the extended tribal or kinship configuration of the populations of “Israel.”38 While the Judges narratives are replete with references to the “sons of Israel,” including the stories of Ehud (3:27), Deborah (4:5, 23), and the opening framework to the story of Jephthah (10:17),39 the term “sons of Israel”

35. For example, Rainer Albertz sees parallels between Jeroboam and Moses as described in Exodus 2–5, and dates this early narrative to the time of Jeroboam. The parameters of his Moses narrative contain references to the bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ (e.g., Exod 1:9, 12, 13) (Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, trans. John Bowden, 2 vols [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994], 1:42–43, 141–42). Konrad Schmid concurs with Albertz, though his general parameters include Exodus 2; 4; 7–14; and 16–17 (all of which contain references to the bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ ). Schmid proposes that the older form of the Exodus narrative reaches back to the Northern Kingdom, possibly written as a “legitimation document” for Israel (Schmid, Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010], 144–45, 148). See also Fleming’s argument regarding the pastoralist underpinnings of Exodus, regardless of its complicated transmission history, in Legacy of Israel, 165–68. 36. Note that the introduction to Judges 5, which is likely added to the two distinct poems that form the core material, is replete with the term “Israel.” 37. Cf. Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 60–71. 38. The bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ and other terminology for the people of Israel may predate terminology for the people of Judah, the latter of which includes the bənê yəhûdâ (sons of Judah), as well as yəhûdî (Judean). The phrase “sons of Judah” depicts a tribal population in Numbers, Joshua, and Judges 1, and is used as an alternative to the term “Judean” beginning in Jeremiah. This coincides with the first attestations of the term “Judean” (yəhûdi)̂ for the name of residents in the Southern Kingdom, which, according to Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, is not “until Jeremiah’s time (e.g., Jer 32:12, 38:19, and others)” (Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 11 [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988], 187). 39. Note that in the story of Jephthah that follows in Judges 11, the primary reference is to “Israel,” rather than to the “sons of Israel” (11:13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 26, etc.).

19 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

is also attested in the formulaic cycle of the Israelites doing what is “bad” in the eyes of Yahweh, falling into the hands of such-and-such enemy, and eventually crying out for deliverance (e.g., 3:15; 6:1, 6). In contrast to the bəne-yiŝ rá ̄ʾel̄ , the House of Israel is found in material of arguably Judahite origin. It is most commonly attested as an expression for the Northern Kingdom in the prophetic corpus, often paired with the House of Judah, with otherwise limited use in the Pentateuch and historical writings.40 It is thus quite similar to the House of Judah in that it is almost entirely absent from the Samuel- Kings material. Unlike the House of Israel, however, the House of Judah is used minimally in the prophetic texts.41 Beyond the House of Judah and House of Israel, the tribes or political bodies of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Joseph are also referred to as the House of X. Notably, all of these entities are related to Israel and the central highlands, at least in some settings. They follow a pattern similar to the sons of X/House of X attestations for Israel and Judah, in which references to the sons of X as tribal populations far outweigh those of the House of X. Ephraim and Benjamin are each attested as

40. There are a total of 124 references to the House of Israel in the prophetic material, distributed throughout Isaiah (5x), Jeremiah (19x), Ezekiel (83x), Hosea (5x), Amos (8x), Micah (3x), and Zechariah (1x), plus three attestations in the Psalms and one in Ruth. It is striking that such a large percentage of these references are found in Ezekiel, the latest of the three major southern prophets. In the Pentateuch and historical books, references to the House of Israel are sparse, found in Exod. 16:31; 40:38; Lev. 10:6; 17:3, 8, 10; 22:18; Num. 20:29; Josh. 21:45; 1 Sam. 7:2–3; 2 Sam. 1:12; 6:5, 15; 12:8; 16:3; 1 Kgs. 12:21; 20:31. Many of these texts have been argued to be quite late (e.g., 1 Sam. 7:2–3, with signs of editorial intrusion), and none are clearly early textual witnesses. However, Hans Walter Wolff considers all of the references to the House of Israel in Hosea (1:4, 6; 5:1; 6:10; 12:1) to be part of a core account from the Northern Kingdom that presupposes the military activity of 733 BCE (Wolff, Hosea: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea, trans. Gary Stansell, Hermeneia [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974], 11–12, 19, 97). Wolff suggests that the “House of Israel” reflects a name in current use for the Northern Kingdom that refers specifically to the representatives of the people. He proposes that these representatives may be synonymous with the elders or “chieftains,” in comparison with Mic. 3:9. Based on Hosea 5:1 (“Hear this, priests; listen, House of Israel; give ear, house of the king”), Wolff argues that these representatives are to be viewed as distinct from the royal court and the priests. See also James Luther Mays, Hosea: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 80. The phrase “house of the king” as a reference to the royal house in Hosea 5:1 is also notable. 41. Of the thirty-nine references to the House of Judah, twenty-seven of these are found in the prophetic corpus: Isa. 22:21; 37:31; Jer. 3:18; 5:11; 11:10, 17; 12:14; 13:11; 31:27, 31; 33:14; 36:3; Ezek. 4:6; 8:17; 25:3, 8, 12; Hosea 1:7; 5:12, 14; Zeph. 2:7; Zech. 8:13, 15, 19; 10:3, 6; 12:4. The remaining references are found in the following locations: 2 Sam. 2:4, 7, 10–11; 1 Kgs. 12:21 (= 2 Chron. 11:1), 23; 2 Kgs. 19:30; Neh. 4:10; 1 Chron. 28:4; 2 Chron. 19:11; 22:10. In the historical texts, the House of Judah refers consistently to the Southern Kingdom.

