Abraham, Joseph, Solomon and David

Ha'aretz Magazine

(from Ha'aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999) Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs' acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it     The Kaufman Collection Hezekiah son of Ahaz, king of Judah    Tobshalem, commander of the army Elishama ….servant of Ahaz   This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people - and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story - now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people's emergence are radically different from what that story tells. http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/jerques.htm In a September 22nd, 2002 speech to visiting Christian Zionists, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asserted, "This land is ours... God gave us the title deeds..." However, recent scholarly research, including discoveries by an archaeological team from the University of Tel Aviv, not only deconstruct the Biblical Old Testament and Torah stories upon which this claim rests, but grant previously unthinkable credence to an ancient historian's claim that the Israelites of Exodus were actually the Hyksos, and therefore of Asiatic origin.   To trace the foundations of this ongoing Biblical bonfire, we must go back to 1999. All hell broke loose in Israel in November of that year when Prof. Ze'ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University announced: "the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land, and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes". Moreover, the Jewish God YHWH had a female consort - the goddess Asherah! His conclusion that the kingdom of David and Solomon was at best a small tribal monarchy, at worst total myth, has made enemies for him in the camps of traditional Jewish and Christian belief systems. He asserts: all evidence demonstrates that the Jews did not adopt monotheism until the 7th Century BCE - a heresy according to the Biblical tradition dating it to Moses at Mount Sinai. Tel Aviv University's archaeological investigation at Megiddo and examination of the six-sided gate there dates it to the 9th Century BCE, not the 10th Century BCE claimed by the 1960's investigator Yigael Yadin who attributed it to Solomon. Herzog, moreover, states that Solomon and David are "entirely absent in the archaeological record". In addition, Herzog's colleague, Israel Finkelstein, claims the Jews were nothing more than nomadic Canaanites who bartered with the city dwellers. The team's studies concluded that Jerusalem did not have any central status until 722 BCE with the destruction of its northern rival Samaria. However, the real bombshell is Herzog's discovery of numerous references to Yahweh having a consort in the form of Asherah. Inscriptions, written in Hebrew by official Jewish scribes in the 8th century BCE, were found in numerous sites all over the land. For Yahweh, supposedly the "One God", to have had a female consort and, of all people, the goddess Asherah, is dynamite of wide ranging significance.   But what does all this do to the validity of the "Title Deeds" from God that Ariel Sharon refers to? Quite apart from the obvious conclusion that the god assumed to have given the "promised land" to his chosen people was just one god from a pantheon and not the alleged monotheistic only God of the cosmos, Herzog's findings corroborate theories that have been "out there" for some time. The Hyksos Like Herzog, the historian Josephus (c. 37CE - c. 100CE) denied the account of the Hebrews being held in captivity in Egypt, but he went a drastic step further about the racial origins of the Jews, whom he identified with the Hyksos. He further claimed they did not flee from Egypt but were evicted due to them being leprous. It must be said that Josephus has been vilified over the ages as a Roman collaborator by both Jewish and Christian scholars who have argued that the dating of the exodus of the "Hebrews" from Egypt in the Bible positively rules out their identification as Hyksos. However, Jan Assmann, a prominent Egyptologist at Heidelberg University, is quite positive in his writings that the Exodus story is an inversion of the Hyksos expulsion and furthermore that Moses was an Egyptian. Likewise, Donald P. Redford, of Toronto University, presents striking evidence that the Expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt was inverted to construct the exodus of the Hebrew slaves story in the Torah and Old Testament. His book, which argued this theory, "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times" was Winner of the 1993 Best Scholarly Book in Archaeology Award of the Biblical Archaeological Society. There is irrefutable evidence that the Hyksos, a mixed Semitic-Asiatic group who infiltrated the Nile valley, seized power in Lower Egypt in the 17th Century BCE. They ruled there from c. 1674 BCE until expelled when their capital, Avaris, fell to Ahmose around 1567 BCE. The Hyksos in Egypt worshipped Set, who like ISH.KUR they identified as a storm deity. Under the "inversion theory", Jewish scholars in the 7th Century BCE changed the story from "expelled" to "escaped" and as a further insult to their enemy, Ahmose, changed and miss-spelt his name to Moses, presenting him as leader of a Hebrew revolt. But there is also a strong possibility of two separate origins to the "Moses" character being merged into one, which I will come to later. Ahmose's success in 1567 BCE led to the establishment of the 18th Dynasty in Egypt. ThotMoses III overthrew the transvestite Pharaoh Atchepsut, and under ThotMoses IV Egyptian conquests extended beyond the Sinai into Palestine, Syria, reaching Babylonia and included Canaan. By the end of this expansion, Amenophis III (1380BCE) ruled an Egyptian empire whose provinces and colonies bordered what is now known as Turkey. This empire would have included the regions in which most of the expelled Hyksos now lived. Amenophis IV succeeded the throne in 1353BCE. He established a new monotheism cult establishing "Aten" as the one supreme god and he changed his name to Akhenaton. Married to the mysterious Nefertiti, Akhenaton declared himself a god on earth, intermediary between the one-god Aten (Ra) and humanity, with his spouse as partner, effectively displacing Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Enead. Declaring all men to be the children of Aten, historians suspect Akhenaton planned an empire-wide religion. He banned all idolatry, the use of images to represent god, and banned the idea that there was more than one supreme god. It is alongside Akhenaten and his father Amenophis III that we find the second Moses. An important figure during this period was confusingly called Amenophis son of Hapu. He was First Minister (Vizier) to both kings. He is generally depicted as a scribe, crouching and holding on his knees a roll of papyrus. He more than anyone was responsible for authoring the religion in which the old gods were merged into one living god, Aten, who had been responsible for the creation of the Earth and of humanity. The symbol of this god, the sun disk, represented Ra, Horus and the other gods in one. The sun disk, in symbolism, was supported between the horns of a bull. The Son of Hapu says this about creation: "I have come to you who reigns over the gods oh Amon, Lord of the Two Lands, for you are Re who appears in the sky, who illuminates the earth with a brilliantly shining eye, who came out of the Nou, who appeared above the primitive water, who created everything, who generated the great Enneade of the gods, who created his own flesh and gave birth to his own form." The king's overseer of the land of Nubia was a certain Mermose (spelled both Mermose and Merymose on his sarcophagus in the British Museum). According to modern historians, in Amenhotep's third year as king, Mermose took his army far up the Nile, supposedly to quell a minor rebellion, but actually to secure gold mining territories which would supply his king with the greatest wealth of any ruler of Egypt. Recent scholarship has indicated Mermose took his army to the neighborhood of the confluence of the Nile and Atbara Rivers and beyond. But who was this Mermose? According to historian Dawn Breasted, the Greek translation of this name was Moses. Does Jewish tradition support this identification? According to Jewish history not included in the Bible, Moses led the army of Pharaoh to the South, into the land of Kush, and reached the vicinity of the Atbara River. There he attracted the love of the princess of the fortress city of Saba, later Meroe. She gave up the city in exchange for marriage. Biblical confirmation of such a marriage is to be found in Numbers 12:1. "And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman." The archaeology of the Land of Israel is completing a process that amounts to a scientific revolution in its field. It is ready to confront the findings of biblical scholarship and of ancient history. But at the same time, we are witnessing a fascinating phenomenon in which all this is simply ignored by the Israeli public. Many of the findings mentioned here have been known for decades. The professional literature in the spheres of archaeology, Bible and the history of the Jewish people has addressed them in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. Even if not all the scholars accept the individual arguments that inform the examples I cited, the majority have adopted their main points. Nevertheless, these revolutionary views are not penetrating the public consciousness. About a year ago, my colleague, the historian Prof. Nadav Ne'eman, published an article in the Culture and Literature section of Ha'aretz entitled "To Remove the Bible from the Jewish Bookshelf," but there was no public outcry. Any attempt to question the reliability of the biblical descriptions is perceived as an attempt to undermine "our historic right to the land" and as shattering the myth of the nation that is renewing the ancient Kingdom of Israel. These symbolic elements constitute such a critical component of the construction of the Israeli identity that any attempt to call their veracity into question encounters hostility or silence. It is of some interest that such tendencies within the Israeli secular society go hand-in-hand with the outlook among educated Christian groups. I have found a similar hostility in reaction to lectures I have delivered abroad to groups of Christian bible lovers, though what upset them was the challenge to the foundations of their fundamentalist religious belief. It turns out that part of Israeli society is ready to recognize the injustice that was done to the Arab inhabitants of the country and is willing to accept the principle of equal rights for women - but is not up to adopting the archaeological facts that shatter the biblical myth. The blow to the mythical foundations of the Israeli identity is apparently too threatening, and it is more convenient to turn a blind eye.  Ha'aretz., October 29, 1999

Abraham

One remarkable thing about God and His promises to Abraham is that He told Abram the same thing several time (See 13:14-15, 15:5), but Abram and Sarai weren't quite sure how God was going to fulfil His promise. You see, they couldn't have children (11:30), and it seemed obvious that this problem was a major obstacle in the way of the promise that they would become a great nation. At one point, Abram seems to think he'll never have any children and that a servant will be his heir (15:2), and then Sarai comes up with the idea that maybe God wants Abram to have children through Sarai's servant, Hagar (16:1). So, between having severe doubts and trying to solve the problem themselves, Abram and Sarai ended up going through a lot of turmoil as they waited to see God's promise come into being.

