Who Was King David?, Transcript

Who Was King David? - Centre Place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcBnok1c-m8

Transcript:

(00:00) picture that I have picked here Michelangelo's David um sculpted the beginning of the 16th century that's probably not the most famous statue in the world certainly one of the most famous statues in the world depicting the biblical character David well when he was a Shepherd boy holding a sling slingshot as he's getting ready to slay the Giant Goliath so even though we are in a world with say ever decreasing biblical literacy so it would have been a time in the anglo-american world anyway uh 200 years

(00:46) ago let's say or even 100 years ago when people would have known uh Bible stories a lot more Bible stories and a lot more thoroughly than what they know today but I'd suggest that they David and Goliath story for example still is pretty well known even so in addition to that um Michelangelo's David there are actually several other famous artwork of David including Donatello's earlier statue David this one is as opposed to when he's about to slay Goliath with a sling this is after he's already cut Goliath's head off with

(01:24) a sword um anyway in addition to being the uh inspiration for famous artwork the story of David and Goliath a young Shepherd boy who kills a giant armored Warrior using just his sling that remains in common parlance in our language anyway as an archetype so whenever the little guy is taking on a giant metaphorically say so um you know if you're fighting big Pharma or something like that that sort of story is referred to as a David and Goliath story but even though David is known for this and this is like I say still fairly famous even with decreasing biblical

(02:14) literacy David is known for more than that so David is also known as the king of Jerusalem so the biblical David went on after being that Shepherd boy to killing the Giants Larry went on to become a king and he's known anyway in the Bible as the first Israelite to establish Jerusalem as his capital um the Bible then subsequently judges all subsequent Kings of Judah and Israel against David's example so he's held up as the first the model not the first king but the model for kingship uh in the Bible as a result of David um settling in Jerusalem conquering it from

(03:02) the jebusites of Canaanite people and making it his Capital the oldest part of the city the area that is now just south of what has become the Temple mount that section of the city historically has been called the city of David and indeed the whole city of Jerusalem is sort of called the city of David by extension but that particular part of it because that was the part that existed in David's time the Bible also portrays David as king of both the Southern Highlands area of the Holy Land uh the Southern Highlands area being Judah the kingdom of Judah and also the

(03:49) king of the middle and Northern Highlands area the kingdom um the Northern Kingdom of Israel in a kingdom that is essentially a kingdom that unites the 12 tribes of Israel so he's king of Judah and Israel a United Kingdom according to the biblical narrative in addition to that the Bible sees him conquering his many neighbors and establishing an Empire and so that map based not on archeology or extra Biblical history but based on the Bible often has made its way into atlases and so this map for example was in the Hammond World Atlas that I

(04:36) had as a kid it was from the 60s but I was growing up in the 70s and so that would be one of the maps that I poured over as a kid you know it's from the historical section actually in this case the biblical section of a regular secular historical Atlas at the time there are other famous stories about David as once he's a king for example there is the story of David and Bathsheba so Bathsheba is originally the wife of David's loyal Soldier Uriah the hittite while Uriah and David's troops are away fighting a war David's enemies David from his Palace in Jerusalem looks out

(05:21) across to a neighboring house and sees Bathsheba bathing on a roof he lusts after her and sends for her has an affair with her with with or without her consent it doesn't say she becomes pregnant and so then David is concerned that this affair is going to be discovered as a result of that and so he sends for Uriah and hasn't come back uh wants him to have a take a leave so that he can also sleep with his own wife and so therefore mask the fact that David has gotten her pregnant but Uriah being such a loyal Soldier while his cohorts while the rest of the troops are in the field

(06:07) he refuses to um you know take that kind of a leave and so therefore he sleeps at the king's door guarding the King's house as opposed to doing that so David's plan is foiled as a result of that David writes a note it's one of these wonderful literary things where you give the note uh then you want the person to be killed right and you like like rosencan Guildenstern you put the note that you send with the messenger and so um he sends it with uh Uriah back to the front lines where the general is told put Uriah in the very front of the fighting and then once he is totally in

(06:46) uh surrounded by um the enemy then pull back so that he'll be killed and so that happens uh it's an egregious abuse of authority on the part of the king and so it's a pretty amazing um uh story in the Bible David is also famous as the author of Psalms so um in art David is frequently pictured with a harp he's known from the narrative as being a um a liar player or harpist so if it was not enough for one biblical character to be known for he a number of poems in the Book of Psalms are attributed to David

(07:32) who is thus remembered as a poet musician so in the Middle Ages and medieval Europe King David was thus a model for Royal patronage of of Troubadours so courtiers who played music and wrote poetry and things like that this uh style that became invented in uh the landshad oak the southern middle and southern France in the courts of the of the Dukes of Aquitaine Eleanor of aquitaine's ancestors and herself and her descendants even like Richard the lionhearted her son they patronized poets who um wrote stories that were courtly stories that are meant to entertain you know

(08:24) other nights and courtiers and things like that and are telling things like essentially the invention of things like chivalry and courtly romance courtly love and so on and so uh as a a model of that and indeed a model for kingship in generally David was remembered anyway at that time as what what the people in the middle age is called the nine worthies um these exemplars from the past who were models of chivalry how a king or a chivalrous Knight are supposed to behave uh there's more so another archetype that David is known for among gay men a

(09:09) special especially is you know throughout time so maybe it hasn't been as important to non-gaymen but anyway the relationship between David and Jonathan Jonathan being the son of King Saul David's predecessor as King has been a Biblical precedent for same-sex love so in the book of Samuel we read the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as himself then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself and that went both ways because when Jonathan was later killed in battle

(09:48) alongside his father David sings a famous lament part of which goes I am distressed for you my brother Jonathan you have been a close friend to me your love for me was more wonderful than the love of women how the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war have perished and that continues to be a a well-known phrase anyway how the mighty have fallen but you can see how that's anyway an ex archetype anyway for uh male friendship and love for Christians uh David is also kind of important as uh the ancestor of Jesus

(10:32) and so because of biblical predictions Old Testament or Hebrew Bible predictions that a new anointed one Messiah is the Hebrew word for that and that's usually meant to refer to priests or but also especially kings that a new anointed one a new Messiah would arise out of the Fallen Royal House of David so the House of David when the kingdom of Judah when Jerusalem was destroyed the uh the princes of the House of David were taken into Exile by the Babylonians into Babel where they assimilated into Babylonian culture and so uh one of the

(11:17) last princes that we hear over the last Prince that we hear of of the House of David his name is zerubbabel which is a Babylonian word or name which means it means like son of Babylon or something like that but anyway something like that but anyway it's a shows how fast they assimilated he is allowed when the Persians conquer the Babylonians he and others are allowed to go back to Jerusalem rebuild the Temple and so forth but soon thereafter zerubbabel falls out of the biblical narrative so presumably at some point or rather a Persian

(11:55) Emperor decided it's too much to have a davidic governor you know because it gives maybe the judahites the judeans the Jews too much um thought that maybe they need to rebel and not be under Persian rule anymore and so at some point or rather um he was gotten rid of quietly and thereafter Jerusalem is ruled as a Persian Province under Persian officials Jewish Persian officials who hold the high priesthood so under priests as opposed to davidic uh kings in the House of David is lost nevertheless because

(12:33) Christians saw Jesus that Jesus needed to be a descendant of David both the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and Luke each independently created genealogies where they connect David I'm sorry Jesus you know by his parents and all the way back to David and and these genealogies are contradictory to each other and also have no historical basis they're the creations of those authors so and last another thing here anyway about David David is possibly the first historically attested character in The Bible so David may be

(13:22) the first biblical character whose historicity is attested by a non-biblical source so we have an inscription on What's called the tell Dan Staley just to say the rock that's from the hill or tell of Dan which is where the city of Dan would have been at the very Northern limits or Frontier of the Northern Kingdom of Israel Samaria at the center place of what where there had been the tribe of Dan's Northern Outpost there's an inscription in an Aramaic the language of the aramaians and the later later adopted as

(14:00) the uh Hebrew or the Judean language in the in the second temple period but in Aramaic by the king of Aram Damascus so Aram or Damascus it's around Damascus this was another important local uh Kingdom at the time so the in addition to Judah and Israel there were the other surrounding kingdoms Moab Edom and then Aram Damascus is one of the big important ones and so at a certain point the king of Aram between 870 and 750.