20 INTRODUCTION

the House of X once, in the historical material. In Judg. 10:9, the Ammonites (bənê-ʿammôn) cross the Jordan to make war on Judah, Benjamin, and the “House of Ephraim.” In 2 Sam. 3:19, Abner helps to win over Israel for David by speaking with “Benjamin” (binyāmin̂ ) and informing David of the wishes of Israel and “all the House of Benjamin.” In these examples, the House of Ephraim and House of Benjamin are viewed as tribal groups that are separate from the polities of Judah and Israel. The consultation in 2 Sam. 3:19 is clearly political, related to a particular choice in leadership. As such, the House of X name acknowledges a political character to these groups, although these groups are not defined as kingdoms. The “House of Joseph” in Judg. 1:22, 23, and 35 is perhaps the clearest example in which the biblical House of X reflects an acting political body.42 The term “House of Joseph” most often categorizes the Northern Kingdom as a whole (e.g., Josh. 18:5; 2 Sam. 19:21; 1 Kgs. 11:28), comprised of Ephraim and Manasseh (Josh. 17:17). This particular genealogy suggests that the “House of Joseph” is based on the more common expression of the “sons of Joseph” (bənê-yôsep̄ ), which is defined, often quite literally, as Ephraim and Manasseh (e.g., Gen. 41:50–52; 48; Num. 1:10; 26:28; Josh. 14:4).43 However, the beginning of Judges depicts the House of Joseph as a

42. Although Judg. 1:22–36 is a later addition to the core Judges material, Sara Milstein argues persuasively that this “Joseph section” is to be separated from the “Judah introduction” in 1:1–21 (Milstein, “Expanding Ancient Narratives: Revision through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Texts” [PhD diss., New York University, 2010], 152–61). According to Fleming, this account of the House of Joseph laying claim to the political center of Israel, the area around Bethel, is part of a specifically “Joseph-oriented account” that potentially dates as late as the eighth century, as corroborated by the focus on Bethel in the books of Amos and Hosea (Legacy of Israel, 79). 43. Note Josh. 17:14–18, in which the “House of Joseph” is used as an alternate rendering of the “sons of Joseph,” the standard designation for the Northern Kingdom as represented by Ephraim and Manasseh. Joshua 17:1 refers to Manasseh as the “firstborn” (bəkôr) of Joseph. While the bənê yôsep̄ interact with Joshua as a collective people in vv. 14 and 16, v. 17 replaces this terminology with the unusual designation of the “House of Joseph.” This “house” could be a variant rendering of bənê yôsep̄ , as it is also comprised of Ephraim and Manasseh. However, while bənê yôsep̄ is a simple designation of the people themselves in vv. 14 and 16, “House of Joseph” in v. 17 is utilized for a more intentional, careful description of Ephraim and Manasseh (“Joshua said to the House of Joseph, [that is] to Ephraim and Manasseh”). Verse 17 is likely an editorial explanation, portraying the “House of Joseph” as an umbrella term for the tribal groups Ephraim and Manasseh. Indeed, 17:14–18 is not a cohesive unit; the sons of Joseph complain twice to Joshua that one portion is not enough land for them (vv. 14 and 16), and Joshua first denies the double portion (v. 15) and then affirms it (v. 17) in conflicting verses.

21 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

separate entity from other northern tribes, rather than the umbrella that contains them. This Joseph-focused section of Judges begins with the House of Joseph dispossessing Bethel (1:22–25). The remaining tribes follow suit, including Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan, yet these tribes fail to dispossess the inhabitants of the land (1:27–36). While these other tribes are characterized by singular verbal forms, the House of Joseph is further distinguished by the collective plural: “and the House of Joseph went up [wayyaʿălû] against Bethel . . . and the House of Joseph were scouting out [wayyātirû ̂] Bethel” (1:22–23). In this Judges example, the House of Joseph is portrayed not as a dynasty or a kingdom, but as a collective people.44 While it cannot be considered synonymous with the terminology of the “sons of Joseph,” comprised of Ephraim and Manasseh, the House of Joseph nonetheless functions as a small, acting political body alongside other tribal entities. This particular characterization of the House of Joseph may correspond to that of the House of David in 2 Sam. 3:1. Indeed, it is unclear from Judges whether “Joseph” refers to an actual person, a geographical area, or a tribal group. In the prophetic writings, the House of Joseph is once paired with the House of Judah (Zech. 10:6), thus equating Joseph with Israel, and once with the House of Jacob and House of Esau (Obad. 18), which potentially refers to both Judah and Israel through its primal ancestors, Jacob and Joseph. It is possible that David was also understood as a primal ancestor, the route taken in the lore regarding Joseph, rather than as a king. The concept of David as king may very well be historical, given the numerous stories about him in the David lore. Yet even with a real founding king, the political conception of a primal ancestor would have resonated in the same way for both David and Joseph. Indeed, where “X” in “House of X” equals a king, it may be equally important to understand this person as the founder of a people rather than as a dynasty. Thus the body politic is the “house” in question, and not

44. However, Jack Sasson argues that the House of Joseph in Judges 1 reflects a reigning dynasty and the land it rules (Judges 1–12: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 6D [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014], 164).

22 INTRODUCTION

necessarily the line of royal descendants. With the House of David, then, the name could originate in laying claim to founding a people or a polity, rather than a dynasty. Of the twenty-two examples of the “House of David” in the Bible (excluding three additional examples that denote the literal home of David), the majority equates this “house” with the Davidic dynasty in Jerusalem,45 while a few prophetic references substitute the “House of David” for “Judah” (e.g., Isa. 7:2, 13; Jer. 21:12).46 Yet while most references fit a clear Judah framework for understanding David, 2 Sam. 3:1; 15:16a; and 1 Kgs. 12:16,47 in particular, depict the House of David as a political body associated with David, yet distinct from a developed dynasty centered in Jerusalem. In chapters 4–6, I examine these references in the context of the development of the David story. Chapter 4 treats the rebellions of Absalom and Sheba against David in 2 Samuel 15–20, while chapter 5 explores the story of David’s rise over Israel in 2 Sam. 2:1–5:3. Chapter 6 then examines the birth of two kingdoms in 1 Kings 12, in particular the relationship between the House of David, Israel, and Judah.