It seemed like God was delaying, and in the mean time, trouble would come their way. A famine came into the land (12:10ff), and they went to Egypt, but because Abram was afraid, he and Sarah agreed to deceive the Egyptians and conceal their marriage, claiming that they were only brother and sister. The same sort of thing happened again later when they deceived another king about their marriage. Because of this deception, Sarah was taken into the household of other men, first of Pharaoh and then of Abimelech. Imagine how you would feel if you were Abram--imagine how you would feel if you were Sarah!

• Abraham and his tribe travel to Egypt since famine struck the lands where they lived and needed grain and food supplies, and Egypt had plenty.

• Abraham heard of a naughty Pharaoh, who has nothing else to do but stay at the border of Egypt looking for beautiful women coming through the gates of Egypt.

• Abraham fears that pharaoh sees his 80 years old most beautiful of all women, that yehova has created,  his wife Sarah, at the entrance of the borders and kills him and takes her for his harem.

• Abraham tells Sarah that she must act as his sister and not as his wife in order to protect her.

• The naughty Pharaoh and his henchmen waiting impatiently, and peeping out the gates at the Egyptian border to see if they can grab anything that comes their way from the foreign lands.

• Abraham introduces, his wife Sarah as his sister,  gives his wife Sarah to be married to pharaoh and goes to be part of the royal harem, and gets paid very well, lands, cattle, herds, gold and silver.

• Pharaoh gives Abraham and his Tribe all the gifts and gold and grain and what ever their hearts desired as a gifts for marring Sarah.

• She lives as a queen and is pregnant after nine month after living with pharaoh, but of course it is not the pharaoh who impregnated her, but it was Abraham, except the bible fails to says when, where, and how? also this god made sure that the king of Egypt does not touch the eighty year old beauty, however she must have had some explanation to say to the king on how she was pregnant or may be god did the explanation himself.

• Sarah has Child named Isaac nine monthlater

• She confesses to pharaoh  and tells him the truth about herself and Abraham.

• Pharaoh is chocked however very kind and has a good heart that such sins did not anger him at all nor the whole court of Egypt who must have been shocked at the news, even though that Abraham and Sarah both  lied, deceived and committed adultery, Pharaoh sets them free and gives Abraham more great wealth, lands, and presents and gifts.

• Cf. Genesis 12:17-19:

  But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai .... So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, 'What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, 'She is my sister'? so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone'.

• For Pharaoh must have enough of the 80 year old (beauty) and even paid a fortune to get rid of her along with his confused son or son of Abraham and his tribe. so the bible say.

Surly the LORD had his hands into this situation.

The Sins of Abraham and Sarah 

Cowardice

Deceit

Lust

Greed

Betrayal

Lying

Adultery

Accessory to Adultery

Prostitution and Pimping

1- Abraham is a cowered and feared Pharaoh more than his own god

2- Sarah is an adulteress both in Egyptian law and Hebrew yehovic law And would have been executed by             the Egyptian court along with Abraham

3- Abraham is a pimp for accepting Gold and gifts from the sale of his own wife to Pharaoh.

4-  A pure business transaction according to the bible as in our world today in brothels or high business             deals involving great amount of wealth and seduction by beautiful women.

5- Isaac, The born child, whose child is he? The fooled Pharaoh or the 100 years old Abraham.

The Birth of Isaac.]

   And Abraham was ninety-nine [Fol. 25b, col. 2] years old when God went into his house and gave Sârâ a son, and he was one hundred years old when Isaac was born to him. And Isaac was thirteen years old when his father took him and went up to the mountain of Yâbhôs (Jebus) to Melchisedek, the priest of God, the Most High.

Isaac and Rebecca.]

   And when Isaac was forty years old, Eliezer, a son of the house of Abraham, went down and brought Rabkâ (Rebecca) from the east, and Isaac took her to wife. And when Abraham died Isaac buried him by the side of Sârâ.

Abraham was 175 years old when he died, and Isaac and Ishmael buried him. Rebecca was the daughter of Bethuel, the Aramean,(armean did not yet exist in the region, not for anthor 1000 year later)a native of the town of Arâch (Erech ?).

Is this the Truth? Or may be another version would be better and would make more sense at these Roman fabricated ones

That a prophet of god, who had many conversations with his good god would allow such wickedness and evil primitive ways. To give up his wife and give her to another man, in exchange for material gain.

Alternatively, perhaps the real story is different but written by ignorant illiterate primitive scribes, who with no doubt could not read what they have written.

The real Story

"Fear not to go down into Egypt; for I will THERE make of you a great nation."  Genesis 46:7

1- Egypt becomes the world’s greatest power under King Thutmosis III (Tawout Mose) III who conquered all the land beyond the Egyptian borders and built the Egyptian empire from the Nile to the Euphrates.

2- Most of the ancient world pays tribute and became vassals under Egyptian rule.

3- Abraham was a smart tribal leader of a new united small shepherds tribes wandering around for food and want to join the big world at his time.

4- Abraham ventures into Egypt, which was the great super power of her time.

5- Abraham wanted his children to be taught and learn to read and write, and to evolve his tribe to a better quality in life.

6-Abraham offers his sister or daughter to the harem of the pharaoh court as sign of alliance and respect to the king of Egypt and by this secure a good dowry and avoids famine or invasion.

7- The sons of minor foreign wives in the Egyptian court would not be able to rule Egypt, but would rule their mother’s estates or lands, when under the influence of Egypt. Isaac is probably one of those sons, who was raised as an Egyptian and would always make him divine and special.

This version would be at least being more honourable and would make the story truer, unless this god of Abraham is not a god but a demon, which likes these events in his way.

The choice is yours

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Joseph

Yo seph / Waser / Oser Seph

The story was created from the following Stories and Royal Inscriptions and Tombs

The author and the inventor of the fantasy biblical, Joseph, Moses, studied in Egypt well and were well acquainted with a lot of its famous classical literature and of its historic events.

1-      Vizier Imhotep

2-      The Famine Stela of King Djoser

3-      The Tale of the Two Brothers

4-      The Akhnaton Period (Actual History)

5-      Vizier Aperia / Aper El

6-      Manetho Histories

7-      Chaeremon Histories

8- EGYPTIAN RELIGION

Yoseph / Joseph

Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. He is falsely accused by Potiphar's wife, and is imprisoned. He interprets Pharaoh's dreams, saving Egypt (and his own family) during a famine.

"Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt. And Joseph went out from Pharaoh's presence and traveled throughout Egypt."
     - Genesis 41:46

"So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh's..."
     - Genesis 47:20

Pharaoh gave Joseph the name Zaphenath-Paneah..."
     - Genesis 41:45a

So Joseph settled his father and his brothers in Egypt and gave them property in the best part of the land, the district of Rameses, as Pharaoh directed."
     - Genesis 47:11

Pharaoh asked the brothers, 'What is your occupation?'
'Your servants are shepherds,' they replied to Pharaoh, 'just as our fathers were.' They also said to him, 'We have come to live here awhile, because the famine is severe in Canaan and your servants' flocks have no pasture. So now, please let your servants settle in Goshen.'"
     - Genesis 47:3-4

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made a richly ornamented [the meaning of the Hebrew for 'richly ornamented' is uncertain] robe for him."
     - Genesis 37:3

gave Joseph 'to wife Asanath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On'

generation of Ephraim's children. Also the children of Makir son of Manasseh were placed at birth on Joseph's knees [that is, were counted as his].
Then Joseph said to his brothers, 'I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.' And Joseph made the sons of Israel swear an oath and said, 'God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place.'
So Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt."
     - Genesis 50:22-26

Vizier Imhotep

Seal-bearer of the King of Lower Egypt, one who is near the head of the King (i.e., vizier), Director of the Great Mansion, Royal representative, High Priest of Heliopolis, Imhotep, the carpenter and the sculptor..."
     - from a limestone bust from a lost statue of King Djoser

"...Imhotep was often characterized in inscriptions as 'the image and likeness of Thoth' - and also as the 'successor to Thoth' after the deity had ascended to heaven.."
     - Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal

"At some point, through a shift in the Egyptian psychological view of the status of Imhotep, his role as a sage became enhanced by attributing his birth to the direct intervention of one of the major gods. Imhotep became 'son of Ptah' creator god of Memphis, whose nature as a god of craftsman particularly suited the fathering of an offspring renowned for sculptural skill. From the Saite period (Dynasty XXVI) there is ample evidence of a vigorous cult centered around Imhotep son of Ptah at Memphis and Saqqara. Hundreds of bronzes depict him in an iconography which subtly emphasize his wisdom and divine parent. He is represented seated with a papyrus scroll across his knees, wearing a skullcap and a long linen kilt. We can interpret the papyrus as suggesting the sources of knowledge kept by scribes in the 'House of Life'. The headgear identifies Imhotep with Ptah, and his priestly linen garment symbolizes his religious purity."
"By the Ptolemaic period "as his cult spread, more and more emphasis was placed on his role as a supreme physician readily identifiable with the Greek Asklepios....The cult of Imhotep became a focal point for married couples desiring a son....It was this immediacy of Imhotep son of Ptah as resolver of human problems, often medical, that ensured the popularity of his cult into the Roman period."
     - George Hart, Egyptian Myths

The Famine Stele on the Island of Sehel

The Legend

    During the reign of Djoser (3rd dynasty) a terrible drought lasted for seven years.