(14:40) made this inscription which refers to something called the bait doad you know those letters are there which is usually you know like bait or Beth is uh you know is like house in Aramaic here and daudu dawood or whatever it looks like David so it's usually interpreted as a House of David and so um it does seem to be a reference or it's often anyway considered by a lot of Scholars anyway to be a reference to David by somebody who's not which is anyway but not the Bible by another source all right so that brings us then like I

(15:17) say to the question today uh who was David both biblically and also though historically so um we one of the questions we want to ask with this presentation tonight is does the bible begin to transition from Mythic to Historic with the stories of David um to evaluate this claim or Theory we're going to survey both the biblical narratives about David we'll also look at the texts the Psalms that are attributed to David and we're also going to look at what archeology and then also all of the Contemporary extra biblical historical evidence tells us about

(15:58) Israel and Judah in David's era and that should get us to our answers so we'll start here with the book of Psalms and David since these are theoretically potentially written by David so the book of Psalms is a compilation of hymns or sacred songs Psalms which are individually composed over several centuries so some of these are late and they're composed in what we call the post-exilic period so after that period of time I just mentioned where the Babylonians have taken the Nobles and the davidic Kings and so forth to into Exile in Babylon and the Persians have let them

(16:46) come back and so in other words the post-exilic period 5th Century BCE or later but many of them were written before the destruction of the kingdom of Judah um in other words prior to its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BCE so um this is a period of time especially in the Century in the lead-up to that destruction when lots and lots of literary outpouring is happening and a bunch of the Psalms come from that time period and they do seem to be focused on davidic kingship they're focused on Jerusalem they're focused on the Jerusalem Temple they're focused on maybe ritual things that are said in the

(17:36) court of the of the kings in Jerusalem and so forth and in the temple so 73 or about half of the Psalms are attributed not quite half to to David so this attribution happens in the headings go out here real quick so the headings say like on this one here Psalm 23 a Psalm of David um that also though could be translated not only a Psalm of David it could also be translated from the Hebrew of Psalm 2 or 4 David so it could be one just even composed for David or to David even so in any event whatever it exactly means all of these headings it turns out are

(18:27) actually late additions to the text and so they are not um original uh with with whoever if David was writing them in writes of David or something like that that doesn't exist rather they're probably representing at best the tradition or guesswork of later editors who are operating you know centuries after when David would have lived and so um you know without any kind of historical knowledge to confirm that kind of an attribution and indeed Scholars today really reject davidic authorship for any of the Psalms there's no

(19:04) um there's no strong connect ways to connect any of these to an actual historical David um it's very natural um ultimately why would they why does the bible calls these Psalms of David why why have they been attributed to him so um it's very natural when you have Anonymous ancient texts for them to attract famous attributors so so because Solomon for example is famous for his wisdom there's a lot of wisdom literature including the books of Proverbs The Book of Ecclesiastes the much later apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon

(19:43) all of those books are attributed to Solomon and even claim uh very carefully I mean and very directly not not just in a in an added title or anything like that they claimed in some cases to be written by him even though none of those books is written by Solomon likewise it's only natural since the biblical narrative talks about David playing a harp and being being a singer psalmist and so forth that later editors would attribute Psalms to David even though those are not written by him so we get past then books that are

(20:24) attributed to David we also now want to look at the source for the biblical narrative about David so the narrative for David forms the central component of what we sometimes call the deuteronomistic histories so these are the books of Joshua Judges first and second Samuel first and second Kings um so it's all kind of one one school it's usually thought of as being a a school of thought a school of writing books that have a similar theme and Theology and they also seem to be attached to the same kind of

(21:06) thinking as the books of Deuteronomy which is one of the five books of the Torah or pentateuch and also the book of The Prophet Jeremiah so Jeremiah is a prophetic writer who is living at the very end of the independence of the kingdom of Judah at the time of King Josiah and later and ultimately after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians Jeremiah goes into Exile in Egypt and continues to be active for a while in the Exile period and so forth so so Jeremiah and and this overall School of this history is maybe coming out of or it may be edited more

(21:52) afterwards but anyways maybe coming from that kind of late time period in terms of the last blossoming of the independence of Judah as a as a kingdom before the destruction of Jerusalem um one thing about this Theology and this school of thought is um it is has a very specific um narrative goal and so the deuteronomist is interested in um in promoting uh Yahweh only worship so you are not to worship any other gods but the god of Israel Yahweh Jehovah and also in centralizing that worship so that that worship can be conducted in

(22:42) only one one place legitimately which is the temple site in Jerusalem and on top of that by casting this all in history and back into history um the deuteronomist has a theological belief in terms of as a solution to the problem of evil that suffering is happening when people disobey that so in other words God has covenanted with Israel and if you do that and don't start worshiping after other gods the gods of the moabites and the Philistines and and asherah and all of the other you know pagan gods then then God is

(23:27) going to maintain you in the land forever but if you do succumb to that kind of Temptation that's when you're going to get punished and so the the texts of those books very deliberately are cast to kind of show that and it's able to work a lot better in the very early in Mythic stories of judges and things like that where everything is on a Mythic scale of a generation of 40 years and you can have a set due to a deuteronomistic cycle where the um the people prosper in the land they forget Yahweh they start worshiping other gods as a result of that God sends the Philistines

(24:13) to come and punish them and chastise them that after after they've been um been oppressed by the Philistines they remember God they pray to God God sends a judge like Samson or somebody like that to cast off the Philistines the people people remember God and so forth that's the um narrative perspective of the determistic history okay so Joshua and judges Joshua picks up where Deuteronomy ends so the end of the pentateuch the end of the Torah with the death of Moses at the end of The Exodus story and as his chosen successor Joshua leads

(24:56) the Israelites into the land of Canaan as conquerors the Book of Judges then goes on to describe the tribes of Israel living in the land of Canaan among the Canaanites and the others other neighbors but operating without Kings in other words led by tribal judges in that sequence that I was talking about so people like Gideon or Samson the middle part of this Samuel Samuel is a transitional figure the very last judge also a great prophet who also anoints Israel's first King Saul so in other words he's the end of the

(25:39) judges and the beginning of this period of Kings Saul initially prospers But ultimately disobeys God and so again in the Deuter Mystic cycle when you disobey then God strikes you down and punishes you or whatever so God instructs Samuel um we're going to do a do-over we're getting rid of Saul we're going to replace him with David uh David then kills Goliath he becomes a mercenary leader while Saul is King and he then becomes king reigning only after Saul's death and then finally in the books of Kings they record David's death and the reign

(26:18) of his son and successor the famous King Solomon the wise who builds the temple in Jerusalem and then after Solomon's death the remainder of the text tells the story of the division of the United Kingdom of Saul and David and Solomon it's division into two very unequal Parts the Kingdom of Israel which is the much bigger more prosperous kingdom coast of 10 10 Northern tribes which has ultimately destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BCE uh and then the Lesser smaller poor Kingdom of Judah one one lone tribe um centered though retaining the capital

(27:03) if not the name Israel according to this idea that the United Israel Kingdom Under David retaining the capital Jerusalem but more or less nothing else uh and ultimately destroyed by Babylon the Babylonians in 587. okay so let's look at the biblical narrative about David so before David as I say the tribes of Israel have been ruled by judges this has not been very successful actually as the way it's described in the Book of Judges and all the tribes of Israel at this point simply demand from Samuel the last judge um to end this thing we don't want to

(27:47) have rules by judges anymore you're an old man Samuel and by the way your sons are not following in your footsteps we can't have any more more judges now they say a point unto us a king to judge us like all the other nations everybody's got Kings nowadays we want King too a king too and Samuel actually has a big caution against Kings and so he says if you're gonna have a king the king is going to uh he's going to tax you and he's going to steal all your sons to make them soldiers for his War he's going to steal your daughters to make

(28:21) them his concubines and so forth and so this is not going to be a great uh thing but okay if you want it we'll go ahead and so um Samuel chooses Saul Saul is from uh The Tribe of Benjamin so it's the tribe that's in between Judah and all the other Northern tribes whose qualifications according to the Bible are one he is the most handsome Israelite there's nobody handsomer than Saul according to the book of Samuel and two he is taller than anybody else he's a whole head taller than anybody so obviously when you have a king you want them to be super tall and I say that as

(28:59) a 6'4 guy anyway but there's always been that as a as a characteristic in terms of anyway bias so those are Saul's qualities initially Saul proves to be a very successful King both he and his son Jonathan are victorious in battles against the ammonites the Philistines the amalekites all of the enemies of Israel the tribes of Israel um however um again the the theme of the deuteronomistic history is uh you have to obey and do everything and one of the things that you need to do is exterminate all of the neighbors and uh and Peep non-israelites in the land and

(29:42) in addition to that you have to also you got to kill everybody and everything you can't just keep um you can't keep their daughters as as concubines or their livestock and so forth because if you marry um women with these different Customs that's going to introduce paganism into Israelite religion according to again the deuteronomistic history and so Saul fails to kill the king of the amalekites and also allows that guy to keep most of his I mean they keep most of his valuable livestock and so forth instead of killing it and destroying it and so