History of Scholarship on Samuel-Kings

The long history of scholarship on the books of Samuel and Kings revolves around Martin Noth’s monumental idea, first published in 1943, of a single writer-editor in the exilic period, his “Deuteronomist.”48 This was revised most influentially by Frank Moore

45. These examples include: 1 Sam. 20:16; 1 Kgs. 12:19 [= 2 Chron. 10:19], 20, 26; 13:2; 2 Kgs. 17:21; 1 Chron. 17:24; 2 Chron. 8:11; 21:7; Zech 12:7, 10, 12; 13:1. First Samuel 20:16 refers to the House of David anachronistically before David even becomes king, which is a sign of editorial revision. 46. Psalm 122 is particularly interesting in describing the “thrones of judgment” parallel with the “thrones of the House of David.” 47. In 1 Kgs. 12:16, Israel officially breaks from David, stating that they have “no portion” or “inheritance” in Jesse’s son, and crying out: “To your tents, O Israel; and you, look to your own house, O David.” This exclamation is similar to that of 2 Sam. 20:1, which begins the revolt of Sheba, though the reference in 2 Sam. 20:1 is slightly reworded and lacks the reference to David’s house. See chapter 6. 48. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien: Die sammelnden und bearbeitenden Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (Darmstadt: Max Niemeyer, 1943). Most often, I use the translated work, The Deuteronomistic History, trans. J. A. Clines et al., JSOTSup 15 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981). For comprehensive overviews of the various literary-historical arguments on Samuel-Kings that develop from Noth’s theories, see the following: McCarter, I Samuel, 27–30; Iain Provan, Hezekiah

23 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

Cross, who divided Noth’s Deuteronomist in two, adding a second, exilic redactor and shifting Noth’s primary Deuteronomist to the time of Josiah.49 Though others before Cross had argued for two editions of the Deuteronomistic History (such as Julius Wellhausen in his Prolegomena,50 and John Gray in I & II Kings51), it was Cross’s ideas of the two main themes of the preexilic Deuteronomist—namely, the sin of Jeroboam and the faithfulness of David, as well as the exilic “subtheme” of the sins of Manasseh—that made his theories so attractive. Shortly before Cross, Rudolf Smend qualified Noth’s hypothesis by proposing that the Deuteronomist’s work was revised by a later exilic hand defined by a legal focus (DtrN or “Nomistic”).52 A Göttingen school emerged from Smend’s innovation, which further elaborated his theory by focusing on subdivisions of later, postexilic Deuteronomistic writing with legal or prophetic interests.53 Within the narrative itself, Leonhard Rost’s delineation of a pro-Solomonic “Succession Narrative”

and the Books of Kings: A Contribution to the Debate about the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 4–21; Steven L. McKenzie, The Trouble with Kings: The Composition of the Book of Kings in the Deuteronomistic History (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 1–19, 117–45; Gary Knoppers, Two Nations under God: The Deuteronomistic History of Solomon and the Dual Monarchies, vol. 1, The Reign of Solomon and the Rise of Jeroboam, HSM 52 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 1–56; Thomas Römer and Albert de Pury, “Deuteronomistic Historiography (DH): History of Research and Debated Issues,” in Israel Constructs its History, ed. Thomas Römer and Albert de Pury, JSOTSup 306 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 24–141; Römer, So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 14–43; and Hutton, Transjordanian Palimpsest. 49. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 274–89. 50. Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Enzies (1885; repr., Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 228–72; trans. of Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1883). 51. John Gray, I & II Kings: A Commentary, 2nd ed., OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970). 52. Rudolf Smend, “The Law and the Nations: A Contribution to Deuteronomistic Tradition History,” trans. Peter T. Daniels, in Reconsidering Israel and Judah: Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and J. Gordon McConville, trans. P. T. Daniels, SBTS 8 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 95–111; trans. of “Das Gesetz und die Völker: Ein Beitrag zur deuteronomistischen Redaktionsgeschichte,” in Probleme biblischer Theologie: Gerhard von Rad zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. W. Wolff (Munich: Kaiser, 1971), 494–509; see also Smend, Die Entstehung des Alten Testaments, 4th ed., TW 1 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978). Smend acknowledged that this idea had its roots in Alfred Jepsen’s theories (Die Quellen des Königsbuches [Halle: Niemeyer, 1953]). 53. Walter Dietrich and Timo Veijola exemplified this school by including a DtrP or “Prophetic” redaction into Smend’s scheme: Walter Dietrich, Prophetie und Geschichte: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk, FRLANT 108 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972); Timo Veijola, Die ewige Dynastie: David und die Entstehung seiner Dynastie nach der deuteronomistischen Darstellung (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1975); also Veijola, Das Königtum in der Beurteilung der deuteronomistischen Historiographie: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1977).