I was in mourning on my throne, Those of the palace were in grief….because Hapy had failed to come in time. In a period of seven years, Grain was scant, Kernels were dried up…Every man robbed his twin…Children cried…The hearts of the old were needy…Temples were shut, Shrines covered with dust, Everyone was in distress….I consulted one of the staff of the Ibis, the Chief lector-priest of Imhotep, son of Ptah South-of-the-Wall….He departed, he returned to me quickly, He let me know the flow of Hapy…

Translation by Lichtheim

Imhotep, a high official and Renaissance man, revealed to the king that the Nile had its origins in a land consecrated to Khnum and gave an account of the building materials available at Elephantine. Khnum appeared to Djoser in a dream with the promise to end the drought and described how a temple should be built. Grateful, Djoser re-established the cult of Khnum at Elephantine.

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Aperia Vizier/Aper-el
Vizier of Amenhotep III
1390 -1353 B.C.

Aperia is in fact a diminutivo of this Vizier, whose official name according to the habitual formulation of the time for this type of names is Aper-El , with an evident similarity with other names of semítico origin. Although Aperia very is known being the Vizier of Ajnatón, the data contributed by its tomb indicate to us that it developed almost all his race under the reign of Amenofis III.

Next the long list of titles is exposed that appear writings in their tomb:

1.       First Prophet of the God Atón.
2. Father of the God, divine Father, bienamado divine Father.
3. Vizier
4. Judge
5. Mayor of the city.
6. That that is at the top of the whole Earth.
7. Messenger of the king
8. Nobleman and Prince
9. Chancellor of the king of the Low Egypt.
10. Unique companion (of the king).
11. That that satisfies to the Gentleman with Two Earth thanks to its personality.
12. Favorite of the perfect God (the king).
13. Tutor of the children of the royalty.
14. Boy of the Kap
15. Mouth that calms in the whole Earth.
16. That to that occurs what it is in the heart to have conformity to the words of its    Majesty.
17. Balance of the Gentleman of the Double Country.
18. Eyes of the king in all the country. (or in all place)
19. That that the Gentleman of the Double Country has made his Ka (double)
20. Head of the horses (General of the Chariots) - doubtful but very probable

Pharaoh Thutmose III (1457-1425 BCE) initiated the Egyptian practice of raising princes of subject kings of Western Asia. Aper-el, the Semite who became a vizier, was referred to as “a child of the nursery.” These nurseries might have housed dozens to hundreds of children.

In addition to some titles that could be but well honorary, this man showed a series of very high responsibilities in the regency of Egypt, beginning by the title of Vizier.

The funeral equipment of the family of Aper-El, is very similar with the one of Yuya and Yours, and consequently with the royalty of Egypt.

Gifts coming from the real pair Amenofis III and its Tiye wife can be emphasized directly. To be concrete, that was a wood coffer with the developed protocol of Amenofis III, with his prenomen of Neb-Maat-Re, as well as the one of the Great Real Wife queen Tiye [1][ 1 ] . Also were two slopes engravings with the cartridges of this king.

On the other hand, also were seal fragments with the inscription " Nefer-Jepru-Ra ua-n-Ra, loved of Unnefer (Osiris)" that is the name of coronation of Amenofis IV. This indicates to us that this man entered functions in the reign of this king very initially.

Everything what we know Aperia, has been obtained from the discovery of its tomb, that luckyly has given enough information, non single of he himself but also of certain part of its family as it is its Tauret wife, Uriai alias, and one of its children called Huy. one can be done presentation of this family from two of the inscriptions of its tomb:

" the Mayor of the City and Aperia Vizier, justified (late) in the west of Menfis (y) its sister (he is to say his wife), loved his, the Lady of the Uriai House, justified in the west of Menfis, favored by Unnefer" (designation of Osiris).

"Offering that gives the king to the living Atón, Gentleman of the Sky, Sir of the Earth, that illuminates the Two Shores (Egypt), when rising which all man and all woman live; with such aim that it gives bread, water, pie, (...) to the Mayor of the City and Aperia Vizier, justified " and it follows immediately: "By its son who makes live his name, the Head of the Horses (General of the Chariots) of the Gentleman of Two Earth, Huy

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King Solomon Pharaoh Amenhotep III

In the Bible,⁽¹⁾ King Solomon is said to have:

1.       Inherited a vast empire conquered by his father David that extended from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia (1 Kings 4:21; Gen. 15:18; Deut. 1:7,11:24; Joshua 1:4; 2 Sam. 8:3; 1 Chron. 18:3).

2.       Accumulated great wealth and wisdom (1 Kings 10:23).

3.       Administered his kingdom through a system of 12 districts (1 Kings 4:7).

4.       Possessed a large harem, which included "the daughter of Pharaoh" (1 Kings 3:1; 1 Kings 11:1,3; 1 Kings 9:16).

5.       Honored other gods in his old age (1 Kings 11:1-2,4-5).

6.       Devoted his reign to great building projects (1 Kings 9:15,17-19), including:

a.       the Temple (1 Kings 6).

b.       the Royal Palace (1 Kings 7:2-12).

c.        the walls of Jerusalem,

d.       the Millo (an earthen fill made to enlarge Jerusalem) (1 Kings 11:27)

e.        the royal cities of Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer

f.         the store cities, the cities for his horsemen and the cities for his chariots throughout his empire.

To be consistent with the pattern of other great Bronze and Iron Age cultures in the ancient Near East (Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite), it would be expected that numerous documents, art, and inscriptions on buildings or public monuments would have been left by such a great king or by his descendants later in honor of him.⁽²⁾ Yet no article of any kind bearing his name has ever been found.⁽³⁾

The cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer have now been extensively excavated. A stratum containing large palaces, temples and strong fortifications was found in each of these cities. The name of Solomon was not found, but the cartouche of the 18^th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep III instead.⁽⁴⁾ In Jerusalem, it has not been possible to excavate the temple mount, however, extensive excavations in the city, including the areas adjacent to the temple mount have not revealed the existence of a Solomaic palace complex.⁽⁵⁾ Moreover, excavation of the Millo has revealed (due to pottery found in the Millo) that its original construction was also contemporary with the Egyptian 18^th Dynasty of Amenhotep III.⁽⁶⁾

Amenhotep III, known in ancient times as the "King of Kings" and "Ruler of Ruler's,"⁽⁷⁾ was a Pharaoh of Egypt's glorious 18th Dynasty. He, like Solomon, inherited a vast empire whose influence extended quite literally from the Nile to the Euphrates.⁽⁸⁾ In contrast to the empire of Solomon, the empire of Amenhotep is indisputable.⁽⁹⁾ The buildings, monuments, documents, art, and numerous other vestiges of his reign are ubiquitous and unparalleled (with the possible exception being those left by the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh, Ramses II).

The entire reign of Amenhotep III was devoted to monumental construction throughout Egypt, Canaan, and Syria.⁽¹⁰⁾ In addition to the ancient world's most glorious temple at Luxor,⁽¹¹⁾ he built many other temples of similar design throughout Egypt and in the rest of his empire,⁽¹²⁾ including the Canaanite garrison cities of Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer,⁽¹³⁾ Lachish and Beth-shean.⁽¹⁴⁾

According to Egyptian records, Amenhotep's father Thutmose IV and grandfather Amenhotep II deported over 80,000 Canaanites. The Canaanite inhabitants of Gezer were specifically included in this deportation.⁽¹⁵⁾ It was during Amenhotep III's reign that Gezer and other major Palestine cities were refortified as royal Egyptian garrisons, and endowed with fine temples and palaces.

The Bible states that in Solomon's day, the Pharaoh of Egypt captured the Canaanite city of Gezer and presented it to his daughter as a dowry upon her marriage to Solomon (1 Kings 9:16-17).⁽¹⁶⁾

It was customary and obligatory for Amenhotep III to marry "the daughter of Pharaoh" in order to secure the throne.⁽¹⁷⁾ This is precisely what was done when he was married to Sitamun, the daughter of his father, Pharaoh Thutmose IV.

The network of Egyptian 18th Dynasty garrison cities also included Jerusalem. If construction by Amenhotep III at Gezer, Hazor, Megiddo and other garrison cities is any indication, then a magnificent temple undoubtedly was also built by Amenhotep on Jerusalem's venerated Temple Mount.⁽¹⁸⁾ The structure adjacent to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, known traditionally as "Solomon's stables," is consistent with the architecture of Amenhotep's garrison cities.⁽¹⁹⁾ Archaeology has also confirmed that chariots were kept in these cities during his reign in groups of between thirty to one hundred and fifty each.⁽²⁰⁾

The ancient mining operations at Timna in the Negev desert, known as "Solomon's mines," "are earlier than Solomon by some three hundred years [in the conventional chronology],"⁽²¹⁾ dating once again to the time of Amenhotep III. Copper from Timna, gold from the Sudan,⁽²²⁾ other precious metals, jewels and high quality stone were used in great abundance in Amenhotep's temples, just as they were in Solomon's.⁽²³⁾ A stela from Amenhotep's mortuary temple boasts that the temple was "embellished with gold throughout, its floor shining with silver ... with royal statues of granite, of quartzite and precious stones."⁽²⁴⁾ The list of materials used in another temple built by Amenhotep is also "staggering: 3.25 tons of electrum [an alloy of silver and gold], 2.5 tons of gold, 944 tons of copper..."⁽²⁵⁾

The Biblical Solomon's greatest satisfaction is said to have been the challenge of completing grand projects (Ecclesiastes 2:4-11). The same was said of Amenhotep III. A royal Egyptian text of the period reads, "Lo, His Majesty's heart was satisfied with making very great monuments, the like of which had never come into being since the primeval age of the Two Lands."⁽²⁶⁾ Only an enormously wealthy king of a long established empire could have built so splendidly and in so many widely distributed locations in the ancient world. Amenhotep III was arguably the ancient world's wealthiest king. The completion of such magnificent projects required management of a considerable and constant source of labor and revenue extending over a period of many decades.