(30:19) God tells Samuel I I regret that I made Saul King you got to go rebuke him and we're gonna we're gonna pick somebody else now so while Saul is still reigning as king you know so even though God has withdrawn um his favor from Saul uh um so still the king though Samuel nevertheless then seeks out a replacement and he anoints David who's the youngest son a judahite Shepherd boy son of Jesse again his qualities are he said to be really handsome in appearance although presumably not as tall as Saul and has beautiful eyes they say so anyway they're picking picking uh Kings

(31:09) by a male Beauty contests in the story here without knowing uh what Samuel has done in terms of anointing this young man to supplant him Saul who is looking for someone to be a Harper in his court to play the harp uh he um he has since God has left him God has been sending quote an evil spirit to him that has been causing him to be disturbed and so forth but when um when somebody plays a harp around him that soothes him and so Saul invites David to join his court both as a harp player and also as his his armor Bearer so a court position

(31:56) for the young man so while um David is in that position the Philistine Army once again invades and challenges to single the Israelites to a single combat between Champions and this is a a really interesting kind of story which almost seems to be where Homer's Iliad breaks in on the Bible and it's almost you have a crossover here where uh you know like the in a universe where suddenly um Superman is is meeting the X-Men or something like that in other words between DC and Marvel in this kind of case um uh Goliath is almost their Champion

(32:42) Goliath of gath is pretty much almost described as wearing um you know Greek armor in the in the form of a uh Hellenistic or not Hellenistic a Greek warrior and he's almost got the same kind of um boasting hubris of a homeric hero and so forth so anyway that's what they want to do they want to have a single combat between the two armies between the Philistine Champion Goliath of gath and anybody on the Israelite side who will do it but nobody on the Israel side is is prepared to fight a giant because

(33:17) this guy is is huge and so forth and so ultimately only David this kid accepts the challenge despite his Youth and size that's all it's like uh this is how is this going to work out he gives David his armor but Dave is like I've never trained with us I don't know how to use this and so he leaves the armor and the big sword and instead he um picks stones from the brook and with his his sling that he uses to defend uh his sheep from wolves as a Shepherd boy he uses that sling in order to slay the Giant and obviously the point of the story is that it's only because of God's favor right so there's the reason why

(34:02) um such an unequal match shows that God is on the side of the little guy in the case of David and Goliath's story so from this time after David defeats Goliath David and Saul's son Jonathan become soul mates and they fight a lot of wars together and David's reputation as a warrior grows in the course of this next period David also marries one of Saul's daughters Michael um and and so therefore he's entering you know more closely associated with the Royal Family now becomes the king's son-in-law and meanwhile though because um you know David is this now famous warrior and giant killer and so forth

(34:55) um uh a lot of popular a lot a lot of popularity and people are comparing him very favorably um David's perspective with Saul unfavorable from Saul's perspective so Saul becomes extremely jealous of David and we keep hearing that an evil spirit from God rushes on him so God is also intervening by sending evil spirits to Saul and while that happens he twice tries to kill David unsuccessfully he takes a spear while David's there playing harp and almost Spears him and so forth uh and so that David survives that but in any event

(35:35) um things are not going well uh in terms of between David and his father-in-law so fleeing now from Saul's Court the next phase of the biblical narrative David becomes kind of the leader of a band of young mercenary Warriors David's young men on a number of Adventures he's often aided by Jonathan so while he successfully is evading Saul and doing all kinds of adventure stories and so forth David twice has Saul in his power so Saul doesn't know he's there but he's looking for David and David could kill him if he wanted to but Saul I'm sorry but David declines to kill his

(36:18) father-in-law despite the fact that you know Saul is trying to kill him and so and so it's showing uh the animosity is one-sided and that David is you know more noble and that kind of a thing and so um these are almost like um the kind of stories that you have like about like a Robin Hood Stories you know so it's a band of these you know Mary Warriors who are not the king that who are you know having to um in this case fleeve you know like not from Prince John but from King Saul and so forth so the Mary band of uh David's young men

(36:55) that narrative continues when the Philistines uh until when the Philistines kill Saul and most of Saul's Sons including Jonathan at the end of the book of First Samuel so David now becomes king of Judah but Saul has another surviving son named ish a chef who is initially anointed king of Israel the larger northern kingdom before ishpashrath is betrayed and killed by his own servants and so so the book is sort of at pains to not make the Civil War have been like David be a usurper but rather the house of Saul self-destructs and David ends up you

(37:41) know being King because of he had already been anointed by Samuel and so forth as king so David now you enter your phase of David as king and indeed a a young competent successful King so David conquers Jerusalem from one of the indigenous peoples the jebusites that are there and decides to make it his new capital he transfers the Ark of the Covenant which has been Central to The Exodus story this is the place where the tablets of the law that Moses has are kept and it has also been sort of like a it's like a little

(38:27) it's not like a cart but anyway it's like a little uh wheelless cart that they carry around this is um we were just in Seville where they're about to have these big celebrations where they're going to take the the all of the major statues from all the big churches and everybody's got like a little a little sedan chair for them and you get like 20 guys and you carry it around and so forth and this is a uh it's like a symbol and a totem of God being with you and so forth and these were used it was also used in battle so you you kind of have that as a as a sign that you

(39:03) know God is marching into battle with you and so forth so David is going to transfer that Arc from a town in Israel called ball Judah and he plans to build a permanent Temple for it to house it in Jerusalem God however indicates to him that the the actual building of the temple is going to have to be left to David's son nevertheless because of what a anyway a great guy or all around David has proved to be as in contrast to Saul God decides to establish a covenant with him the davidic Covenant and I'm going to read it in a fairly long quote here

(39:43) just so we can get a sense of it because this is really Central to the entire idea of the deuteronomic history how the davidic Covenant so God says I myself took you from the pasture from following the Sheep to be the leader Over My People Israel and I have been with you wherever you have gone and have eliminated all of your enemies from you I will also make a great name for you like the names of the Great men who are on the Earth and I will establish a place for My People Israel and will plant them so

(40:20) that they may live in their own place and not be disturbed again nor will malicious people oppress them anymore as previously even from the day that I appointed judges Over My People Israel so God's like okay yeah I get it I mean that was nobody liked the judge's period so and I will give you rest from all your enemies the Lord also declares to you that the Lord will make a house for you and when your days are finished and you lie down with your fathers I will raise up your descendant after you so Solomon who will

(40:50) come from you and he will establish his kingdom and he shall build a house for my name the temple and I will establish the Throne of his kingdom forever I will be father to him and he will be a son to me and when he does wrong I will discipline him with the rod of men and with Strokes of Sons of mankind but my favor shall not depart from him as I took it away from Saul whom I removed for you from you your house and your kingdom shall endure before me forever your throne shall be established forever so this is a um unlimited unconditional unlimited

(41:34) Covenant that God establishes with David that says his house the House of David is going to continue to be on the throne of Jerusalem forever and there will not you know not going to be is not going to be replaced or ended like happened with Saul so uh David then in the story goes on to defeat all of Israel's enemy conquer his neighbors and so forth so the tone of the story shifts once again beginning with the egregious abuse of power in the story of Bathsheba which I already recounted from there The Narrative pulls pretty directly into courtly narratives you

(42:15) think that Bathsheba story was maybe going to be the low point but actually it uh goes down further from there so second Samuel continues to focus on stories of courtly Intrigue as an aging and increasingly weak King David Falls prey to the politics of his many competing wives and their sons and so this would have been you know a very common theme in a uh you know Middle Eastern Court when you have uh when you practice polygamy so in the when there's practice of of having you know multiple uh wives and Sons this is

(42:53) something that continued on for example even into the court of the Ottomans were very famously um when the ottoman uh Sultan and Khalif when he um emperor of the Autumn of Constantinople when he get when he dies um one son has to kind of emerge fairly quickly out of the Harem and be the one that is going to be the successor and he has to kill all of his brothers otherwise any one of them that escapes can kill him you know and so it is a um it can be kind of a brutal uh succession thing there's lots of you not only just have like um

(43:29) when you have monogamy and uh and primagenitor and so forth you know maybe have an error and a spare as Prince Harry calls himself but you or in the in the capetian sense they almost always more or less only produced one son they were really good at that the French King so that helped France to build itself up from weakness in the Middle Ages to being a very powerful Kingdom by the early modern period in this case you pretty much have to kill all your brothers in order in order to keep this kind of thing going and that happens a lot in the in this um these stories of