24 INTRODUCTION

(SN) in 2 Samuel 9–20 and 1 Kings 1–2 remains the point of reference for subsequent arguments regarding divisions in the narrative.54 Since these early influential theories, myriad new ideas have emerged regarding the composition of the books of Samuel-Kings, focused on questions of theme, dating, the number of systematic redactions involved in the production of the text, its textual limits and sense of unity, and the question of independent or pre-Deuteronomistic material. Maintaining that 1–2 Samuel contains sources as early as the tenth century, some past scholars have argued for a pre-Deuteronomistic “prophetic record” that extends from 1 Samuel 1 through 1 Kings 2 and includes the lore of 1 Sam. 16:14–2 Samuel 5 (the History of David’s Rise) and 2 Samuel 10–1 Kings 2 (Rost’s SN, sometimes said to begin as early as 2 Samuel 2).55 Recently, Jeremy Hutton has envisioned a series of independent sources created as early as the tenth century, including much of 2 Samuel 2–4 and 15–19.56 Among scholars who have disputed seeing sources as early as the tenth–ninth century, 2 Samuel 2–5 and 15–19 are still seen to be part of a similar, “earlier” stratum. Thomas

54. Rost, The Succession to the Throne of David, trans. Michael D. Rutter and David M. Gunn, HTIBS 1 (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1982); trans. of Die Überlieferung von der Thronnachfolge Davids, BWANT 42 [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1926]). According to Rost, the theme of succession is integral to the text and concludes in 1 Kings 1–2 with Solomon. Rost argues that the SN can be split into two sections: the “background to the successor” (2 Sam. 10–12, the story of Bathsheba), and “background to the succession,” which includes the following: 2 Sam. 6:16, 20–23 (Michal’s barrenness); 7:11b–16 (Yahweh’s promise that a son of David will succeed him on the throne); 9 (intro. to Mephibosheth); 13–14 (elimination of Amnon); 15–19 (Absalom’s revolt); and 20 (the unsuccessful revolt by Sheba). Other separate sources include the “Ark Narrative” (AN), the prophecy of Nathan (2 Sam. 7:1–7, 11b, 16, 18–21, 25, [26], 27–29), and “The Account of the Ammonite War” (10:1–11:1; 12:26–31). Rost argues that the AN dates to the time of David and is comprised of 1 Sam. 4:1b–18a, 19–21; 5:1–11b, 12; 6:1–3b, 4, 10–14, 16; 6:19–7:1; and 2 Sam. 6:1–15, 17–20a. According to Rost, the AN is connected to the SN via the Michal episode in 2 Samuel 6. See also Hutton’s detailed overview of Rost and subsequent theories in Transjordanian Palimpsest, esp. 176–201. 55. See McCarter, I Samuel; also Antony F. Campbell, Of Prophets and Kings: A Late Ninth-Century Document (1 Samuel 1–2 Kings 10), CBQMS 17 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1986). Provan rejects the idea of a “prophetic record,” while still allowing for an early Deuteronomistic source that includes the Succession Narrative and the History of David’s Rise (Hezekiah and the Books of Kings). Meanwhile, McKenzie follows Noth’s idea of a single Deuteronomistic editor, arguing that literary evidence for pre-Deuteronomistic sources is “highly questionable” (Trouble with Kings, 58–59). However, McKenzie does envision a collection of earlier sources that would include 2 Sam. 2:8–4:12; 9; 10–12; 13–20; 21:1–14; and 1 Kgs. 1–2 (McKenzie, “The So-Called Succession Narrative in the Deuteronomistic History,” in Die sogenannte Thronfolgegeschichte Davids: Neue Einsichten und Anfragen, ed. Albert de Pury and Thomas Römer [Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000], 123–35). 56. Hutton, Transjordanian Palimpsest, 366–68.

25 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

Römer, for example, includes these sections among his more reduced scheme of earlier sources. Yet he dates this material no earlier than the seventh century, based on the notion that the story of David as king of Israel must be created after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. These earlier sources include parts of 1 Sam. 1; 9:1–10:16; 11:1–15; 13–14; 16–27; 29; 31; and 2 Samuel 2–5.57 Walter Dietrich offers a notable exception in asserting the priority of 2 Samuel 15–19 over 2 Samuel 2–5. He finds the Succession Narrative to be among the earliest writing, close to the time of Solomon, while he dates the History of David’s Rise to the time of Hezekiah.58 Recent scholarship has attempted to organize the David material based on perceived understandings of the political development of Israel and Judah. The most recent German scholarship, including the studies of Reinhard Kratz and Alexander Fischer, has argued that the earliest material in the David narrative associates David with Judah alone.59 Kratz, in particular, regards what he refers to as the “Judahite court narratives” (2 Sam. 11:1–27; 12:24b; 13–14; 15:1–6, 13; 18:1–19:9a; 20:1–22 [1 Kings 1–2]) as the earliest writing in 2 Samuel, while 2 Samuel 2–5 was created as a later bridge between the early Israelite Saul narrative in 1 Samuel 1–14 (1:1–20; 9:1–10:16; 11:1–5; 13–14) and the court narratives. According to his scheme, the David-Absalom narrative contains some of the earliest material in the books of Samuel, focused on David as king of Judah. The basic pre-Deuteronomistic material in 2 Samuel 15–19 (15:1–6, 13; 18:1–19:9a; 20) thus predates the pre-Deuteronomistic (post-720) material in 2 Samuel 2–5. Kratz writes, “I see the main difficulty of these narratives in their presupposition that David was king over Israel and Judah, which could hardly have been said before there were two states, and that he operates in the region of the Benjaminite sons of Saul (Mahanaim), which clearly requires the literary connection with the prehistory in 2 Sam. 2–9.”60

57. Römer, So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 97. See also Johannes Klein’s helpful chart in his David versus Saul: Ein Beitrag zum Erzählsystem der Samuelbücher (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002), 135–38. 58. Walter Dietrich, Early Monarchy in Israel. 59. Kratz, Narrative Books; Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem; Fischer, “Flucht und Heimkehr Davids.” 60. Kratz, Narrative Books, 175. Note that this recent scholarship shares Römer’s post-720 dating of the narrative of David as king of Israel.