The administration and taxation system of Amenhotep with its 12 districts⁽²⁷⁾ is identical to that of Solomon as described in the Bible (1 Kings 4:2-7,27; 5:13; 9:23). Amenhotep also dedicated himself to rediscovering the wisdom, mysteries and traditions of earlier Egyptian Dynasties.⁽²⁸⁾ A strong relationship has been established between the "Proverbs of Solomon" in the Bible and the "Maxims of Amenhotep III" found in Egypt.⁽²⁹⁾

In addition to the projects already mentioned, Amenhotep also built a completely new palace complex in Thebes. The new royal residence included all of the elements contained in the palace complex of Solomon which are described in the Bible (1 Kings 7:2-12),⁽³⁰⁾ namely:

1.       a house made almost entirely out of cedars of Lebanon (built for Amenhotep's Jubilee festival);⁽³¹⁾

2.       a colonnade (hall of columns) fronted by a portico (porch) and surrounded by a column-lined courtyard;⁽³²⁾

3.       a throne room built with many wooden columns and whose floor was a painted lake scene (identical to the one crossed in wonder by the Queen of Sheba when she approached the throne of Solomon, as described in the Koran);⁽³³⁾

4.       a separate palace built for Sitamun, "the daughter of Pharaoh;"⁽³⁴⁾

5.       a royal palace (consisting of his own residence, the residence of his Great Wife, Tiye, and a residence for the royal harem).⁽³⁵⁾

Amenhotep, like Solomon, was relentless in his pursuit of women for his harem, especially beautiful foreign women of both royal and common backgrounds alike.⁽³⁶⁾ Amenhotep's harem included two princesses from Babylon,⁽³⁷⁾ two princesses from Syria, two princesses from Mitanni, and like Solomon's harem, it included a princess from each of the seven nations listed in 1 Kings 11:1.⁽³⁸⁾ As the mightiest king of the Middle East, Amenhotep did not send any of his own daughters to other kings in exchange, nor did any other Pharaoh of this dynasty (or likely any other throughout Egypt's history).⁽³⁹⁾ He specifically denied a request by the king of Babylon for an Egyptian wife.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Importantly, the Bible emphasizes Solomon's Egyptian bride, but does not mention that Solomon had any Hebrew wives.⁽⁴¹⁾ Rehoboam, who is said to have succeeded Solomon, was the son of an Ammonite princess.⁽⁴²⁾

Palace of Amenhotep III in Thebes, wher (queen shebawalked with her dress raised from the tiles that looked like a pond) and where it housed over  five hundred wives of the king

The court of Amenhotep III was an extremely liberal one, and reflected every possible excess of an affluent and secure kingdom.⁽⁴³⁾ Eroticism in art and court life reached its height during the reign of Amenhotep.⁽⁴⁴⁾ The famous "nude dancing girls" mural dates to Amenhotep's reign.⁽⁴⁵⁾ As with Solomon, Amenhotep denied himself nothing "his eyes desired" and "refused his heart no pleasure" (Ecclesiastes 2:10). However, the last years of Amenhotep's thirty-eight year reign were not pleasant ones. The long years of indulgence had taken their toll and he had many ailments. As a compassionate gesture, his Mitanni brother-in-law⁽⁴⁶⁾ sent him an idol of the goddess Ishtar (i.e., Asherah)(1 Kings 11:5).

The King Amenhotep III bedroom in Malkata Palace

The "inescapable conclusion"⁽⁴⁷⁾ is that the story of Solomon was patterned specifically after the life of Amenhotep III. The name Solomon itself, which literally means "peace" or "safety" points to Amenhotep III whose long and pervasive reign in the 14th Century B.C. did not include any major military campaigns, but was characterized by unprecedented stability throughout the Near East.⁽⁴⁸⁾ After the Egyptian 18th Dynasty, the region between the two great rivers was not controlled by a single power again until the Assyrian empire of Ashurbanipal (the grandson of Sennacherib) who invaded Egypt and pillaged Thebes in the 7th Century B.C.,⁽⁴⁹⁾ and the 6th Century B.C. empire of Cyrus, who also conquered Egypt and made it a Persian province.⁽⁵⁰⁾ There is no evidence of any empire at any time controlling this region whose capital was Jerusalem.⁽⁵¹⁾

Solomon is said to have had "a thousand and four hundred" chariots (1 Kings 1:26). This represents a prodigious army by ancient standards, and one which could only have been amassed over a long period of time by an established civilization.⁽⁵²⁾ Yet we are told that only five years after the great King Solomon's death, the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak and his allies invaded Judah and captured its fortified cities with little or no military resistance (2 Chron. 12). The Bible adds that Jerusalem itself was spared only after delivering up the entirety of King Solomon's accumulated wealth to Shishak.

The rapidness with which Solomon's empire was established, as described by the Bible, and the ease with which it shortly thereafter submitted to a foreign power is also not consistent with the pattern set by other great ancient civilizations.

In the New Chronology model, the Pharaoh Seti I ascends in Egypt around the middle of the fourty year reign attributed to Solomon. Shortly after his coronation, Seti I and the Egyptian army set out to deal with a crisis in Palestine. The Karnak account states, "their chiefs are gathered... on the hills of Palestine,"⁽²⁾ and that "Beth Shean was under attack from a Canaanite king and could not get help."⁽³⁾ Beth Shean is listed as one of the most important Solomonic cities, and yet it is Seti I who is taking action to defend Egyptian interests there.

The Bible does not mention this Egyptian military intervention. However, it does mention the capture of Gezer by the army of Egypt during the reign of Solomon. The Bible also records that Solomon had troubling adversaries, e.g., Jeroboam who is said to have fled from Solomon to the Pharaoh Shishak in Egypt; Rezon, the former minister of Hadadezer (identified by Rohl as Aziru of the Amarna letters) in Damascus; and Hadad in Edom (I Kings 11:14-40). Osman notes that both the Bible and the Talmud agree that Solomon was not the original name of the local monarch, but perhaps Jedediah.⁽⁴⁾

It is too obvious that the fictional Solomon Stories were Taken from the life of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, since he was always referred to as the King of Peaceful Times.

One of the most amazing discoveries of all time occurred in 1999 in Egypt. In 1999 Archaeologist Edgar Pusch of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany discovered the floor remains of an immense temple ruin with the gold dust floors still intact under nearly sixty centimeters of Nile mud about 100 kilometers north of Cairo, Egypt, in the area assigned by Biblical literature to the dwelling place of the Hebrews in Egypt.

Nothing like it has ever been found in Egypt before. Because the cartouche (hieroglyphic insignia of the king) of Ramses II has been found there, the Temple has been assigned to Ramses II.

As shown in other pages of LexiLine and from the revised dating of the birth of Moses to ca. 1700 BC on the authority of Artapanus, Ramses II can only have been the famed King Solomon. Hence the temple floors discovered by Pusch belonged to the destroyed FIRST Temple of Solomon.

It is the temple in which Solomon kept the Ark of the Covenant. The floors are made of a substance into which great amounts of gold dust were mixed. When one walks on them, the shoes leave a trail of gold dust in the air behind, verifying the legend of the wealth of Solomon, according to which even the dust of the streets in Per-Ramses (Pi-Ramesse) was of gold.
 

The legendary king of Israel, King David's son and successor, which reign became known as Israel’s golden age. His date of birth is placed between 975 and 970 BC, and his death between 928 and 922 BC.

Building on David’s achievements, Solomon instituted a proficient centralized government, with a professional army and an advanced trade network. Above all, he poured attention on Jerusalem, raising superb public buildings and palaces, and carrying out his father’s plan to construct a Temple for the Lord, worthy to house the Ark of the Covenant.

Solomon had about 700 wives and 300 concubines. Many of the exotic women were in fact living treaties. He sustained alliances by taking wives from the family of every ruler willing to sign a treaty. He even kept mighty Egypt out of Israel by marrying an Egyptian princess, daughter of a Pharaoh Shishaq / Shoshenq, and that Shishaq paid the city of Gaza as a Dowry to Solomon.

By loving so many foreign women and allowing them to continue their own forms of worship corrupting the Holy City with their exotic rituals and gods, Solomon not only tolerated this paganism but also participated in it himself. Some even say that he became a skilled sorcerer. According to one of the many legends about him, Solomon used pagan magic to imprison 72 rebellious evil Demons into a brass vessel, throwing it then into a deep lake, where they were supposed to stay until the end of time. In an attempt to find great treasure, the Babylonians rescued the vessel and broke it open, allowing the demons to escape. These devils became known as the 72 spirits of Solomon.