(44:06) Court Intrigue in the books of Samuel and Kings so David's son amnon um there's a story next he lusts after his half-sister Tamar and he connives for example to have his father he says he plays sick and he wants his his father David to send Tamar to him to you know just give him medicine and so forth and once um once she comes and is in his bedroom and so forth he rapes her so David is ultimately aware of amnon's crime and he's angry about it but he he really does nothing about it so he's ceasing to be a font of Justice um so amnon is

(44:49) you know the son of David by one of the wives Tamar is a daughter of David by a different wife and that by that same wife she has a full brother Absalom and Absalom then you know is having been having had his sister Dishonored by his half-brother their Mutual half-brother decides that he's got to avenge her and so he also you know tricks his dad in descending amnon off with him to a shearing festival and when he's drunk uh he kills amnon and so forth and so while um David Grieves for amnon he doesn't

(45:26) punish Absalom and so he lets Absalon flee and then he later lets him return to court Without Really any consequences for the murder so again um aging David David is weak and he is not a font of justice and so the court is spiraling out of control while this is happening then Absalom kind of sets himself up as a rival King in Hebron so Hebron had been the capital of Judah according to the biblical account before the capital moved to Jerusalem and now he just kind of has his own Court he's acting like he's the king and his popularity grows such that

(46:01) people you know they can read the writing on the wall they see that Absalom is going to be the king so people's loyalty switch to him and that actually ultimately forces David to flee his own Capital flee Jerusalem Absalom takes the capital and uh with the advice of his advisors who um you know want him to complete being complete the Takeover he actually sleeps with all of his father's concubines uh you know causing that another level of Dishonor so that you know it's never going to you know David can't be brought back

(46:36) they can't be reconciled and so forth Civil War ensues and yet David is still impotently constantly telling his generals deal gently with Absalom for my sake don't you know don't hurt the you know this young man you know this Rebel who's trying to destroy him in all these different ways and so it's only um you know an Absalom uh dies when his hair is again beautiful more handsome and beautiful than any um uh Israelites and as long flowing hair and it gets caught in the branches of an oak tree and so then uh his servants kill him against David's orders since David

(47:15) even though he's fighting for his life and his kingdom and everything like that in theory um is is so I don't know he's he loves his son so much that he can't fight him so despite all of the actions that Absalom has taken then David just you know very emotionally Mourns his son uh which you know allows Court Intrigue to continue so there's just more and more of these kind of uh courtly Intrigue stories as David becomes too aged to lead troops against the Philistines and so forth ultimately emits the chaos David's favorite wife Bathsheba

(47:53) of that same Bathsheba and Uriah the hittite story is able to convince David uh having made it made an alliance with uh one of the prophets to name her son Solomon as David's heir and then one of David's other sons adonaiha who has kind of already been kind of taking kingship again just like Absalom had been doing um when David dies Solomon successfully executes his half-brother and actually others too in order to secure the throne so like I say it's a pretty sad end for David's Reign this um kind of story of this Valiant young Shepherd boy who trusted

(48:41) God so much and you know is able to destroy killed the Goliath ends in this very um weak impotent way as his entire house is killing and raping each other and so forth so this is a rich story but also an embarrassing story and so when um modern historiography got going when historians were first uh looking at the text like this early historians sort of argued on the basis of criteria like the Criterion of embarrassment that it made the story of David David's historicity kind of likely because they asked themselves why on

(49:21) Earth would biblical authors tell such an embarrassing story if they were simply myth-making if you were making a myth about your founder why wouldn't you write um why wouldn't you write a story that he's all perfect and indeed we can even have an example of that myth making because we have this story of David that I've just talked about from the deuteronomistic history so Joshua Judges Samuel Samuel Kings and Kings but there's also two books of Chronicles that are written much later in the post-exile period where a writer

(49:58) essentially is taking the deuteronomistic history as their source and they're continuously cleaning it up so they're taking all the embarrassing stuff and just eliminating it which is what you know a person would maybe want to do if you have embarrassing episodes in your history and so forth and so Chronicles kind of in my opinion doesn't really have almost any historical benefit at all except for to show you know how people would want to clean up the history if they could you know and so forth um anyway nevertheless even though uh this story is weird and and we we people

(50:34) question why you would make it up if uh if it weren't history um archeology has now pretty clearly demonstrated that the idea of a United Kingdom of Israel and Judah together under Saul and David and Solomon is a myth so that never occurred there never was um one combined Kingdom of Judah and Israel ruled from Jerusalem the way the biblical narrative tells it and so then that undermines the the main you know component of the historicity what the story is kind of trying to tell and so let's look at that so when people first started doing

(51:20) archeology of the Holy Land um you know archeology initially kind of grows out of um tomb robbers and and adventurers who like like uh who are reading The Iliad and wanting to dig up Troy and so forth and find um find artifacts and things like that uh and so it it's only only took at a certain point does it actually um get to its level of Cur its current level of sophistication and so forth so working initially from the premise that the biblical accounts were largely historic many even all through the mid

(51:59) 20th century archaeologists erroneously identified certain sites as solomonic and so they would go to cities like megiddo and hazor and Giza or gazer and they would say um well megiddo has got to be one of these uh major Frontier um uh cities outposts of Solomon's powerful this powerful King Solomon's Reign and they go when they find uh a big big tell that they excavate and it has a big Royal complex with stables and it has a big type of gate and so forth and uh and because they've again they have assumed that Solomon's kingdom is historic they've gone to a place in the

(52:49) Kingdom which they've found a a building or a city complex which they then identify as solomonic and then they say the fact that there's a solomonic site here um confirms that Solomon is actually historic so that's circular you know circular reasoning right none of those none of the sites um have an inscription that mentions Solomon or anything like that so it was only simply how do we interpret what the site is that's one of the issues always with archeology as opposed to history history we have all this text but we

(53:24) don't know uh if it happened or not you know you know and we just know that people wrote about it what people wrote and we have to think of when they were writing it and we have to read into their biases and so forth with archeology we've got all this stuff but you know it doesn't necessarily say who made it or what it was so there's been a lot though more recent work from archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein who have identified all of these previously thought of as being solomonic sites centers as the work of the amride dynasty these Kings of

(54:02) Israel the northern kingdom Samaria Israel that are not um not based in Jerusalem not not part of this Mythic United Kingdom but rather the northern kingdom one of the other clinchers for this is not only that all of those sites um have uh architecture and and and everything else that mirrors the uh capital of the northern kingdom Samaria and so forth the supposed capital of David's United Kingdom Jerusalem remained a really tiny village that did not grow in importance until after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 BCE so in other

(54:49) words this time period centuries earlier when supposedly David and Solomon are ruling an entire Empire they're doing it from this crappy Little Village it doesn't make any sense you know there's you would have to um you would have a capital that would where you would bring in you know all the supplies that you'd need in an Iron Age Kingdom all of the uh The Chariot places for your your uh you know Chariot teams your Stables all these kinds of things as you would uh have to control produce and everything else doesn't exist for Jerusalem uh at the time period for David and Solomon to be ruling you know

(55:26) by contrast the amrade dynasty of the north built a very substantial New Capital at Samaria and those forms like I say mirror the construction previously thought to be solomonic at megiddo and so forth um it's not just the archeology I mean there's lots of archaeological studies I mean to show again the northern kingdom had earlier Economic Development it was much more densely settled there was really only a handful of villages that the southern that Judah was even ruling and some less developed and so forth but also then there's

(56:01) all of the extra biblical historical record tells the same story so the relative importance of the northern kingdom is really confirmed in everywhere of Israel's neighbors that we have uh records and Stella's inscriptions and so forth so for example the Assyrians um like to write a lot of propaganda about all the different people that they conquer all the time or where they say they're going to conquer or that they fought and so forth and so there's a 9th century BCE Assyrian Stella that states that the omrid king Ahab of Israel um you know he defeated him in battle is

(56:38) what they like to claim but anyway he but but they do is they also say is that Ahab was part of a coalition of local you know West Syrian leaders including the king of Aram Damascus and so forth a lot of these other uh little Iron Age Kingdoms at the same time as Israel is around um and the CH and and essentially the king of Kingdom of Israel Ahab is actually providing the most uh chariots and and troops and so forth as part of this anti-assyrian military coalition and likewise um other neighbors like the kings of Moab refer in their uh inscriptions and

(57:23) Stella to the house of Omri uh referred to Israel and the amrides as opposed to referring to Judah and the House of David or Israel as led by the house of David under David or anything like that that doesn't exist so um the house of Omri and the biblical narrative so that is also Omri is also character in The Bible the biblical narrative does acknowledge uh the house of Omri as rulers of the northern kingdom you know and so in the northern kingdom in the narrative is called Israel and the biblical narrative actually does acknowledge that the northern kingdom is really much larger than Judah consisting