26 INTRODUCTION

Following Fischer and Kratz, Jacob Wright argues in his recent book that the earliest David material relates solely to David and Judah. According to Wright, this material has no connection to Saul, or to David’s rule over Israel; rather, it presents David as a “warlord who consolidates the kingdom of Judah.”61 Focused on the “History of David’s Reign/Rise,” the oldest David material would include the following sources: 1 Sam. 23:1–5, 13a, [14a]; 25:2–29, 31–42; 27:2–3a, [5–6], 7–11; 30:1b–2, 8–18a, 19–20, 26b–31; 2 Sam. 2:1–4a, 11; 3:2–5; 5:4, 6–11 (brackets denote the tentative inclusion of verses in his scheme). Wright spends little time with 2 Samuel, though he suggests that 2 Sam. 5:17b–25 could be included in his scheme, along with “several episodes” in 2 Samuel 6–9 and 10–12, and the information about David’s warriors in 2 Samuel 23. In contrast to 1–2 Samuel, which is generally considered to contain distinct source material that can be separated from later editorial writing, the question of independent or pre-Deuteronomistic material in 1–2 Kings is highly debated. Noth observes that while his Deuteronomist had access to a “comprehensive and coherent narrative tradition” for the books of Samuel, the history of Solomon and what follows in Kings was constructed from “diverse,” “disparate,” and “scattered” source material that is difficult to trace.62 McCarter agrees, and also writes that the “most striking aspect” of the Deuteronomistic redaction in Samuel is “its sparseness,” in comparison with the “rigid structure” of the Deuteronomistic writing in Kings.63 This is particularly notable in contrast to McCarter’s focus on a pre-

61. Wright, David, King of Israel, 35. 62. Noth, Deuteronomistic History, 91. In terms of Kings in particular, Van Seters denies any source documents and evidence of earlier traditions underlying the Deuteronomistic work (In Search of History, esp. 344–62). While McKenzie acknowledges that Van Seters’s views may be extreme, he agrees with the “artificial line” that scholars often draw between Dtr’s sources and Dtr’s own narrative, and states that there is no evidence of this source material within Dtr’s creation in Kings (Trouble with Kings, 147–48). For Römer, the first version of Kings was the Deuteronomist’s, constructed in the Neo-Assyrian period (So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 99). Kratz’s argument follows a similar logic in arguing that only a small portion of Kings contains core Deuteronomistic writing (DtrG) and dates post-720 BCE, while the majority reflects secondary Deuteronomistic revision (DtrS) in the exilic or postexilic period. However, Kratz also suggests that some of these secondary revisions or supplements include material that might be older than the Deuteronomistic framework (Narrative Books, 164–65). 63. McCarter, I Samuel, 15.

27 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

Deuteronomistic “prophetic record” in Samuel, taken up by such scholars as Antony Campbell and applied to Kings. Other scholars have argued for pre-Deuteronomistic editions of 1–2 Kings. Antony Campbell, in particular, builds upon the concept of a northern “prophetic record” as espoused by McCarter in relation to 1–2 Samuel, and extends it into the books of Kings. He argues for a single, ninth-century prophetic narrative that runs through 2 Kings 9. In Campbell’s system, the evidence for the prophetic record can be grouped into three different sets of texts: (1) texts associated with the anointing of Saul, David, and Jehu; (2) texts associated with the designation and/or rejection of Jeroboam, Ahab, and Jehu; and (3) texts pointing to interrelationships between the first two sets and to their links with the wider context of the intervening narrative.64 Overall, the books of Kings exhibit much more of a clear editorial framework than the books of Samuel. As such, the possibility of discernible independent or pre-Deuteronomistic material in the books of Kings is far less certain than in the books of Samuel.65

Phases of Literary Development

The biblical narrative in Samuel-Kings is a blended composite of earlier

64. Campbell, Of Prophets and Kings, esp. 17, 89n55, 185–97. Notably, Campbell’s prophetic record excludes 1 Kgs. 12:1–20, with the exception of v. 20a, which he connects to the prophetic story of Jeroboam at the end of 1 Kings 11. However, Campbell also proposes a pre-Dtr “southern document” that begins with Rehoboam and ends with Hezekiah, which he suggests would be aware of the prophetic record and its northern expansion and written as its counterpart. In 1 Kings 12, he sees these two documents existing side by side; v. 20a represents the prophetic record dealing with Jeroboam, while vv. 1–15a, 16, 18–19, and 20b represent this southern document. For a history of scholarship on the so-called prophetic record, see Campbell, Of Prophets and Kings, 2n3; also McKenzie, Trouble with Kings, 10–14; and Hutton, Transjordanian Palimpsest, 118–31. 65. The number of systematic redactions of the books of Kings has been a consistent focus of scholarship, including the possibility of multiple, preexilic Deuteronomistic redactions. For example, Helga Weippert argues that different judgment formulae against the kings of Israel and Judah point to a proto-Deuteronomistic text dating to the time of Hezekiah (“Die ‘deuteronomistischen’ Beurteilungen der Könige von Israel und Juda und das Problem der Redaktion der Königsbücher,” Bib 53 [1972]: 301–39). André Lemaire agrees with Weippert but posits multiple preexilic redactions (“Toward a Redactional History of the Book of Kings,” in Knoppers and McConville, Reconsidering Israel and Judah, 446–61). Provan himself rejects any pre- Deuteronomistic material and dates a preexilic Dtr layer to the time of Hezekiah rather than Josiah, with a second exilic redaction (Hezekiah and the Books of Kings), while McKenzie adheres to Noth’s idea of a single Deuteronomistic editor, which he places in the time of Josiah (Trouble with Kings).