Pharaoh Shishaq According to the bible conquered and sacked Jerusalem Just when Solomon Died. The Sack of Jerusalem

 Very fanciful, false and doubtful 

1-since It is man who pays Dowry to marry a woman, especially if Solomon wanted to keep the might of Egypt out of his lands.

2-According to all the Diplomatic letters of correspondence found between Egypt And other Nations, it was customary for these princes and kings to marry their daughters and sisters to the Egyptian kings as a form of respect and alliance to the ruling Egypt who were a super power in her days.

In the case of the references to Solomon’s marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter, several other facts lessen confidence in their historical reliability. First, as noted above, there is nothing in the references to indicate that they were drawn from any first-hand source; that is, any account that was written close in time to the events and by a person or persons in a position to know the facts about Solomon’s reign. Quite the contrary—Had the biblical writers been drawing from first-hand sources found in archives or records coming from Solomon’s time, they surely would have included the names of the pharaoh and his daughter. After all, the point of a royal marriage of this sort was to establish an alliance, and listing the names of the participants was indispensable to this process. Also, a comparison of these notices to the biblical report about Shoshenq’s (Shishak’s) campaign in Palestine (1 Kings 14:22-25) immediately shows the differences. In the latter, not only is a year given, but a specific king’s name is also mentioned. Neither of these data is found in the reports of the marriage. Nor is the princess’s name given. Undoubtedly when the biblical authors had access to specific names, places, dates and such, they included them. Therefore, the references to Solomon’s marriage resemble tradition and stock royal ideology not first-hand reports drawn from inscriptions, annals, archives, etc.

Second, we have explicit evidence from Egypt itself that pharaohs did not marry their daughters to foreigners. In a letter dating to the time of Amenhotep III (ca. 14th century BCE), Kadashman-Enlil I, king of Babylon, quoted Amenhotep III as having said, “From of old a daughter of the king of the land of Egypt was not given to anyone.” Indeed, from what is otherwise known of the Amarna period, the time of Amenhotep III, Egyptian pharaohs regularly married princesses from foreign countries, but never allowed their own daughters to marry a foreign potentate. Moreover, an analysis of Egyptian evidence from the time of David and Solomon supports this fact by showing a lack of marriages of pharaoh’s daughters to foreigners. Although a few scholars have attempted to demonstrate that such marriages occurred, primarily when Egypt was weak, my analysis of their published evidence and arguments shows that their claim does not hold up. To date, there are no clearly attested marriages of princesses of reigning pharaohs to foreigners. All of these considerations should make us skeptical of the historical reliability of the biblical reports of Solomon’s marriage to an Egyptian princess. True, we cannot prove that it never happened, but prudence and caution make it necessary to avoid placing any weight on these reports in our reconstruction of relations between Egypt and Palestine during Solomon’s reign.

When I was in Israel in 1968 1 took the tourist bus to view the so-called "Pillars of Solomon --impressive geological structures north of Eilat. I smiled within myself at the knowledge which the other tourists did not have that we were in an area of ancient copper mining activities as slag heaps were all around. Later I learned to my chagrin that Benno Rothenberg in 1969 discovered at the base of those pillars an Egyptian temple with inscriptions of the XlXth-XXth Dynasties dating from the 14th to the 12th centuries B.C. Rothenberg therefore maintained that these were earlier Egyptian mines and not Solomon's. ⁷⁵ In a recent article Bimson argues that radio-carbon dates do indicate that the Timna mines were being utilized during Solomon's reign.⁷⁶

EDWIN M. YAMAUCHI
History Department
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056

It is too obvious that

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The Tel Amarna Tablets

Biblical Parallels in the Time of David

"In 1887, 380 clay tablets were discovered in Egypt at a place called Tell el-Amarna and have come to be known as the Amarna tablets. These tablets were letters from foreign rulers, mainly of city-states but also of the more powerful northern kingdoms of present-day Syria, Turkey and Cyprus, as well as what was once Babylonia and Assyria. They were written to the Egyptian pharaoh of the day; this was Amenhotep IV who soon changed his name to the famous Akhenaten.
"The tablets were carried to Egypt, transcribed onto papyrus from the original Akkadian/Cuneiform script into heiroglyphs for the pharaoh to read and then the original tablets stored at Amarna to be discovered some 3000 years later."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

According to conventional chrononology, Amenhotep III ruled from 1402 to 1364 B.C.E. and his son Akhenaton from 1364-1347 B.C.E.

Amenhotep IV "revived the ancient cult of the sun god in the form of Aten (the disc of the sun). Amenhotep believed that the Aten revealed himself only to his 'son', the king. He changed his name to Akhenaten ('living spirit of the Aten') in honor of his god."
     - The Useborne Book of the Ancient World"

"The Akkadian language was the lingua franca of the time [of the Pharaoh Akhenaten] and was used as the official language of correspondence between the city-state rulers of the Levant and Pharaoh. The majority of the tablets found at Amarna were letters sent to Egypt from these city-state rulers or file copies of replies from Pharaoh (EA 45 to EA 382), but there was also correspondence from the 'Great Kings' of the powerful northern kingdoms of Mitanni, Hatti (Turkey), Alashiya (Cyprus), Karduniash (Babylonia) and Assyria (EA 1 to EA 45)."
"In the Amarna Letters to Pharaoh from the city-state rulers of Palestine and Syria (including Phoenicia) we find copious references to a group of people called the habiru (or in Sumerian logogram-form 'SA.GAZ')."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1973), pp. 196, 200

"Some of them were anxious letters written from Jerusalem (Urusalim), warning the pharaoh an invasion by the 'Habiru [Khabiru]', approaching from Trans-Jordan."
     - Immanuel Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos

Akhenaton's mother, Queen Tiye, was evidiently the recipient of the letters addressed to her son and ignored the pleas for help.

"The Amarna tablets paint a picture of a tribal Palestine ruled by various city-state rulers of Canaanite, Philistine and Israelite/Hebrew origin as well as the larger state of Amurru/Aram to the north, very much corroborating the biblical picture of Samuel. They tell us that the coastal plains were in the hands of Philistines of Indo-European origin, dominated by city-state rulers with Indo-European names who communicate with Pharaoh Akhenaten in the Amarna letters. The Bible tells of the coastal plains being out of the control of Saul and under Philistine rule. The city of Gezer in the Amarna letters is under Canaanite rulers; Gezer in the Bible is under Canaanite rule until given to Solomon as a dowry by Pharaoh in I Kings 9:16."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

(1) David in the Time of Tuthmosis III?

Kings Saul and David reigned in the 10th century B.C.E. according to the biblical chronology but Josephus dates David to a far earlier period.

"He was buried by his son Solomon, in Jerusalem, with great magnificence, and with all the other funeral pomp which kings used to be buried with; moreover, he had great and immense wealth buried with him, the vastness of which may be easily conjectured at by what I shall now say; for a thousand and three hundred years afterward [in the time of] Hyrcanus the high priest, when he was besieged by Antiochus..."
     - Josephus Flavius, Antiquities of the Jews

The seige of the second Temple in Jerusalem by Antiochus can accurately be dated to 167 B.C.E. Adding another thousand and three hundred years puts David's funeral at 1467 B.C.E., or almost 450 years before the generally accepted date (circa 1020 B.C.E.) This, according to conventional chronology, would be during the reign of the greatest Egyptian warrior-pharoah Tuthmosis III [1490-1436 B.C.E.], who extended the Egyptian empire to its furthest limits.

"The David who established an empire that stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates can only have lived in the fifteenth century B.C...The Israelite infiltration of Canaan, the Promised land, was a fragmentary process that did not gather pace until after Egypt lost control over Palestine in the second half of the twelfth century B.C...The David whose main campaigns were against the Philistines cannot have lived before the twelfth century B.C. because that was when the mass invasion of the coastal plain of Canaan by the Philistines took place."
"The King of Qadesh, a strong fortified city on the River Orontes in northern Syria, led a Syrio-Canaanite confederacy in a general rebellion against Egypt. In response, Thuthmosis III marched into western Asia to regain the territories between the Nile and Euphrates that had been conquered forty years earlier by his grandfather, Thuthmosis I. In the next twenty years he led a total of seventeen campaigns in western Asia, at the end of which he had earned himself the reputation as the mightiest of all the kings of the ancient world. The account of these various wars, copied from the daily records of the scribe who accompanied the army on its campaigns, is to be found in the Annals, a 223-line document that covers the inside of the walls enclosing the corridor surrounding the granite holy of holies Thuthmosis III built at Karnak."
     - Ahmen Osman, The House of the Messiah

"It is remarkable that none of the letters from Tel Amarna refer to central Palestine. There is no mention of any town in lower Galilee or in Samaria, except Zabuba, and Megiddo. Taanach, Shechem, Jezreel, Dothan, Bethel, and other such places are unnoticed, as well as Heshbon, Medeba, Rabbath-Amon, Ramoth-Gilead, and the places in Moab and Gilead. The Egyptians probably had no stations in these wild mountains, where their chariots could not pass. No towns in the regions of Samaria or Gilead or Moab occur in the list of places taken by Thothmoses III; nor were there any stations in the Hebron mountains. The nearest places to Hebron seem to have been Nezeb, in the valley of Elah, easily reached by a broad, flat road, and on the south Kanaan (Kanana), a fortress, which is only two miles southwest of Hebron. The inhabitants of Hebron were never apparently disturbed by the chariots, and appear in the Tel Amarna tablets as marauders of the Egyptian stations. On the other hand, many places in Sharon and Philistina, and in the lower hills to the east, and in the Nezeb hills south of Hebron, were conquered by Thothmoses III."
     - The Tel Amarna Tablets, translated by C.R. Conder, 2ed., London, 1894

(2) David in the Time of Thutmose IV?