(58:07) of ten tribes to judah's One Tribe so the only thing that um it's a weird it's a weird thing in the narrative from the um the the Mythic United Kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon ruled from Jerusalem the southern Kingdom doesn't even get to keep the name they just keep one tribe Judah and the capital which is actually just a little village and it is not big enough to be the capital and the northern kingdom keeps the name you know the all the major centers and everything like that it doesn't really

(58:41) make a lot of sense in terms of the how the narrative works so instead though in the narrative Omri his son Ahab it's a fairly famous Wicked king ahab's sidonian or Phoenician wife Jezebel so Jezebel is an even more famous Wicked Queen um so you can just even think in their sons Isaiah and uh ahazi I mean and johoram so these are all viewed as just terrible villains through the deuteronomistic perspective of the Bible of this portion of the Bible so again why because they're viewed as being Rebels against the right rifle House of

(59:23) David and and also as setting up places of worship that are Rivals to Jerusalem and ultimately also of worshiping Gods other than just Yahweh the god of Israel so the danger is if you as as the king of Israel Ahab and you were growing and expanding your influence and so forth if you make an alliance with the Phoenicians a very neighbor Neighbors who are closely related actually to Israelites and everything like that who speaker related language and have almost the same alphabet and all this kind of thing um and you enter Mary and then as a result of that your your wife Jezebel

(1:00:08) um but as well is going to bring her God bail you know to your your new city of Samaria right and that will be and that's the danger um according to the deuteronomistic perspective of uh promoting Yahweh only worship so that is therefore from the biblical perspective the dramistic perspective that that wickedness is ultimately the cause of Israel's fall and because it's actually written from that perspective when Israel has already fallen they're able to show that cause and effect retrospectively um so this is just another one of these Assyrian Stellas that's really neat

(1:00:50) where we have a guy jehu you know one of the um Kings of the northern kingdom jehu of the land of the people of Omri as the inscription says bows before the Assyrian King shamanes are the third so jehu was forced to pay tribute uh according to this Stella in 841 BCE and so not um little what is it a little over a century later uh Israel you know stopped just taking I'm sorry a serious stop just taking tribute and just conquers Israel altogether and when they do that as we talked about in our lost 12 tribes lecture a month or so ago takes the

(1:01:29) Kings and also a bunch of the Nobles uh and relocates them pulls them back to uh the Assyrian Heartland and the area kind of Northeastern Iraq and so forth and as part of a Syrian policy brings other people and and moves them aramaians and so forth and moves them into Samaria so here's kind of a map of how that goes once the Assyrians have not only conquered and absorbed Israel which is now ruled directly but has also defeated even Egypt and Judah and all the neighbors and so forth had made them client kingdoms which is to say kingdoms that are still independent to an extent

(1:02:16) but they have to pay tribute to the Assyrian Empire and so you can see at a certain point Assyria is dominant and controls the entire Middle East as the first really great Empire and so the time period when Judah actually we see archaeologically as we see also for Jerusalem the time period when Judah actually Rises is after Israel's fall so although biblical Maps tend to emphasize the independence of the kingdom of Judah pretty much from the destruction of Israel by Assyria Judah becomes a client Kingdom of Assyria which means it's it's technically has some Independence but it has to pay a

(1:03:03) lot of tribute at different times it's in a state of rebellion um where they're not paying the tribute and the Earth syrians are maybe trying to Simply punish them and maybe destroy them and take them over and incorporate them as a province altogether but it remains a a client Kingdom um as a client Kingdom though it actually prospers a lot because Syria has a very um huge economic uh let's say trade zone which is now connecting Judah to international trade and is also allowing because it has got its own kind of Independence what had been Samaria and these other conquered provinces where

(1:03:47) there's a lot of heavy Taxation and so on a lot of people have fled in Exile and relocated to Jerusalem which now does develop as an urban center So within the sphere economic sphere of Assyria Judah prospers in the 7th Century BC and now that's when we see Jerusalem actually develops as an urban center as the davidic Kings welcome Exiles from the destroyed Northern Kingdom of Israel Samaria so it turns out that this building phase in Jerusalem also corresponds to literary output that's often something that happens so

(1:04:29) substantial Construction in Jerusalem as a royal Center corresponds with remarkable output of literature including all these biblical Source texts like the sources in the deuteronomistic history so therefore the deuteronomistic history does not date to the era of David but it instead is being written in the period after the fall of Israel Samaria and so and inspect kind of late into that so when the davidic Kings Hezekiah Manasseh and especially Josiah are reigning uh in Josiah at the end of the 7th Century BC e and then even Beyond in

(1:05:14) the last uh weaker Kings as the kingdom is on a path to fall prey to Conquest from Babylon so this is time to maybe I've talked about dates so many so much here and I thought well let's bring in a let's bring in a timeline and try to uh work this out a little bit so we can see these times that we're talking about and so I'm taking a timeline here from 1200 to 400 before the Common Era um we have at the beginning of that period that Bronze Age collapse so this is this time when the hit the earlier Empires

(1:05:57) you know the Mycenaeans the Minoans the Hittites uh those kind of Empires uh the Mycenaeans and the Minoans and the head types of you know fall the Egyptians uh have to fight off um the sea peoples and so Egypt continues to survive but in weakened form and this is also the moment when the Philistines come and invade Canaan and become established in the in the plane uh next to the Hill Country of Judah and so and establish the Philistine sites the Philistines may have originally been sea peoples they may have originally um maybe they were originally Mycenaeans even but by the time and that's maybe

(1:06:44) why they have like Greek armor in the case of like Goliath and things like that although maybe not so it's by the time we get to um the time period when the Bible is actually written however they've lost their language so so they have assimilated and they are speaking a local Canaanite language which is just like Israelite and everything like that so it's part of these kinds of language then we have on here I have this grayed out area which is when the let's say mythical United monarchy of Saul and David and Solomon would have been set so this is early behind between sort of

(1:07:23) the year 1010 BCE to maybe the 9 30s so the 10th Century BCE um so this doesn't correspond to actual historical reality however there is an actual event that happens at this point which is kind of a Revival of Egypt where the Pharaoh Shawshank the first invades Canaan and which is to say the area of Judah and Israel and phenicia and the Philistines and so forth and so one of the things that happens when the Egyptians do that is they destroy the um the Canaanite city-states in the lower areas which as one of the things that allows Israel and Judah in the highlands to develop and

(1:08:17) specifically Israel so the Kingdom of Israel Samaria and so we have on here then Omri who is the real kind of founder of that Kingdom of Israel as opposed to the Mythic founders of Dave and Solomon and so forth and that Kingdom in its existence until it's destroyed by the Assyrians then we can see the ongoing Kingdom of Judah which now develops under Hezekiah and later Josiah until we see there when the Babylonians you know the Babylonian Empires is also encroaching uh the Neko the Pharaoh kills Josiah um I have on there a listing then in Josiah's time maybe as when uh

(1:09:07) Deuteronomy 1 the deuteronomous won the first draft of the general Mystic history is maybe composed and then during the Exile period the Babylonian captivity that's maybe when the second draft of the deuteronomistic history is compiled and then later in the Persian period with Ezra that's maybe when the Bible as we start to have it is mostly like the Torah and so forth is mostly all composed and edited into its into its final form so much later obviously than this time period when David and Solomon would have been around and and indeed you can even see if the deuteronomistic

(1:09:50) history is written at the time of Josiah which is which is like essentially the earliest it could have been written this is already so many centuries after when David and Solomon would have been around that there's really no the memory really can't be preserved for that kind of a time and that's why that history actually as always with text it refers especially and it no the historians or the writers know about their own time and anything that they have from the past from before that is garbled memory that is um

(1:10:22) that is always uh viewed with an anachronistic lens of their own time and specifically the the powerful lens that it is uh distorted through is this idea of Yahweh only religion and a davidic covenant which is which they are seeing at the present for King Josiah and maybe Hezekiah even as early as Hezekiah but they push back into all of history way past into the past when it did not occur so let's look at those kings a little closely because this really is the period of time uh this is maybe the earliest and then hezekiah's successors when any of these texts of the Bible could have been being

(1:11:07) written so Hezekiah is the king of Judah soon after the fall of Israel to Assyria and he's the one then who's welcoming Northern Exiles to his growing court at Jerusalem so he's forced to pay tribute as a um client King of the Assyrians but he also Rebels and holds out against an Assyrian Invasion so all of the rest of the kingdom of Judah is kind of you know you know destroyed by Assyrian forces but he successfully weathers a Siege which shows that Judah is now on the rise if they can actually hold out against this vast Empire and so forth Hezekiah also