28 INTRODUCTION materials and later, systematically added elements, in which possibly earlier versions are crucial for asking historical questions about the polities of Israel, Judah, and the House of David. It is therefore impossible to explore the David narrative without engaging in literary- and transmission-historical analysis. At the same time, to focus primarily on this type of analysis would weaken the historical basis for this study, and transform it solely into a literary history. Large- scale historical interpretations would be made to rest on choices about transmission history that had been fine-tuned to a degree beyond the major choices essential to broader historical analysis. The danger is that such transmission-historical arguments can become less and less convincing as they become more and more detailed, forcing precision where it cannot be had. My goal is to have the chronological and political categories that I select for transmission history match the categories that I hope to delineate for the broader, extratextual history, by marking the major changes of political formation and identity, and following the rough dates for when such changes may have occurred. In chapters 4–5, within the context of 2 Samuel 15–20 (chapter 4) and 2 Samuel 2–5 (chapter 5), I have therefore created a literary history focused specifically on major narrative changes that affect the process of historical reconstruction, rather than on the minor changes of each particular verse or literary unit. We might call this an “historian’s literary history.” The intention is to utilize literary history in a broad sense, distinguishing older, independent lore from a later process of organization by which the narratives are gradually linked to each other, reinterpreted politically, and given a logical structure as part of the David narrative. This approach to transmission history opens up the space for historical conclusions that emerge from the literary- historical process, setting aside as much as possible the need to outline each minor step in the process of textual transmission and revision. Throughout, I have engaged carefully with literary- and transmission- critical studies, clearly distinguishing my own interpretations of the major narrative changes from these approaches.

29 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

The approach that I have constructed recognizes two distinct, overarching phases in the transmission history that seriously affect the Bible’s political portrayals. In this, I have been inspired by what Luis Alonso Schökel distinguishes as “primary and secondary unity.” Schökel writes:

I must make a distinction between primary and secondary unity. A real artistic unity may be produced by different processes. It could be a chance event, as when different houses in a street have come together to form a beautiful and harmonious group of buildings. The opposite case is when the unity is planned beforehand: as with Pienza in Renaissance times or Brasilia in our own days. A later writer could take already completed pieces and bring them together skillfully to form a new and complex unity.66

Schökel’s work is focused on biblical poetry and poetic sensibility, and he is interested in the result, rather than in the processes by which these new phases of unity are created. Yet I find his conceptualization helpful in understanding how a text takes on a new sense of unity or coherence through its process of development. In terms of the House of David and the political landscape, changing social contexts for the process of writing and editing of the David material, such as the fall of the Northern Kingdom, can subtly shift our interpretation of the House of David into a “new and complex unity.” In this book, I propose two main phases of literary “unity” (to utilize Schökel’s language) in the writing of the David narrative. I define these phases not in terms of a final product, but rather in terms of the processes by which these coherent narratives are created: a primary and secondary phase (or process) of literary development. I will argue that the conceptual framework for the primary phase is the story of David as king of Israel, without consideration of Judah; in the secondary phase, the framework is David as king of Israel and Judah. Prior to both of these phases exist independent narratives or building blocks, stories that are self-contained and much more modest in their scale of interest. In the primary phase of literary development, this

66. Schökel, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics, SubBi 11 (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1988), 189.

30 INTRODUCTION

independent lore is organized, written or rewritten to some degree,67 arranged into chronological sense, and woven into a larger, systematic narrative of David as king of Israel. The central hypothesis behind this primary phase of development is that much of the process of composition, revision, and compilation of the David narrative is concerned with David as king of Israel and not king of Judah. Building from the evidence, in which core material about David in this phase of development is concerned with his rule of Israel from Jerusalem, his connection to Hebron and Mahanaim, and his affiliation with other sites in the central highlands and across the Jordan,68 the logical conclusion is that these stories were written from a Judahite perspective about an “Israel” inclusive of both Israel and Judah. Scholars such as Kratz, Fischer, and Wright would argue that this phase of development (which they consider later than the David and Judah lore) could have taken place only after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. These scholars maintain that Judah was never part of Israel, David was never king of Israel, and Judah would therefore only claim the identity of Israel after the fall of the northern monarchy.69 According to this hypothesis, the House of David could only ever be bound up with Judah and Jerusalem, based on the perception of a clear geographical and political separation between Judah and Israel during the time of David. Yet in considering the material in this way, scholars adapt the David story to their understanding of the relationship between Israel and Judah: David is king of Judah first, and of Israel

67. For a study on how these building blocks may have first come into written form, see David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Carr examines the interplay between orality and textuality in transmission history, writing, “Thus, the mind stood at the center of the often discussed oral-written interface. The focus was on inscribing a culture’s most precious traditions on the insides of people. Within this context, copies of texts served as solidified reference points for recitation and memorization of the tradition, demonstrations of mastery of the tradition, and gifts from the gods” (Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, 6). See also William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 60; quoted in Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, 6n9. 68. See chapters 4–5 on the Absalom material in 2 Sam. 15:1–16a and 18:1–19:9a, the Abner-Joab lore in 2 Sam. 2:12–32, and a series of independent accounts that include geography across the Jordan and in the central highlands of Israel in 2 Sam. 2:4b–9. 69. See Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem; Fischer, “Flucht und Heimkehr Davids”; Kratz, Narrative Books; and Wright, David, King of Israel. See also Kratz, “Israel als Staat und als Volk,” ZTK 97 (2000): 8–17; and Christoph Levin, “Das vorstaatliche Israel,” ZTK 97 (2000): 385–403.