"The city of Beth-shan was long an Egyptian outpost and during his first battle against the Canaanites, one of the local kings killed in the valley of Beth-shan, was placed on the city walls along with that king's slain sons, as was customary for Amenhotep II."
      - Encyclopedia Brittianica, "Amenhotep II"

"Thutmose III's forces controlled much of Palestine after his victory over the locals at Megiddo in 1438 BCE. During the time of Saul at one of the Battles in the valley of Ephesdam'mim, the enemy's champion had challenged the Israelite forces for forty days before David came forward to take it up. Goliath was defeated, and the Egyptians were driven back to their border. Years later Saul was killed in Battle by Amenhotep II in the valley of Beth-shan, near Mt. Gilbo'a."
"Many letters were written to the King of Egypt, accusing A'chish of treason against the alliance and being tied in with the "men of blood" from the central hill country of Palestine."
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

"The leader of the 'men of blood' is in another letter shown to be D_D. This is demonstrated to be David."
     - C.R. Conder, "The Tel Amarna Tablets" 2ed, London, 1894

"At this time David was pretending to be in league with the Egyptians, a confederate of A'chish. But he trusted David completely, never realizing that David had been raiding the cities of the alliance. David was made king over the tribe of Judah and ruled from Hebron. He continued to make raids on the various Egyptain outposts throughout the Palestine area. And many letters were written to Egypt complaining about the "marauders" and "men of blood" based around the hills of Hebron.
"Three years after Saul's death David became king over all Israel. In his seventh year as king, David besieged Jerusalem and took it within five months. Ebed Kheba wrote several letters to Egypt asking for help and why did the Egyptian troops withdraw from Zion.
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

"Why do you tremble before the chief of the Habiri and the rulers fear the end?'"
     - Ebed Kheba to Egypt from the El-Amarna letters

"Soon Thutmose IV sent out a large force to fight against king David in the valley of the Giants. This was made up from the armies of the alliance and troops from Egypt as well. However, David's army caught them by surprise and defeated Thutmose IV's force and drove them all the way back to Egypt's boundary south of Gaza.

"King Abimel (Hiram) of Tyre sought to make a treaty with David after Jo'ab defeated him and others of the alliance."
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

"...As to Ben Zechariah (another of David's captains) the King has sent not to attack. Lo! Ben Zechariah with men of blood was known to us to march, and we are conquering him. He gives up Abukasu. Once more he has made peace."
     - Biridia to Egypt from the El-Amarna letters

"David went up into Syria and in league with the king of Egypt as one of his vassals, fought and defeated Du Srutta king of Mittia. This figure is better known in the Old Testament as Hadad'ezer of Zoab."
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

"In the Amarna letters, Jerusalem is ruled by Jebusites, a Hurrian elite race. In II Samuel 5:6,7, this is also the case until the city is conquered by David. The name of the ruler of Jerusalem is given in the Amarna letters as Abdiheba, a mixed Semitic/Hurrian name. The Amarna tablets tell of the whole region of Syria dominated by kings of Amorite stock including a king Aziru. The Bible in II Samuel speaks of this kingdom being Aram and the king being Hadadezer, one of David's enemies. Aziru is considered to be the accepted shortening or hypocoristicon of a longer, more formal name. Given that Hadad was a prominent god of the Arameans and that -Aziru (or -ezer) means helper of', it can be seen that the Amarna letters use the shortened name of the Aramean king Helper of Hadad' or Hadadezer, a startling biblical confirmation."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

"The name 'fierceness as the lion is his strength,' in Hebrew is rendered Hadad'ezer and in the Syrian (Persian) is rendered as Du(r) Srutta."
     - Rev. R.N. Palmer, "Reflections on Biblical Histories, Part 1" CCU, 1997.

"He [David] then went further and defeated the other Syrian forces that came to Du Srutta's aid. After this David put a garrison at Damascus to put down any insurrections that may have followed.
"David was feared for his guerrilla military tactics, using nature to his advantage in over coming his enemies. He was known for many things, but not for being a prominent member of the Egyptian alliance in Palestine, nor his becoming a vassal for the Pharaoh."
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

"The first of many Judean kings who served under the sovereignty of Egypt. Solomon [son of David] is the most noted."
     - Shem B. Toshawb, "The True Hebrew Antiquities" CCU, 1984.

David's low profile in the alliance "may be the fault of the historians who gave the victories of the foreign kings in their lands little to no credit, while on the other hand heaping all the glory upon the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, the god of Canaanites (Ba'al). (The Egyptian kings were worshipped by their Canaanite subjects and called in both masculine and feminine forms. Statuettes have been confirmed as in the likeness of king Narmer's famous pose. [Shem B. Toshawb, The True Hebrew Antiquities and Sayce, Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, chapters V and VII])."
"So David ruled in Jerusalem for thirty two and one half years. He served as a vassal of Egypt for thirty. His deeds and his life had been recorded in the Old Testament, with the above in formation not included. The reason unknown even to this day. Though archaeologists have uncovered evidence that shows (suggests) the dominance Egypt held over the area of Palestine for centuries longer than that of the Babylonians. (From 3,000 BCE to the time of Herod the Great the Palestine area was under control of Egypt for an overall period close to 2,600 years, one way or another. The Babylonian influence was mainly in trade and correspondence language.)
"But David showed that by being a member of the Egyptian alliance that The Israelites could be masters over their own country. His accomplishments should reflect this achievement along side all else recorded concerning him."
      Rev. R.N. Palmer, "King David of Israel - His Place in History" (July 28th 1997)

(3) David as 'Malchiel'?

At the time of the Tel Amarna tablets Jerusalem was controlled by the Jeb'usites. Their ruler, Ebed-Kheba [a Hittite name] , was unsuccessful in preventing the Egyptian garrisons from abandoning their positions before the Khabiru governor lay siege to the city. The Khabiru governor's name was 'Malchiel' (God's appointed) who had remarkable parallels to the biblical King David.

Malchiel "lived in Hebron, governed the area there, married a daughter of Tagi, took Jerusalem and proclaimed himself king of the Hebrews."
"It appears that the Egyptian royal court knew about David [Malchiel] and allowed him to make raids on the other districts and take over the district that belonged to the Jeb'usites and Jerusalem as well."
     - Rev. Robert Palmer (private correspondence)

"To the king my lord thus says Ebed-Kheba thy servant: at the feet of my lord the king seven times seven I prostrate myself. Behold, Malchi'el has not separated himself from the sons of Labbawa and the sons of Arzawaya so as to claim the king's land for them. A governor who commits such an act, why has not the king questioned him (about it)? Behold Malchi'el and Tagi have committed such an act by seizing the city of Rabbah. And now as to Jerusalem, if this land belongs to the king, why is it that Gaza has been appointed for the (residence of the) king ('s commisssioner)? Behold the land of Gath-Carmel is in the power of Tagi, and the men of Gath are (his) bodyguard. He is (now) in Beth-Sannah. But (nevertheless) we will act. Malchi'el wrote to Tagi that they should give Labbawa and Mt. Shechem to the district of the Khabiri, and he took some boys as slaves. They granted all their demands to the people of Keilah. But we will rescue Jerusalem. The garrison which youi sent by Khaya the son of Meri-Ra been taken by Hadad-mikhir and stationed in his house at Gaza. [I have sent messengers] to Egypt, [and may] the king [listen to me]....There is no garrison of the king [here]. Verily by the life of the king Pa-ur has gone down to Egypt; he has left me and is in Gaza. But let the king entrust to him a garrison for the defense of the land. All the land of the king has revolted. Send Yenkhamu and let him take charge of the king's land."
     - Tel Amarna Collection (Archaeology of Cuneiform Insriptions, Chapter VII)

Bringing the Time Frame Forward

(1) Dating by Astronomy

"To the king, my Sun, my god, my gods. Message of Abimilku, your servant...Fire destroyed the palace at Ugarit; (rather) it destroyed half of it and so half of it has disappeared."
     - El-Amarna Letter EA 151 (written after the death of Amenhotep III in the twelth year of Akhenaten)

"The day of the new moon of Hiyaru was put to shame as the sun (goddess) set, with Raspap as her gate-keeper."
     - Tablet KTU-1.78 (found in the "Western Archive" of Ugarit, burned by the fire)

"...King Nikmaddu II and the priests of Ugarit watched with foreboding from the roof of the temple of Baal as the day was 'put to shame at sunset' at precisely 6.09pm on the 9th of May 1012 BC - just thirty minutes before the sun set! Close to the eclipsed solar disc was a giant star which would explode so violently some two thousand years later. Astronomers have christened this spectacular supernova the Crab Nebula. The god Rashap who attended the sun's entry into the nether-world was a giant star approaching its nemesis."
This is the only "candidate for a near-sunset total eclipse at Ugarit in April/May [the month of Hiyyaru] during the second millennium BC."