(1:11:48) there's a turning point in the biblical narrative and Hezekiah is remembered for really pushing manolatry which is to say Yahweh only worship and specifically removing all of the idols to other and cult forms from other gods to the from the temple which the deuteronomistic history says Solomon put there and also destroying rival worship centers the various high places within the kingdom of Judah and he does other things like for example destroying the staff of Moses so this had been a an important object which in the Torah Moses holds up in it

(1:12:31) you know in order to cure people and so forth this has become the center of a um what apparently viewed as a pagan Pagan worship by Hezekiah and all of those actions are celebrated by the deuteronomous this is what the deuteronomistic history wants you to do they want you to be like Hezekiah and destroy all of these Pagan things to worship only Yahweh and uh uh and so forth nevertheless hezekiah's son Manasseh reversed almost all of these reforms so between 697 and 643 his reign of 55 years he rebuilt all of the high places

(1:13:10) He restored the idols of Ashura and Baal to the temple He restored the cult to the temple prostitutes and so forth to Jerusalem he even revived the Canaanite practice of child sacrifice to moloch so this is all these kind of things that the deuteronomistic historian of the Bible is not like and thus Manasseh is you know terrible terrible King and yet here's the problem the way the deuteronomistic history works is what happens when you do all of those things when you forget Yahweh when you start worshiping all the other gods when you

(1:13:49) restore the the Pagan temples and things like that you're supposed to get smitten but Manasseh ends up having a an entire long successful reign of peaceful rain and so forth and so this doesn't happen and it's hard-pressed for the deuteronomous to even explain why that should be because when they are writing the story and making a Literary story that's not how it works so when you're telling um you know the story again in in the Book of Judges written in the in the time long long ago when we're saying Once Upon a Time your story always ends with when you do these bad things God smites

(1:14:28) you in this case when it's contemporary when when this is the time period when they are actually writing these things and living it out it turns out when you do all those things you don't get Smit and so it is a it becomes a test of faith in that sense for um uh the reformers nevertheless uh when manasse's grandson Josiah as a child is put on the throne uh his advisors are all the monolatrists in other words the hezekian kinds of reformers they regain power and so in Josiah's name uh the court again destroys all the high places all the Rival centers of worship they cleanse the temple again they cast out all the

(1:15:11) different idols and uh Temple prostitutes and so forth and they even under Josiah go north so the kingdom of Judah expands just a little bit and enters into the traditional territory that had been part of the Kingdom of Israel Samaria the shrine at Bethel the house of the Lord this is the place where the northern hero and patriarch Israel Jacob you know met with God and this is also the place where the one of the places where the northern Kings established a special Shrine to uh where they were which was a center of worship at the house of the

(1:15:54) Lord with a uh which is with one of the one of those golden idol Bulls right and so Josiah troops attacked that they seize that place and um uh destroy the shrine and indeed burn human bones on the altar to totally desecrate it forever to get rid of this rival Shrine you are only going to worship now at Jerusalem and you know kind of amazingly interestingly Josiah is the only King within the entire deuteronomistic history which is predicted you know way ahead of time and so um the book itself there's a prophet who two or three hundred years earlier

(1:16:42) predicts that a king one day named Josiah is going to destroy the shrine at Bethel and burn human flesh on it and so forth burn human bones on it and so forth which is what he does right and so how does that prediction how is that prediction so accurate it's because now we're seeing when the due to domestic history is actually being written in the time of Josiah and we also have a description of how the Scribe priest hilkaya finds a book of the law which is speculated by many scholars to be the book of Deuteronomy or possibly

(1:17:19) the book of Deuteronomy plus the first draft of the deuteronomistic history uh and so they say here hey look Josiah look what we found we found now a literary book that is justifying um all of our program of Yahweh only worship and so forth so no king is as honored by the deuteronomist other than David then Josiah which is one of the arguments one is also used in favor of the argument that maybe this first draft of the deuteronomistic history is composed during Josiah's reign is the only king that's comparably favorably compared to David he's a new David as far as the uh deuteronomistic

(1:18:02) history is concerned and his works are written into the text like I say as a direct fulfillment of Prophecy even somewhere else to predict his name nevertheless he is nothing to be he doesn't end up being a great king at all very unexpectedly and very anticlimactically uh Josiah is killed by the pharaoh of Egypt Neko II at megiddo so Pharaoh again has brought out his troops and so forth and has gone to the plains uh presumably he summoned all the local kings around Josiah has gone up there and he just gets killed and so the promise uh for the junior the the

(1:18:43) deuteronomist holds for Josiah's Reign goes completely unfulfilled and indeed soon after Josiah's death Judah Falls and the davidic Covenant itself is broken God has promised that the House of David the scepter shall never depart from the House of David um and ironically for the um deuteronomist it uh even if since they wrote that Covenant this house that had potentially has been there since before their memory so into the prehistoric times that House of David had been ruling Jerusalem and now they've written this Covenant uh back

(1:19:21) into its history it ends up being broken almost immediately so the deuteronomous school so where let's look at their perspective a little so Jeremiah whose prophetic book is associated with the determistic school and it's actually even he's traditionally identified as the author of The Books of Kings traditional attributions are not always any good but it's interesting in this particular case he's also said to be the son of hilkaya that priest who found the scroll so he's got a lot of stuff associated with all of this in addition to the fact that his themes and his book has all these

(1:20:01) literary overlaps with it so it means then that all of these histories from the Bible supposed histories from the Bible are actually written in the context of the era of Hezekiah and especially Josiah's reforms and so as a result of that the deuteronomistic school very anachronistically recasts all of Israel's history and judah's history in the light of that very late reform of Yahweh only worship of of davidic rule and Jerusalem as the center and so forth so why would they do that well there are mutual advantages of this davidic myth so for the northern Exiles from Israel

(1:20:53) now that they have let's say moved to Judah and are part of this um new court in Jerusalem and they are now writing in this literary output writing under the patronage of the davidic kings of Jerusalem it really makes sense for these guys priests and other writers and so forth to cast Israel and Judah as sister kingdoms and even to say they were all once originally the same Kingdom and it makes even more sense to tell your Patron Hezekiah or your Patron Josiah that their ancestor they're from the House of David so you have an eponymous ancestor David that was an actual guy and he was actually the real

(1:21:32) founder of Israel not Omri Omri was was a sinner and so forth and thus Jerusalem has a claim to the entire inheritance so the northern Kingdom's already been destroyed anyway but there's still lots of Israel lights who live there under a Syrian direct Rule and many of them are are still worshiping at Bethel and shechem and Samaria and so forth and the more we can change their focus to Jerusalem the more you know we can actually expand maybe Jerusalem's borders into Bethel and so forth so that eventually we can say you have a claim

(1:22:12) to all of that inheritance and indeed the House of David is the only legitimate heir to the entire inheritance so this all leads us to probably what you're probably getting from the whole beginning of this the non-historicity of the David's stories so likely then what was known of David at the time that all of these biblical stories about David were composed is simply that the kings of Judah the kings of the of Jerusalem were from a house called The House of David in the same way as I've said you know that the kings of France originally the

(1:22:54) Franks originally were from the house of marovich marrow Vengeance and so the mayor of engine Kings presumed they had an ancestor named marovich and and they sometimes wrote people wrote myths about that guy or so forth and that's often true so there's often a a house name uh that and you assume then that that house name is about a an ancestor so there's a presumed ancestor but you don't know anything about him other than his name so why are there embarrassing Court narratives so this is just coming out of

(1:23:28) um you know writing entertaining stories for a court and now that there is a sophisticated Court in Jerusalem under King Josiah um embarrassing narratives like this are probably informed by all of the things that Manasseh did so so here's this king who reversed all of the reforms and he brought all of the I mean had all these wives and concubines brought back all of the paganism and so forth that's just what David and Solomon did in their last years and their dotage and so forth right and so and so essentially people are writing stories about maybe what's

(1:24:06) going on at the time of Manasseh or recently at the time of Josiah about what had just going on and rather than um you know spending all the time criticizing that it's a little dangerous sometimes putting that into the past as uh you know those ideas of those stories into the past in a safer time period with David and Solomon and it's also possible that the other set of stories David has a scrappy mercenary leader Robin Hood Style guy that may be informed by the actual memories of judah's relative strength in relationship to the Old Kingdom of Israel so these sophisticated Northern

(1:24:45) Exiles they are aware that you know where the sophisticated ones you are are southern Bumpkin cousins but the scrappy thing that you had going for you was kind of this Robin Hood style thing and that maybe is like what David was doing earlier and that sort of a thing so you know that kind of brings us to I'll just I just brought this back again but just to kind of show you again where that is so um you know kind of the the earliest components of this biblical narrative being composed and possibly in Hezekiah