31 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

never. This approach lacks literary sensitivity to the organization and contents of the narrative itself,70 including Judah’s absence, Israel’s dominance as a collective body politic, and the restricted geographical landscape that best represents Israel prior to the ninth-century northern expansion. In this book, I propose that the process by which the story of David as king of Israel was developed began during the existence of two kingdoms. H. G. M. Williamson has argued that the term “Israel” may have been used to describe both kingdoms prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom, based on certain texts that he dates to the eighth century.71 One example is Isa. 8:14, which for Williamson demonstrates close literary affinity with the messenger formula in Isa. 6:1–11 (written prior to 720 BCE), rather than with Isaiah 7. Isaiah 8:14 refers to the God who will be “a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over for the two Houses of Israel; a trap and a snare for those who dwell in Jerusalem.” This particular example could be preserved in a Jerusalem setting before the fall of the north, therefore suggesting that Judah understood itself to be bound up with Israel during the existence of two monarchies. The southern monarchy may have even preserved the name “Israel” for itself, thus laying claim to the identity of the kingdom that David had ruled. Based on this example from Isa. 8:14, Fleming has argued that prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom, both kingdoms may have envisioned themselves as part of the larger and more prestigious Northern Kingdom. According to Fleming, this could have been an attempt “to hitch Judah to the dominant northern power, based on nothing more than a desire to share that prestige.”72 If this was the

70. This approach also suggests that the majority of the David story is pure invention. If this is the case, then the writers of the David material fabricated a story that had no basis in reality, which would isolate them from their contemporary context and past traditions. See Gary Knoppers, who argues that the biblical writers did not work within a historical vacuum, and did not simply appeal to an imaginary future. Rather, they should be understood in their contemporary contexts and in the context of older traditions (I Chronicles 1–9, 470–71). See also Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel, 152. 71. H. G. M. Williamson, “Judah as Israel in Eighth-Century Prophecy,” in A God of Faithfulness: Essays in Honour of J. Gordon McConville on His 60th Birthday, ed. Jamie A. Grant, Alison Lo, and Gordon J. Wenham (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 81–95. See also the discussion in Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 47–51.

32 INTRODUCTION

case, then the claim that David ruled Israel could be part of a Judahite desire to preserve the story of the rightful ruler of Israel, during the existence of this more dominant northern power. This rightful ruler would be none other than Judah’s own David, and David’s royal house. If David were originally king of Israel, then it would be perfectly reasonable to see a Judahite interest in perpetuating this particular tradition, in the hopes that the House of David would once again rule Israel as well as Judah. In this study, I will also argue that during the time of the Judean monarchy, prior to the fall of Israel, Judah envisioned its own story, and the story of its founder, as the story of Israel. This does not imply that a “united” monarchy existed, but rather that Judah may have understood itself as having grown out of a larger configuration, a political body defined as Israel. This process of development likely continued after the Assyrian defeat of Israel and was preserved in the Southern Kingdom. Indeed, Fischer has argued for a pre- Deuteronomistic, pro-David, post-720 redaction of the David material in 2 Samuel 1–5, created with the goal of connecting the House of David with the House of Saul and providing a common history for Israel and Judah. According to Fischer, this would have been a compassionate reaction by Judah to the fall of the north, written to create a common identity for northern exiles.73 My own dating for a primary phase therefore partially overlaps with Fischer’s analysis. Yet it stretches his dates for the composition of the “Israel” sections of the David narrative earlier, potentially as early as the tenth century, depending on one’s convictions regarding the dates of early material in Samuel. I consider references to David’s “house” in 2 Sam. 15:16a and 1 Kgs. 12:16 as part of the building blocks of the narrative, and the “House of David” in 2 Sam. 3:1 as part of the primary phase of compilation and writing of the David narrative. In chapters 4–6, I will argue that the House of David is one way of defining David’s primary political identity when he is struggling to claim Israel. Notably, when David claims rule

72. Fleming, Legacy of Israel, 48. 73. Fischer, Von Hebron nach Jerusalem, 1–12, 49, 209–10, and 275. See chapter 5 for a more detailed examination of Fischer’s perspective.

33 THE HOUSE OF DAVID over Israel in 2 Samuel 5, the House of David as a political title for David is replaced by the title of king of Israel. David’s “house” appears again only when David’s rule is threatened in 2 Sam. 15:16a, and when David’s grandson loses control of Israel in 1 Kings 12. In 1 Kings 12, David’s “house’ is a people connected to Rehoboam, as viewed through the eyes of an Israelite people who reject his leadership. In none of these three attestations is the House of David identified with Judah, and in 1 Kings 12, Israel and Judah are clearly distinguished from the House of David and classified as separate polities. As such, the House of David seems to represent a transitional political title for David and his followers in the David narrative, distinct from both Judah and Israel. This proposal that the House of David is a separate polity from both Israel and Judah has important ramifications for understanding the House of David as connected with David’s southern rule, yet originally distinct from a developed Judean dynasty based in Jerusalem. Following the primary phase of development, the secondary phase consists of small yet crucial additions to the story of David as king of Israel, carving out a place for Judah and reframing the David story in terms of Judah alone. I argue that this secondary phase would occur by the time of the combination of Samuel-Kings, in which the Judah additions are part of the attempt to harmonize the David story with the narrative of two kingdoms. This would take place sometime after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, potentially as early as the late preexilic period. As such, this secondary phase would not occur until considerably later in the process of narrative composition, redaction, and revision. This hypothesis runs counter to that of Fischer and Kratz, who isolate the Judah material alone as the slim basis for an original historical connection to David. The preoccupation of this secondary phase would be to preserve the notion of Judah’s priority over David. As biblical books such as Kings demonstrate, the creation of a strong Judean identity by the time of the exilic period becomes a primary concern, likely permeating the task of those involved with the continued construction of the biblical tradition. At this point, Judah is the sole heir to the House of David in

34 INTRODUCTION

Jerusalem, and the construction of a Judean identity—what we might distinguish as political, religious, and social—is intrinsically linked with the promise that a son of David would once again rule from Jerusalem. Yet the desire to preserve Judah’s priority over David may not necessarily be confined to the exilic or postexilic periods, and other texts demonstrate that additions of Judah could occur prior to the exile. As one example, David M. Carr has argued for preexilic Judah additions to the Jacob-Joseph story in Genesis 49 that culminate with the proclamation in Gen. 49:10 that “the scepter will not leave Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,” and which precede what he refers to as the proto-Genesis composition.74 It is therefore possible that Judah additions in the books of Samuel would also take place in the late preexilic period.