"This entirely independent chronological determination confirms that the el-Amarna period fell in the late eleventh century BC and not in the mid fourteenth century BC as previously believed."
"The 18th Dynasty did not begin in circa 1570 BC, as the conventional chronology proposes, but rather some three hundred and seventy-seven years later in 1194 BC."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 239, 240, 241

This moves the time frame of the Amarna letters forward to the era of Saul and David - 1010 to 971 B.C.E.

(2) A Lawless Period

"From the Amarna Letters we can see that the Habiru groups are comprised of stateless persons who are outside the normal protection of city-state law. The adult males tend to be fighting men who hire themselves out to the local rulers as mercenaries. In the earliest letters a number of the city rulers have platoons of Habiru troops which they use to guard their petty kingdoms and sometimes to settle feuds over disputed territory."
"The general political topography of the Levant in the Amarna period closely corresponds to that described in the second book of Samuel which deals with the beginning of the United Monarchy period in Israelite history."

"The hill country to the north of Jerusalem is dominated by a king who shows scant respect towards Egyptian sovereignty in Palestine. His hypocoristic name is Labau - his fuller name being unknown. Moran [Les Lettres d'el-Amarna: Correspondance diplomatique du pharaon] suggests that name should be understood as 'Great Lion [of N]' where 'N' represents the name of a deity."
King Saul had "a royal bodyguard named the 'Great Lions' and...a corps of Saul's archers who were 'servants of the great lioness'..."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1973), p. 200, 205, 206

Hiding from Saul's men in the cave of En-Gedi, David wrote:

"I am in the midst of lions; I lie among ravenous beasts-- men whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords."
     - Psalm 57:4

Labayu contended for power with the kings of Jerusalem and Gezer, and had possession of the hill country and attempted to penetrate the Jezreel valley, laying siege to Megiddo. He sent an uncompromising letter to the pharoah (probably Amenhotep III).

"If an ant is struck, does it not fight back and bit the hand of the man that struck it?"
     - El-Amarna Letter EA 252

"As already recognized by; the interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew."
     - W. F. Albright, "Two Little Understood Amarna Letters from the Middle Jordan Valley"Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 89 p. 11

There are close parallels between Labayu's seizure of his home town and sacred site, and Saul's campaigns against Geba/Gibeah where a Philistine pillar had been erected at a high place sacred to the Israelites.

"Jonathan smashed the Philistine pillar which was at Gibeah and the Philistines learnt that the Hebrews had risen in revolt. Saul had the trumpet sounded throughout the country and the whole of Israel heard the news: 'Saul has smashed the Philistine pillar and now Israel has incurred the enmity of the Philistines.'"
     - I Samuel 13:3-5

"This event is mentioned by Labayu as he writes to the Pharaoh in EA 252, to say that he was recapturing his home town which was taken by the Philistines, even after it had been agreed in the presence of the governor from Egypt that this would not happen!

"In EA 254, Labayu's third letter to Pharaoh, he reprimands his own son for consorting with the Habiru/Hebrews without his knowledge. This is also told in I Samuel 20:30,31."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

Saul (the "Lion [of Yahweh]'") was eventually killed on Mount Gilboa, to be succeeded by his youngest son and son-in-law (David) . In the Amarna letters, Labayu was also smitten and replaced by "the two sons of Labayu"

"The deaths of Saul and his sons, Jonathan, Abinadab and Malkishua are recorded in I Samuel 31. They occur at the battle of Mount Gilboa in a clash with the Philistines. After gathering at the fountain of Jezreel, the Israelites retreated into the mountains so that the Philistines could not make use of their chariots and cavalry. How the Philistines were successful in pursuing Saul up the mountains is not clear in the Bible but the Amarna tablets answer some intriguing questions. In EA 250, a ruler of a city-state reports to Pharaoh that Saul's surviving sons have asked for help to inflict revenge on a city called Gina (biblical En-Ganim) for killing their father. Also, in EA 245, Biridiya, Philistine ruler of Megiddo, writes to say that when he arrived on the battle field, Labayu was already dead and so could not be taken alive and sent to Egypt for public execution as Pharaoh had wanted."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

(2) David in the Time of Akhenaten?

"The most striking parallels by far are found in the story of David's outlawry....[David's gang] roam the countryside seeking the favor and protection of cities (Keilah), wealthy individuals (Nabal), and kings (?Nahash of Ammon, cf. II Samuel 10:2). Finally David offers the services of his band (600 men - a veritable army!) to Achish, king of Gath. Achish assigns them quarters ('gives them' in biblical and el-Amarna usage) in Ziklag. The town becomes the military base of their marauding operations."
     - George Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, pp. 135-136

"David's power begins to rise after the death of Saul; after seven and a half years, he is king of all Israel. As his power increases, we read in the Amarna letters desperate pleas for help from Pharaoh against the rampaging Hebrews. Most poignant of all comes from the Jebusite king of Jerusalem, Abdiheba. In EA 288 he writes that he is an island amidst a sea of violence as cities fall to the Hebrews round about him. The fall of Lachish is recorded and Pharaoh is reminded that he has done nothing to help. The king asks to be brought to Egypt with his brothers for safety. However, there never was a rescue as in 1003 BC, David conquered Jerusalem; nothing is ever heard from Abdiheba again in the Amarna letters!"
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

"Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion, the City of David."
     - II Samuel 5:7

"May the king, my lord, be informed that my younger brother, having become my enemy, entered Muhhazu and pledged himself to the Habiru. As Tianna is at war with me, take thought for your land."
     - El-Amarna Letter EA 298

"The Hebrew ts (tsade) is often interchanged with a hard t (tet) in other west-semitic languages such as Ugaritic, Pheonician and Aramaic, and also in Indo-European Greek."
"With this linguistic trait in mind you will clearly be able to recognize the Amarna period city of Tian (with its Akkadian termination '-na') as the equivalent of Hebrew Tsiyon which the English Bibles translate as Zion."
"The situation described in several of the Amarna Letters from Palestine reflects the activities of David during his seven years as king of Hebron prior to the capture of Jerusalem. The stronghold of the Habiru enemy from the mountains mentioned in the late Amarna letters EA 298, 284 and 306 - there named Tian-na - is to be identified with the 'fortress of Zion' (Heb. Tsiyon) captured by David in his eighth regnal year - in other words Jerusalem."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 227

"The war between the house of Saul and the house of David lasted a long time. David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul grew weaker and weaker."
     - II Samuel 3:1

"After the death of Saul/Labayu, we know from the biblical account that Saul's son Ishbaal/Ish-Bosheth and David vied for power (II Samuel 3:1). Ishbaal fled across the Jordan after the death of his father and from there he wrote to Pharaoh the tablet EA 256 (in the British Museum)..."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

"Say to Yanhamu, my lord: Message of Mutbaal, your servant. I fall at the feet of my lord. How can it be said in your presence, Mutbaal has fled. He has hidden Ayab'? How can the king of Pella flee from the commissioner, agent of the king, his lord? As the king, my lord, lives, as the king my lord lives, I swear Ayab is not in Pella. In fact, he has been in the field (i.e. on campaign) for 2 months. Just ask Benenima. Just ask Dadua. Just ask Yishuya."
     - El-Amarna Letter EA 256

·"Yanhamu is the official representative of Pharaoh in Palestine."
·"Pella is one of the Israelite strongholds across the Jordan."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

"El-Amarna letter EA 256 contains the names of five of the leading players from the books of Samuel. The letter itself is written by Ishbaal [= Mutbaal =' man of Baal], son of Saul, who in turn refers to Joab [= Ayab = 'Ya(weh) is the father'] (David's military commander), Baanah [= Benenima = 'son of Ana'] (one of Israel's chieftains), David [= Dadua = 'the beloved (of Yahweh)] (ruler of Hebron and son-in-law of Saul), and finally Jesse [= Yishuya = '(Yahweb) exists'] (father of David)."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 229

"As well as confirming the names of these characters, the Amarna letters even contain the name Goliath in its Akkadian form Gulatu (in EA 292 and 294)!"
"It is interesting to note that the only other mention of David found to date is the Tell Dan Stela/Tablet, dated to the mid-9th century BC and mentioning the House of David'."
     - John Fulton, "A New Chronology - Synopsis of David Rohl's book 'A Test of Time'"

"King David, the dynastic founder of Israelite Jerusalem, was a contemporary of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ay and Haremheb (early reign) in Egypt and the Hittite emperor, Suppiluliumas I. He forged his kingdom in the historical period when Egypt was politically and militarily weak and when the latter's northern ally, the kingdom of Mitanni, was disintegrating under the combined pressure of the Hittites to the west and the Assyrians to the north-east."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 231