(1:25:16) but more likely in this Josiah time period um you know there's a lot of Scholars who would rather put the whole thing into the Exile and actually the post-exile period so this is among the earlier datings that are even possible because it reflects the as always the time period when it's composed not not the time centuries earlier when it supposedly set people don't have the expertise to do that you can't the memory it doesn't exist you can write about what you know now so what about just as we end what about the Goliath of gath story so even even

(1:25:55) did David even slay Goliath um we actually have in second Samuel a completely second tradition about who slew Goliath and so we'll just read that here so now it came to pass turnout came about after this that there was a war again with the Philistines at gob then sibikai the hushethite struck and killed saf who was among the descendants of the Giant and there was a war with the Philistines again at Gob and al-hanan the son of jarrah Oregon the Bethlehem height killed Goliath the gitite the shaft of whose spear was like

(1:26:39) a Weaver's beam and there was a war with gath again where a man was of great stature who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot 24 in number and he was also been born to the Giant and when he defiled Israel when he defied Israel Jonathan the son of shimai David's brother struck and killed him these four were born to the giant at gath and they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants so there's a whole bunch of compacted stuff here in this about lots of giant killing and so forth there's a tradition of um you know that this Philistine city of

(1:27:16) gath is producing Giants or so worth but here we have a different hero El Hanan a Bethel Knight guy bethlehemite guy who is the person who kills Goliath uh the Giant and so um again once again one of the things that happens if you have if you're known for wisdom like Solomon and somebody who writes a wisdom book A lot of times it'll get attributed to Solomon and same thing if you're known to be a warrior one of the things that happens is um that lesser Warriors get their stories glommed onto you you know so um so that'll happen to mythology all the time when you know a story about some

(1:27:58) Lesser God will get attached to Apollo later or or it becomes an Apollo story or becomes a Zeus story because um because those are more famous gods and they absorb absorb the stories and so there may be a tradition anyway there's a tradition here in in the Bible that um that somebody else actually even slew it's Luke Goliath and I know that this is a this is uh fixed like I say the book of Chronicles fixes this by just saying El Hanan is another name for David well again Chronicles is all about fixing problems in the Bible but it doesn't make it um historically so

(1:28:36) so that is my little summary of who was King David and hopefully you found that interesting but you may have Also may have also sparked some further questions and we'll see if landro has been watching those for me foreign asks how important was the continuation of actual bloodline to Historic kingdoms of the Bible was adoption a real practice or just after the fact justification of a coup d'etat so um so there was always so there's there's lots and lots of um coups in the biblical narrative even and um and it does seem that that was happening so I mentioned I'm emphasized

(1:29:28) with the northern kingdom the amrite dynasty because they were the ones that sort of uh were the best known and indeed the neighbors even thought of Israel one of the things one of the names for Israel was the land of the people of Omri and so forth um nevertheless the um the Deuter Mystic history of the Bible records a number of coups before the ending of the Kingdom before the kingdom Falls to Assyria and so a lot of cases the chief General will take over and so forth and so um the problem that you always have as as a usurper is that once you once you kill

(1:30:11) the king and you're the general or something like that and you take over um you know there's another General might kill you and take you over you don't have that basis that that it that people have uh who are the King's son or born in the in the purple as they say uh and so um so I would say it's still important is adoption a real practice or just after the fact for a coup d'etat so I think it is a practice um I don't know if we have I don't know if we can say for sure because again a lot of this is not

(1:30:42) um not historic historic but I mean when we get to actual history um adoption for example was a was a practice during the good really good governance that was happening in the at the um in the Roman Empire at the you know that come when we think of the best guys like Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian and everybody those great Emperors were adopting let's say the most um uh qualified successor and and that was the way that they were actually bringing stability um but you know just as often it would get to a dynasty and then and then I think it's even

(1:31:22) it was even Marcus Aurelius who screwed that up by having his rotten son you know succeed him and so and so that is always a thing that can happen because you always have some legitimacy if you're the son of the of the king or the emperor um Kenneth Gregory says Center place um when do scholars believe that the book of Samuel were composed in their current form and have Scholars been able to use textual criticism to estimate when the stories and the books originated is it possible the story of Saul and David's conflicts had its Origins and the propaganda from the House of David just

(1:31:58) to justify his usurpation of Saul's Throne so it's way it's all way later so it so it's not even about usurping Saul's Throne it's um it's Justified it's by the house of David to justify their claims at the very end of their independent reign of Judah to to a jerusalem-centered worship and being the last uh people standing because of the destruction of the northern kingdom is when that will have happened and so the the current form so that so we know that um like at early forums are are very late because like I say there's even a prophecy in the journal domestic history where you know um they predict that

(1:32:45) there will be a king named Josiah who's going to do these things that Josiah actually did um so it's not written before then you know and then uh and then there's also um and it also continues on until the the whole end of the kingdom and the destruction of the kingdom and so forth and so um so it's under there's understood to be a draft that is made uh you know a update at least in the Exile period And so um and then many many scholars are going to suggest that there's further editing and redacting that happens later uh even than that and so and so it wouldn't be to justify a

(1:33:25) user creation of Saul who's essentially a Mythic character um are the deuteronomic books Tristan Turner asks are the deuteronomic books polemics arguing from I'm sorry arguing from yahweh's priests who didn't know these historic Kings maybe davidic King's practice a more polytheistic faith and retroactively these deuteronomistic authors describe how kings should have been absolutely so so to the extent that David was a historic King he is a more like a tribal leader of a little Hill town in other words the independent Hill Country Chieftain of Hebron and Jerusalem and so forth

(1:34:05) and he would have been a regular polytheist so this would have been long before um the Hezekiah and josion reforms which is the beginnings of Yahweh only worship and so two centuries or so this semi-mythic ancestor if he wasn't when he was a historical person would have been just a regular a regular Pagan like Lander talks about in his lectures uh Reign says biblical authors tend to take their time when writing things down usually hundreds or thousands of years after something happens can this logically be explained as oral tradition written later so um so I don't think so in this case

(1:34:48) and so the way oral tradition is going to work if uh if it's going to be passed down and really survive is you need to have a a thing like where you compose like oral poetry or something like that so it's you know it's just one thing if you have like Homer The Iliad and you have a an epic poet that is telling that and so it's composed before they have writing and and some of it survives and maybe it's original although The Poets are also modifying it and changing it as it's as it's going through that we don't have anything like that for this so the

(1:35:26) things that um because this is not a this is not an oral tradition largely that is not being written down there is poetry uh in the Bible and so some in some cases what's happened is uh there are plenty of earlier texts that the deuteronomistic historians have um have embedded you know they might be an ancient text or an early text that they have that they have embedded into it and so things like um this also happens on the Torah so things like the uh the song of Moses the song of Miriam or the song of Deborah these are these are like old

(1:36:03) things that predate the text but they're not they're not so much older so even those who are only a couple hundred you know I mean at the oldest it can't be too much more older so it doesn't anywhere get close to let's say the time period of Moses or anything like that and so um so as a result the there is no no historicity to um to books like Exodus and Genesis uh uh which are written way after the fact uh and so if there's any kind of a I wouldn't even say there's probably even a remembered uh story that has any historicity to it at all but in any

(1:36:43) event it would be totally different from uh as written Donnie Lee Gringo says who were these writers of the deutermistic history so I suggested kind of at the end there that it's a school of um of priests that are aligned with the kings of Jerusalem and Judah and are maybe also aligned with and included or part of the school around Jeremiah who is a prophet who is active at that time that's probably about as close as we can get to them and who they who they are we can't say that for sure but um that's a theory that number of Scholars

(1:37:25) have Michelangelo says was the story of David's census based on any real census or was its uh literary purpose um so yeah this is one of the things that happens at the end of uh David's reign it would not have been based on um on a real census anyway from David's time it may be based on a census that is taking place let's say the reign of Manasseh or something like that and so again it's all of these stories are um you know are probably based on events that are relatively or the kinds of things that had been happening

(1:38:06) relatively recently in the deuteronomistic writer's time and so maybe again memories of things that happened under uh you know under Manasseh or somebody else and and in general um the example of this once again is uh that this is another story that then gets cleaned up by the chronicler right and so um God uh tells David to do a census David does a census God punishes David for doing a census um uh in the in the chroniclers it's Satan that tells David to do the sets this nobody wants to have a census because having a sense this means you're gonna have to pay taxes so that's where that story comes Marvin

(1:38:49) says uh was there any evidence whatsoever that the two kingdoms were ever United even after the time of David and Solomon so um so so no um the so the evidence so if they're United at all there does seem to be um distinct developments uh in both the lower uh Hill Country Judah and then the middle and Upper Hill Country Israel and it does seem to be very distinct in all the different kinds of archaeological surveys to the extent that they will have ever been unified it would be because the northern kingdom had conquered the southern Kingdom and was was have it was in the southern kingdom was having to

