Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, Gen. Rehavam Ze’evi (right) and Gen. Uzi Narkiss walk through the Old City of Jerusalem June 7, 1967 Photo: Ilan bruner / Israel Gov. Press
The Israelite Conquest of Jerusalem in the Bible: When and Who?
Jerusalem in the 14th century B.C.E. was a Canaanite city; by the 10th/9th century B.C.E. it was Israelite. The Bible records several different accounts of how it was conquered. What are we to make of these different traditions?
Published June 1, 2016
See, Philip P. King, “Jerusalem,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 3, (ed. David Noel Freedman; 6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992), 747–766 [751].
That the Goliath story is composite, and reflects multiple sources or redactions (or both), and may be very late, is well-known, but this is not the place for such an analysis. For a collection of papers on this question, arguing multiple sides of the issue, see, Dominique Barthélemy, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust, and Emanuel Tov, The Story of David and Goliath: Textual and Literary Criticism, Papers of a Joint Venture (Orbis biblicus et orientalis 73; Éditions Universitaires Fribourg, Suisse; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986). See also, A. Graeme Auld and Craig Y.S. Ho, “The Making of David and Goliath,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 17 (1992): 19-39; Alexander Rofé, “David Overcomes Goliath (1 Samuel 17),” Henoch 37.1 (2015): 66-100.
The kings of Hebron, Yarmut, Lachish, and Eglon.
Makedah, Livnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron and Devir.
In the early twentieth century, many scholars thought that the sources of the Torah (J, E, D, P) continued through Joshua. Although this idea is no longer popular with most scholars, there is general agreement that the book of Joshua is built out of multiple sources and underwent a long and complicated history. For a brief discussion, see Nili Wazana, “Introduction to Joshua” in The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition (NY: Oxford, 2014), 440. See also my reconstruction of the development of Joshua in, Zev I. Farber, Images of Joshua in the Bible and Their Reception (BZAW 457; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 86-140 (=ch. 2).
It is virtually impossible to read Judg 1 as a coherent whole; it is more akin to a collection of fragmentary traditions included in what was once an addendum to the book of Joshua but became a preface to the book of Judges, which really doesn’t begin until Judg 2:11. For more on this, see Farber, Images of Joshua, 76-80; Marc Zvi Brettler, “A Conclusion that Became an Introduction,” in The Book of Judges (Old Testament Readings; London: Routledge, 2002), 92–102 (=ch. 7).
It is unclear when in the Judges period this story was supposed to have occurred; considering the appearance of Pinchas, it seems that it is supposed to have occurred early in this period.
Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Book of Judges: Literature as Politics,” JBL 108.3 (1989): 395-418 [412-415]. The polemical aspects of this story (pro-David anti-Saul) have been further explored in: Sara J. Milstein, “Saul the Levite and His Concubine: The “Allusive” Nature Judges 19,” VT 66 (2016): 95-116; Yairah Amit, “The Saul Polemic in the Persian Period,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 647-661.
It may be that בית דוד was even an alternative name for Jerusalem. In general, capital cities in the ANE were named after their “founders,” and thus the reference to the king of ביתדוד (the house of David) in the Tel Dan Inscription may mean “king of Jerusalem.” See discussion in, George Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and a New Interpretation (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 225-226. Alternatively, it could simply be a synonym for Judah or “the Judahites,” as it appears to be in the (reconstructed text) of the Mesha inscription (ln. 31).
For more on Benjamin in these periods, see, for example, Nadav Na’aman, “Saul, Benjamin and the Emergence of ‘Biblical Israel’,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 121 (2009), pp. 211-224, 335-349; Philip Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel (LHBOTS, 485; New York/London: T & T Clark, 2007).
EA 285-290. The Amarna letters are a collection of letters from Levantine kings to the Pharaoh and back, written in Akkadian cuneiform, the international language of the time. They were found in Amarna, which served as the capital city of Pharaoh Akhenaten (late 14th cent). For an English translation of the letters, see, William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