Geography

The importance of geography in the creation of political identities is one final guiding principle for the following chapters. In his book The Political Landscape, Adam T. Smith examines the contribution of landscapes to the functioning of political authority in ancient societies. Defining “landscape” broadly to include the “physical contours of the created environment, the aesthetics of built form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representation,” Smith recognizes that landscapes are not fixed entities or backdrops to the social world; rather, they are created by and through the social world.75 As such, polities act through landscapes, intimately linked to the space and geography they create and inhabit. In terms of examining the makeup of ancient Syrian polities, the geographical landscape is therefore crucial. In chapters 1–3, I analyze how bīt X systems create their surrounding geography and function within their environment, in order to better understand the political composition of these systems. This political geography includes the

74. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 248–53. 75. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5.

35 THE HOUSE OF DAVID

number of towns attested for each polity, as well as the question of how integral a particular town or royal city is to the survival of each political system. This information will help to explain the range of influence of a given polity, and how decentralized or centralized we might imagine it to be. Geography plays an equally important role in understanding the House of David and David’s rule over Israel. Chapters 4–5 examine how the House of David and Israel are represented in physical space, particularly in terms of what David rules, and his sphere of political authority. This geography may have some continuity with the Tel Dan categories of Israel and the House of David, and with the topographical list on the tenth-century Sheshonq Relief.76 In 2 Samuel 2–5 and 15–20, the House of David and Israel are affiliated with Hebron, Mahanaim, and Jerusalem, sites that represent the south, the central highlands, and the Transjordan. All three sites are attested as central towns of David and his political “house,” while Mahanaim demonstrates a particular eastern interest tied up with David as king of Israel. This geography represents a distinct overlap with Saul’s sphere of influence, which similarly runs from Mahanaim to Gibeah, a stone’s throw from Jerusalem. Most importantly, the texts do not define Hebron or Jerusalem by their relationship with Judah, but rather by their relationship with Israel and the House of David.

Conclusion: David in History

Having examined evidence for the Syrian House of X and the biblical House of David, the conclusion of this book reorients back to historical questions raised at the outset of this introduction. In chapter 7, I bring the analysis from chapters 1–6 to bear upon extant written evidence concerning the Southern Kingdom, including the Tel Dan Inscription, the tenth-century campaign of Pharaoh Sheshonq, and the Assyrian evidence for Judah and Israel. Though I will not attempt to account for the entire archaeological discussion of settlement and political

76. See chapter 7 on the Sheshonq Relief.

36 INTRODUCTION formation in the south, this chapter also includes archaeological evidence for the Southern Kingdom as part of the larger historical conversation. Chapter 7 also explores some of the larger questions, including the limitations of the textual witnesses, as well as the relationship between history and archaeology. Since the late 1980s, early Israelite history has become almost exclusively the domain of archaeologists, partly in reaction to the use of the Bible as a historical source, and in part because archaeology seems to have the most secure evidence for the period. Yet as the only textual witness, the Bible continues to be utilized as a source for historical reconstructions, especially for names and dates that fill lacunae in the archaeological picture. As such, it is critical to continue to explore how we engage with the Bible and other textual evidence in historical reconstructions. In this study, I will argue for the construction of an integrative method that would not place undue weight on one form of evidence, but that would allow specialists with different types of evidence to participate in the historical discussion of the development of Israel and Judah. Among biblical scholars, those who participate in literary and transmission history may be best equipped to assess what biblical material might have the highest likelihood of reflecting the perspectives of a particular period, whether its origins are Israelite or Judahite, or written in the early preexilic or Persian period. The difficulty is that many of the literary-historical debates end there, without a larger view that takes into account historical questions pertaining to political and social developments in Israel and Judah. For those seriously involved in the process of literary and transmission history, the responsibility of dating and explaining each word within each verse can become an overwhelming task in itself, in which little room is left for further historical analysis. To the reader, these types of intricate analyses can also seem unrealistic and unfeasible, particularly when theories include more than two or three layers of perceptible literary development. This study is an exercise in utilizing two bodies of very different

37 THE HOUSE OF DAVID literary materials in the analysis of the political and social landscape in the early first millennium BCE. Regardless of the subjective nature of the evidence, it has been surprisingly refreshing to explore the Assyrian sources for the House of X systems in ancient Syria. Multiple texts attest to each polity, and all the sources were written close to the actual campaign dates. Working with the Bible has been a very different process, with its chronologically layered amalgamation of material, in which any “original” sources are often impossible to uncover or date securely. In creating an “historian’s literary history,” I have attempted to maintain a very careful balance in dealing with questions of literary history as they pertain to the larger historical questions. However, I fear that at times I have been overly broad in my transmission-historical analysis. This attempt to balance literary history and history is a clear area of continued personal exploration. In analyzing the development of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Bible cannot be isolated as the only source, as this study will hopefully demonstrate. Neither can archaeology. It is therefore my desire to continue to explore multidisciplinary ways of studying the history of ancient Israel, drawing upon various sources, as well as upon multiple methods and multiple sources of authority. In this endeavor, scholars of the ancient Near East, Aramean history, the Bible, and archaeology would all have a place at the table, crossing boundaries between fields in order to build a composite picture of material and textual witnesses to this ancient world.