(1:39:32) pay tribute to it but it wouldn't have been it would have been the same way that the northern kingdom was conquering Moab or somebody like that in other words it's a the king the kingdoms are totally uneven there's a northern kingdom that is important there is a southern Kingdom that um that is not important it's a hill chieftainship and so forth uh and so we don't we can't entirely say what was happening with that Health Hill chieftainship because it's not important enough to get mentioned by um the Assyrians and stuff like that until the Assyrians conquer Israel and

(1:40:04) make Judah a tribute State at that point a tributary State and that's the only time you know it's going to start getting mentioned um Owen wall writes do you believe the historicity of the northern kingdom being 11 tribes to make 12 total or do you think that was made up later to fit with numerology or whatever and Leon has a similar question to the 12 tribes that some people love to talk about really filter down through the two kingdoms narrative so so we've had a whole lecture already recently like a month or so ago on the 12 tribes 12 is a magic number they're not there

(1:40:42) are not simply 12 tribes there are more tribes than that that are part of the northern kingdom there are more tribes even part of the Southern Kingdom than Judah items and so forth essentially uh the answer is it is at some point or rather they they wrote you know they wanted to have 12.

(1:41:07) and at some point or other they made a list of what the 12 are and some of the even more important tribes didn't make it on the list and some of the unimportant tribes did get make it on the list and so forth um so it doesn't it it's it's a arbitrary convention and and indeed all of the 12 sons of Israel those are all Mythic figures uh that are eponymous ancestors of the actual tribal name so they've already had a tribal name and then they make up a Mythic character to represent it it's like if we were to tell a story about um Canada you know coming and and hanging out with and and uh going going to dinner with uh with Illinois or something like that in other words as if Illinois as a person and so forth

(1:41:48) do um uh we have to scroll up Daryl Scott writes did David's story acquire any new symbolism uh with Christianity um I would say so yes so um so so David um so the David and the entire Old Testament for Christians uh ultimately is not uh it's not really what's happening in terms of history and law and anything like that doesn't really matter what what matters is uh there's meaning for it and the meaning is an anti-type for Christ which is which is the type right and so and so David um you know as a messiah precursor is

(1:42:40) embodies Christ the same way and for medieval people let's say that the that the animal of a lion symbolizes Christ or the eagle symbolizes Christ or you know all of those kind of things and so all of um you know all of the components of the David's story you know are overlaid with with Christ uh uh and just Messianic ideas and things like that within Christianity um Rayne asks what about Branch Davidians was David koresh a simple cult leader how would you rate his claims to davidic righteousness I am not an expert on the Branch Davidians I mean in terms of

(1:43:24) if he was claiming if you were saying that he was claiming to be a lineal descendant of David um so you know the way I mean the the the Jesus's um lineages you know that we have in the New Testament are are fictional um if David was a historic person because he's a king and we probably had a lot of children at some point or other it's completely possible the way genetics work is that that pretty much everybody who has any kind of Middle Eastern background would be a descendant of David in the same way that you know

(1:44:01) even people as recently as as Genghis Khan because he had so many concubines and so forth there's like a huge percentage of the population are are descended from from him and and at a certain point it it also genetically if we're hearing about that it doesn't matter because it all washes out pretty quickly in terms of just a few Generations you have no no real you know they always have in TV shows like Star Trek you have like a great great great great great grandson and he looks exactly like they use the same

(1:44:33) actor to play him as the as they they do this with um the actor who plays data all the time so he's the same everything reads true you know but that doesn't actually happen so um so so you know David koresh uh I don't know what he was making in terms of uh in terms of claims of being a davidic leader but um I probably wouldn't um I probably wouldn't have bought into it so if I had met him so Michelangelo says what uh was the character of joab written as a model of a good general or why um why was he such a good and important and to me interesting character in this story

(1:45:14) um yeah so I think that is I think that is interesting um so I think that one of the things that is happening you know in the uh in a story when uh you have a declining King is that sometimes then you still have a loyal officer who even when the king can't make good decisions anymore is still more loyal to the king's best interests than the king is himself able to be and so it's literally just a a wonderful character to have and so forth um and I'll you know and ultimately these kinds of stories of of tragedy and betrayal and and all those things are are literally

(1:46:00) you know this great literature and they still are the kinds of things that we can still um you know make HBO series about and things like that and so that's why um courtly Intrigue stories are so much more interesting than if you were just writing um let's say myths where everybody's perfect because if you just write a myth where everybody's perfect all the time and does everything perfect and everything and they're always good and they're always every good things happen to them that becomes a very boring story very fast and so um one of the reasons why these stories

(1:46:31) have had this staying power is because of their origin as as uh courtly stories so Leandro asks did the maccabeans or herodians claim davidic lineage and I think that they don't um which um which I think is crazy you know because I think why wouldn't you do that right but I think that maybe people just knew that they weren't and um and again I don't think that Jesus claimed davidic lineage the historical Jesus in any at ever claimed davidic lineage I think that um Christians you know long after Jesus was was dead you know claimed that about it about Jesus because of their understanding of

(1:47:19) um Jesus as fulfillment of the Bible so all the things they didn't know about Jesus they believed that Jesus was fulfillment of scripture and so therefore they since when they when they had a gap and they didn't know what Jesus had done or anything about Jesus they assumed based on their knowledge that Jesus was a fulfillment of scripture they were felt felt quite confident and able to fill in the Gap with what they would have known from scripture Wednesday Jones asks is there ever a Divergence on the origin and etymology of names from uh the actual time of

(1:47:54) David and the time of Hezekiah when they had lost their language um so so there's still they so there was still having the same language during that time period I mean it's evolving I mean it would be changing like you say so there so the difference here would be um so so names is interesting uh because one of the things that happens with the Yahweh only um uh worship is that you have to start getting rid of names that have Bell in them you know and so um and so one of the one of the names um trying to think what his name is I can't remember it but anyway and you know Gideon who is one of the heroes one of the judges uh you know this General in

(1:48:45) the Book of Judges has a name that he goes by and which is something ball and so in other words it shows that he is a you know a ball worshiper you know as as another name and so and so they have to um censor those kind of bail names uh you know from their history and so they do change that so I was like listing how um you know that place name that they brought the Ark of the Covenant from is called um like so what was it called of something like a bile Judah or something like that and that that town gets its name changed

(1:49:22) and it's not called that later in the Bible the chronicle art changes that because they don't have a ball name uh and so and so they are they are having to censor um their names like you're saying uh and change them in order to um in order to recast uh heroes from an earlier time before Yahweh only worship as if Yahweh only worship had been the thing that had happened all the way back to the Garden of Eden which is also an invention right so Owen wall says why would the deuteronomous have written about David as such a weak King in many ways if he's

(1:49:59) supposed to be the Mythic founder of this Kingdom so um I guess I would say that this is uh uh these are they're draw probably drawing from a bunch of courtly stories that are being generated within um the court of Jerusalem and so at a certain point there are all kinds of legendary stories and they don't actually necessarily even cohere with each other but they brought them together so on the one hand he's the leader of a merry band of men and so forth and a great warrior and so on and he also um but he also has all of these

(1:50:35) intrigues and so maybe those stories are being um told within the court as a kind of a criticism of what's happened under Hezekiah or Manasseh or something like that and because those stories are known those are drawn in by the the duramistic editors who are bringing stories together so um uh Friedman who is one of the last major proponents for the documentary hypothesis he feels that um that the deuteronomistic history he can identify through it a further continuance of the J Source or the Yahweh Source if there is a Yahweh Source he thinks that he can be identified through the determistic

(1:51:23) history in other words that it wasn't originally only in the Torah only but actually is also a longer source that has been cut up and made into uh the Deuter Mystic stories and so so it's possible that they are working from a pre-existing source that includes these kind of things and then they are recasting the whole thing in terms of uh their world view of uh you have to focus on Jerusalem centered worship Yahweh only worship and so on so there's an actual note here from so if you can um pull up landro

(1:52:03) there's a note here from Finn Hager who says The Maccabees couldn't claim davidic lineage for two reasons one they were priests which made them from the tribe of Levi good point and there was a recognized David Clayman claim it Simon Ben gamliel so okay there we go so in other words there people um so there was a a rival who was claiming davidic kingship or divinic lineage and like you say they're the wrong tribes that's a good point well very good thank you for that and that's the end of our questions I really appreciate you all joining us we will um continue our

(1:52:39) lectures now going forward again now that uh the trip is over and so next week we're going to talk about uh the sayings gospels of Thomas and Q thanks