David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman Read Free Book Online

probably no more than a highland hamlet, with a modest palace a great deal more rustic than the ornate princely residences in the main lowlands cities. A modest temple may have stood next to it, perhaps surrounded by a few houses for the ruling elite, mainly the family of the regional chief. Certainly it was no more significant than this.
    The Amarna letters cover only a short period of time—a few decades in the fourteenth century BCE . Does the situation they describe apply to the centuries that followed, or was it an exception? If we look over the millennia of human settlement in this region, the same pattern emerges time after time. In the marginal southern highlands the proportion of herders and shepherds in the overall population was always significant. Towns and even settled villages were few in number, existing as isolated outposts in an ever-shifting landscape of herding and stock raising in the forests and throughout the desert fringe. Dynasties may have changed; a village may have been abandoned and a new one may have been established; but the general picture of the southern highlands remained that of a sparsely settled dimorphic chiefdom, ruled from one of its main villages as a loose kinship network of herders and villagers. These overall settlement patterns remained quite constant until the rise of the kingdom of Judah in the ninth century BCE , a full century after the time of David. These archaeological and anthropological observations can provide us with a reconstruction of the human landscape in his time—and perhaps an explanation of his rise to power as well.
    OUTLAWS AND KINGS
    The repeated appeals of Abdi-Heba for help from the Egyptian administration indicate that the political situation in the highlands was turbulent and unstable. With its difficult environment and low population, the highlands provided little agricultural surplus with which a ruler could recruit substantial armed forces or maintain more than a symbolic appearance of authority. Working from a small stronghold with a scribe at his side, Abdi-Heba could do little more than complain to the pharaoh about raids from the lowland city-states on his own already hard-pressed peasantry. And the threats were not only external. There is evidence that even within highland regimes like Abdi-Heba’s, economic and social pressures were building among the population. A potentially dangerous form of resistance to the established order was on the rise.
    The Amarna letters refer repeatedly to two groups that acted outside of the sedentary system of the Egyptian-controlled towns and villages. We have already mentioned the Shosu, the mobile communities of herders in the highlands and the steppe. The second group, mentioned more frequently, is more important for our discussion: the Apiru. This term, sometimes transliterated as Habiru, was once thought to be related to the term “Hebrews,” but the Egyptian texts make it clear that it does not refer to a specific ethnic group so much as a problematic socioeconomic class. The Apiru were uprooted peasants and herders who sometimes turned bandits, sometimes sold themselves as mercenaries to the highest bidder, and were in both cases a disruptive element in any attempt by either local rulers or the Egyptian administration to maintain the stability of their rule.
    In his dispatches to Egypt, Abdi-Heba—like many other contemporary Egyptian vassals—accuses his opponents of joining the Apiru, or giving their land to the Apiru, who were perceived as hostile to Egyptian interests. Many were probably uprooted peasants, displaced or escaping from the brutal feudal system in the towns and villages of the lowlands. There, the peasants formed the lowest level of the social hierarchy, subject to heavy taxation, forced labor, and harassment by the local authorities. Married peasants with families had little to do except try to survive on their land. But when the pressures built and desperation became widespread, young