The Throne of David

This paper traces which royal families of Eurasia bear these tribal and family names of Judah, and whether a connection to Israel or Israelites can be established in each case.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016

Leonard-Fleckman compares the "house of..." terminology tin the ninth-century Tel Dan inscription with early first-millennium usage for Syrian (Aramaean) polities in Neo-Assyrian and inscriptional evidence, and examines the "House of David" in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. She argues that the "House of David" was a small body politic around David, but distinct from any Judean dynastic context. The equation of Judah with a later southern kingdom resulted from the redactional creation of a Davidic coterie.

Journal of Asian Evangelical Theology 24, 2020

This article is part of my ongoing project aimed at reading 1 and 2 Samuel as a unified work focusing on politics. My project reflects a recent trend in biblical scholarship, spearheaded by Yoram Hazony, of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, to read the Old Testament as primarily a work of philosophy rather than a religious document. Making an argument very similar to my own are Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes in their recent book, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel. Their close exegesis of the lives of Saul and David provides abundant insights that are applicable “wherever and whenever political power is at stake.” In this paper I build on Halbertal and Holmes’s work while adding a comparative element, discussing similarities between 1 and 2 Samuel and a medieval Chinese novel, The Three Kingdoms.

This book is a study of the texts referring or alluding to the dynastic promise to David in the books of Samuel and Kings (and the "Law of the King" in Deut 17,14-20). Attention is paid to the textual problems of some of the studied passages, especially 2 Sam 7 which has different meanings in the most important textual witnesses (MT, LXXB, LXXL, 1 Chr 17MT, 1 Chr 17LXX). Although the most ancient retrievable text of 2 Sam 7 is not to be identified with MT, this text form corresponds to the original basic meaning of the chapter. Special attention is given to the value of 1 Chr 17 for the reconstruction of the oldest text of 2 Sam 7. There are many "synonymous" differences between 2 Sam 7 and 1 Chr 17, which cannot be explained as resulting from "mistakes" or "tendentious" (e.g. ideologically motivated) changes in one of the two traditions. A statistic study of the patterns of agreements among the witnesses leads to the conclusion that evaluating these differences "case by case" would lead to arbitrary decisions; the great majority of these differences are a result of the Chronicler's relatively free approach to his source. The emergence of 2 Sam 7,1-17 may be construed in two historical contexts. In the "exilic" period, the purpose of the dynastic promise being linked to the polemic against the traditional significance of the temple in royal ideology might be to preserve-or to establish-the validity of the promise after the fall of the temple. Alternatively, 2 Sam 7,1-17 might have been written at the time after Zerubbabel (at the end of the 6th / beginning of the 5th c.?), during the period when the temple of Jerusalem was restored, but the Davidides could not derive their legitimacy from it, since the cult and the temple were understood as the domain of priests under the auspices of Persian rule. The author of 2 Sam 7,1-17 may also be thought to be responsible for 1 Sam 10,8 + 13,7b-15a and 1 Sam 25, the texts that primarily emphasize, in accordance with 2 Sam 7,14-15, the unconditional nature of the dynastic promise once it is given. In the books of Kings, 1 Kgs 2,24.33.45; 1 Kgs 11,29-38*; 15,4; 2 Kgs 8,19 could be ascribed to this hand as well. All these texts could have been written in both the Neo-Babylonian and Persian period, similarly to 2 Sam 7,1-17. However, some other references to the dynastic promise in Samuel (1 Sam 2,27-36; 2 Sam 7,18-29; 22,51; 23,1-7) cannot be dated to the Neo-Babylonian period (or even the very beginning of the Persian period). Theoretically, these texts could belong to the same redactional layer as 2 Sam 7,1-17, but only in case we adopt the later one of the two suggested dates of its origin. In contrast, if the earlier date is accepted for the first group of texts, the second group must have been added later (in one or several stages). At any rate, whereas all these texts may be regarded as a defense of actual political interests of the ex-royal family in the exilic and/or post-exilic period, this does not hold for 1 Kgs 2,4; 8,25; 9,4-5 where the power of the Davidic kings is explicitly conditional upon the eternal loyalty of David's descendants to Yhwh. These passages cannot be ascribed to the same author(s) as the other references to the dynastic promise in Samuel-Kings; on the other hand, this redaction in Kings was perhaps not driven by actual anti-Davidic political interests, representing rather an attempt to explain the unfulfillment of the dynastic promise. Following W. Oswald (and building on the work of S. McKenzie), we ascribe the oracles against the founders of the dynasties (or, in the case of Ahab, the dynasty's other "prominent" member) ruling in northern Israel and the related fulfillment notices (

Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2003

Bill Clinton was not the only comeback kid of the 1990s. King David enjoyed a remarkable revival as well. In 1993 he, or rather his name, made an unexpected reappearance with the discovery of the famous``House of David''inscription at Tel Dan, the earliest reference to ...

The David and Solomon's kingdoms are no longer considered as historical by minimalist archeologists. According to Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, for example, authors of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, at the time of the kingdoms of David and Solomon, Jerusalem was populated by only a few hundred residents or less, which is insufficient for an empire stretching from the Euphrates to Eilath. They suggest that due to religious prejudice, the authors of the Bible suppressed the achievements of the Omrides. Some Biblical minimalists like Thomas L. Thompson go further, arguing that Jerusalem became a city and capable of being a state capital only in the mid-seventh century. Likewise, Finkelstein and others consider the claimed size of Solomon's temple implausible. A review of methods and arguments used by these minimalists shows that they are impostors for writing history. The historical testimonies dated by a chronology anchored on absolute dates (backbone of history) are replaced by archaeological remains dated by carbon-14 (backbone of myths). The goal of these unfounded claims is clearly the charring of biblical accounts. https://www.lulu.com/shop/gerard-gertoux/kings-david-and-solomon-chronological-historical-and-archaeological-evidence/paperback/product-1r86w6my.html

The Character of David in Judaism, Christianity and Islam Warrior, Poet, Prophet and King, eds. M. Zawanowska, M. Wilk, pp. 19–40, 2021

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. chapter 1 David in History and in the Hebrew Bible Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò David, next to Moses, is one of the most studied biblical characters.1 The problem is, however, that this important figure has no clear extra-biblical reference, which makes reconstructing the historical David and his kingdom a difficult, if not an impossible, task. A short paper such as this cannot exhaustively examine scholarly literature on David, nor every mention of the son of Jesse in biblical literature. Therefore, this article's objective is solely to review extra-biblical sources, as well as selected biblical traditions related to this figure, to see whether at all, and if so, to what extent, they can be considered reliable historical sources, and on this basis to offer some general observations on the historical David.