In the Shadow of the House of Omri(1) (c. 1000-722)

Your elder sister is Samaria, who lived with her daughters to the north of you.
Ezekiel 16:46

Sometime in the Iron Age, Jerusalem was claimed as the capital of Judah, one of several small ethno-territorial states in Palestine and Transjordan that began to florish in the 9th century. Based on archeological evidence, settlement of the southern hill country and the urban recovery of Jerusalem occurred later than the lively settlement activity that characterizes the development of the northern hill country of the Israelites.

Aside from contemporary inscriptions and historical records from the states of the Levant and the adjacent regions, our main sources for this period are the biblical Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings (the so-called deuteronomistic work of history or “Dtr”)(2) and some of the prophetic oracles preserved in the prophetic books where, however, the sorting of the genuinely contemporary material from later additions is always a matter of debate. Despite the fact that the deuteronomistic historians prefaced their synchronistic account of the Israelite and Judahite kings with an idealizing account of the first united kingdom under David and Solomo, they did not completely obscure the fact that Jerusalem’s actual role in the early history of the Judahite kingdom was that of a mere vassal of Israel and Aram-Damascus to its north. On one occasion, the king of Israel tears down the city’s walls, and the royal temple treasury is repeatedly plundered (raising the question how the coffers came to be substantially refilled every time this happened). By necessity, then, our overview of the history of the second stage in the history of ancient Jerusalem finds the city eclipsed by its northern neighbors, Samaria and Damascus.

c. 1230            An Egyptian stela lists “Israel” (a people, not a city or state) among other places in Canaan that were destroyed in a military campaign. The sequence of places mentioned on the Merenptah (or Merneptah) stela is consistent with the assumption that this Israel was located in the northern central highlands of Canaan (centered around the biblical Shekhem, modern Nablus).

1150-1050       Archeological surveys show a significant increase in rural settlements (first small villages, then towns, of agro-pastoral character) in the highlands of central Canaan and the northern Transjordan, the heartlands of the later Israelite monarchy. The boundary marker between these concentrated settlements and other ethno-cultural centers such as the Philistine Pentapolis is the absence of pig bones. In biblical terms, this corresponds to what would have been the time of the judges.

c. 1050-930     Emergence of a new political order. In archeological (material cultural) terms: Iron Age I. Jerusalem: remains of a monumental gate and remains of administrative buildings near a natural ridge to the north of the City of David but no evidence of residential buildings. (Hotly debated among archeologists: is “absence of evidence evidence of absence?”)(3) The Iron Age I city of Jerusalem may have served as the fortress or capital of a newly founded, small state.(4)

According to biblical chronology, this would be the time of the kingdom of Saul and of the united monarchy under kings David and Solomon. Despite intense archeological work in and around Jerusalem, there is no undisputed evidence of such an entity for the time in question that corresponds to what one would expect on the basis of Scripture.(5) It is therefore widely assumed today that the stories about David and Solomon were greatly embellished by authors who lived at the time of king Josiah of Judah or later. At the time of Josiah (640-609; see below) the city of Jerusalem was the only remaining city of Judah (all others having been destroyed by Sennacherib in 701) and it was vastly larger and differently designed than the small fortress that would have been taken by David of Hebron. Josiah, who ruled over an expanding state when Assyrian power was at its nadir and the Babylonian armies had as yet to appear at the gates of Jerusalem, may have harbored the ambitious plans of uniting all the YHWHistic territories that had once been ruled by the Israelites with the territories of the Arameans of Damascus (a revenge fantasy engendered by decades of the reverse domination?) and perhaps to bring all of Canaan under the rule of the “House of David.” The Judahite historians of the time of Josiah may be said to have described a novel historical situation in the terms of a mere restoration of the status quo ante. This does not preclude that their narrative may include genuine memories of an earlier period.

In the early-Iron Age coastal and alluvial plains, new city-states are established, and many older ones are modestly resettled or used as (Egyptian?) fortifications. Based on the evidence of material culture, only one type of community is certain to have arrived from elsewhere, namely, the Philistines and other descendents of the Sea Peoples whose ceramic ware (the major basis for archeological determination) is distinct from that used by other communities. Other settlements seem the result of a confluence of regional migrations that lead to the establishment of numerous small, unfortified villages in the north-central hill country of Canaan. These communities may have included refugees from the destroyed or abandoned Bronze Age cities and sedentarized pastoralists from Trans-Jordan and Northern Arabia. Egyptian influence continues, but to a more limited extent. The Philistine Pentapolis (Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath) dominates the southern Levant, Phoenician port cities (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) dominate the north. Signs of a “democratization” of Canaanite societies (as compared to Bronze-Age palace-based society) are the spread of the Phoenician alphabet, which was easy to learn and execute, and iron smithing, which was technologically simpler than the production of bronze and based on regional ore rather than on the import of copper from Cyprus and tin from the Zagros Mountains.

In the northern central highlands and alluvial plains of Canaan, including the Jezreel valley, across the Jordan, in the Negev desert, and in the southern hill country: various ethno-linguistic communities forge areas of territorial dominance (“states”) around their respective tribal sanctuaries and market towns. This includes the Arameans of Damascus, the Israelites (Ephraim and Manasseh), the Ammonites and Moabites, the north-Arabian Edomites, Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and Midianites and, in the southern hill country, the Benjaminites and Judahites.