"Thou dost appear beautiful on the horizon of heaven, 0' living Aten, thou who wast the first to live. When thou hast risen on the eastern horizon, Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty.
Thou art fair, great, dazzling, high above every land; Thy rays encompass the lands to the very limit of all thou hast made.Being Re, thou dost reach to their limit And curb them [for] thy beloved son;Though thou art distant, they rays arc upon the earth;"
"The whole land performs its labor. All beasts are satisfied with their pasture;
Trees and plants arc verdant. The birds which fly from their nests, their wings are (spread) in adoration to thy soul;
All flocks skip with (their) feet; All that fly up and alight Live when thou has risen [for] them.
Ships sail upstream and downstream alike, For every route is open at thine appearing. The fish in the river leap before thee for thy rays are in the midst of the sea."
"Mankind, cattle, all flocks, Everything on earth which walks with (its) feet, And what are on high, flying with their wings.The foreign lands of Hurru and Nubia, the land of Egypt - Thou dost set each man in his place and supply his needs."
     - Hymn to the Aten 1-9, 30-40, 55-59,

"Praise the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty. He wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters."
"He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
The birds of the air nest by the waters; they sing among the branches.
He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate..."
     - Psalm 104:1-3a, 10-14a,

"The cities and royal residences of LB IIA-B in Palestine were built of fine ashlar masonry befitting the 'Phoenician tradition' as described in Kings and Chronicles. The literary tradition of Psalms would now be set in an era of great hymns and epic poetry, vividly represented in the literature of LBA Ugarit. Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Aten', so often closely compared to Psalm 104, would have been composed in Egypt when King David, the author of Psalm 104, ruled in Israel. Without question, both culturally and historically, the Late Bronze Age best reflects the era of the rise and then artistic culmination of Israel's United Monarchy."
     - David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 328

The Egyptian House of David

If King Solomon is to be properly identified as an adaptation of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, then the source of his predecessor, King David, should also be found in Egypt. Consistent with this premise, Osman has compared the account in the Bible of David and his wars with the exploits of Amenhotep III's great grandfather, the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III.⁽¹⁾ Not only are their achievements equivalent, but so are their very names.

Thutmose is a compound name comprised of Thut (from Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom) and mose (an Egyptian title or suffix indicating son or rightful heir). In the ancient Egyptian language, words were written without vowels. Thut was, therefore, written as Twt. The ancient Hebrew language, although very different from Egyptian, originally derived its written structure from the Egyptian language.⁽²⁾ As with Egyptian, the consonants were written and the vowels were vocalized only. Transliterating the Egyptian word twt into Hebrew, because of their similar alphabets, leads to dvd. Reinserting the vowels for pronunciation in Hebrew leads directly to David!⁽³⁾ Moreover, it was the Egyptian King David (Thutmose III) who had defeated an earlier coalition of Syrian and Canaanite kings, and as described in the Bible, had established garrisons⁽⁴⁾ in these regions in order to permanently secure Egyptian control there (2 Samuel 8:5,6).⁽⁵⁾ At the beginning of the Egyptian 17th Dynasty, much of Egypt was still being dominated by foreign rulers known as the Hyksos. Through the initiative of the early Pharaohs of the 17th Dynasty, the Hyksos were attacked and eventually driven out of Egypt during the reign of Ahmose I. Ahmose and his son Amenhotep I extended their campaigns into Asia, "principally to deter any fresh incursions by roving bands into the Eastern Delta [of Egypt]".⁽⁶⁾

When Amenhotep I died without a male heir, he was succeeded by the commander of the army who became Pharaoh Thutmose I. Inspired by previous successes,⁽⁷⁾ Thutmose I, now as Pharaoh, led his army into Canaan and Syria and crossed the Euphrates River at the fords of Carchemish. After routing Mitanni forces, he set up a monument (stele) to his achievement on the north side of the Euphrates.⁽⁸⁾

The heiress daughter of Thutmose I, Hatshepsut was married to her step-brother Thutmose II who became Pharaoh. Thutmose II and Hatshepsut had no surviving sons. After the death of Thutmose II, his young son Thutmose III (by a minor wife Isis who was possibly of foreign birth)⁽⁹⁾ was denied the throne by Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut continued to rule even after Thutmose III had clearly come of age.

When the male blood line of the founding dynasty ended at the death of Amenhotep I, an even greater emphasis was thereafter placed on preservation of the female blood line⁽¹⁰⁾ which by this time had already distinguished itself and wielded considerable power. Ahhotep I had become an interim ruler upon the death of her husband Ahmose I and was immortalized for rallying Egypt's forces against the Hyksos. Her daughter Ahmose-Nefertari was given the title, High Priestess of Amun, and was the first to be designated as the "God's Wife."⁽¹¹⁾ (The royal offspring of 18th Dynasty Pharaohs were considered to have been conceived through Devine visitation of the state god Amun with the "God's Wife."⁽¹²⁾ This concept is clearly demonstrated by large murals in the mortuary temples of both Hatshepsut and Amenhotep III.) Ahmose-Nefertari was, according to the famous turn of the century archeologist Flinders Petrie, "the most venerated figure of Egyptian History."⁽¹³⁾

Upon Hatshepsut's death, the succession of Thutmose III was complicated not only by his own paucity of royal blood, but by the fact that Hatshepsut's daughter Neferure (and holder of the titles "Gods Wife" and virgin High Priestess of Amun) was also no longer living. The nubile princess who could claim the strongest relation to Ahhotep I and Nefertari was found to be Merit-re, the daughter of Huy, the Superior of the Royal Harem. Thutmose III was married to Merit-ra, and in an official ceremony confirmed (cf., Psalm 2:7) as Pharaoh and "adopted" as the son of Amun.⁽¹⁴⁾

It is recorded that the God/Amun and Father of Thutmose III's spoke of him, "I grant thee by decree the earth in its length and breadth. The tribes of the East and those of the West ... that thy conquests may embrace all lands ... I ordain that all aggressors arising against thee shall fail..."⁽¹⁵⁾

Of David, it was written in Psalm 2, "I will proclaim the decree ... 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father ... I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them...'"

Queen Hatshepsut had built impressively in Egypt but had shown no interest in securing an empire in Asia⁽¹⁶⁾ where Egyptian influence largely eroded. The long frustrated Thutmose III was eager to prove himself, and upon becoming Pharaoh his first act was to march out with the military. In anticipation, a formidable confederation of Canaanite and Syrian kings had already consolidated their own armies and were waiting in their camps when Thutmose III arrived in Canaan with his own. Using a risky strategic maneuver, Thutmose III divided the opposing confederation and conquered them at the original epic battle of the Valley of Armageddon (Har-Megiddon).⁽¹⁷⁾

While the nearby fortress of Megiddo was under a seven month long siege, Thutmose III led a contingent of men to Kadesh (the present day site of Jerusalem), and as the Bible describes, he "took the stronghold of Zion."⁽¹⁸⁾ Kadesh was the first of over one hundred cities listed as having been conquered by Thutmose III in this campaign as recorded in the temple of Amun at Karnak,⁽¹⁹⁾ and immediately precedes the city of Megiddo on the list. The more famous city of Kadesh in Syria, and the center of the Syrian-Canaanite opposition of that time, is known to have fallen to Thutmose III in a later military campaign.

The name Jerusalem does not show up on any of the lists of cities conquered during any Egyptian 18^thDynasty military campaign in Asia, however, it was unquestionably part of the Egyptian empire of that time. A diplomatic letter sent to a later Egyptian Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty (of whom we will learn more about shortly), was addressed from "mat Urusalim," i.e., "the land of Jerusalem." Another letter from the governor of Jerusalem during the 18th Dynasty refers to Jerusalem as a city "in which the king [i.e., the Pharaoh] has set his name" (cf. 1 Kings 11:36).⁽²⁰⁾ According to Manetho's 3rd Century B.C. History of Egypt as quoted by Josephus, Jerusalem was being ruled at this time by the Hyksos who had been expelled from Egypt by Ahmose I. It is not surprising that they readily resubmitted themselves to Thutmose III.

The name of Jerusalem (literally meaning "to establish peace or submission")⁽²¹⁾ certainly symbolized the role that it played in establishing and maintaining Egyptian control over Palestine during the 18th Dynasty. Both names are found in Chapter 11 of Nehemiah where the Hebrew reads as "Yurushalayim ha Qudesh," meaning, "Jerusalem the Holy City."⁽²²⁾ The capture of Jerusalem/Kadesh by Thutmose III also resolves the formerly unknown source of the name Zion. Zion consists of the components On (Hebrew for the holy city of On/Heliopolis in Egypt) and the Hebrew word zi (meaning arid place). Literally translated, Zion appropriately becomes "Holy City of the Desert."⁽²³⁾

The sacredness attributed to Jerusalem by the Egyptians initially derived from the transport of the Barque of Amun⁽²⁴⁾ (a holy shrine carried on poles in much the same manner as the Israelite Ark of the Covenant) to the city by Thutmose III. The shrine was normally kept within the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Amun at Karnak, however Thutmose III had carried it with him into battle.⁽²⁵⁾ It remained with him when he took up residence in Jerusalem during the prolonged siege of Megiddo.⁽²⁶⁾

After the fall of the Syrian city of Kadesh (in the Biblical region of Zobah and Hamath) during the sixth military campaign (he conducted a total of 17 in all),⁽²⁷⁾ Thutmose III was able to cross the Euphrates and erect a second stele beside that of Thutmose I.⁽²⁸⁾ In essence, Thutmose III (David) "recovered his border at the river Euphrates," (2 Samuel 8:3) that border being the one originally established by his grandfather.⁽²⁹⁾ It was at this time that Thutmose III (David) "established garrisons in Syria" as the Bible describes (2 Samuel 8:13).

Osman suggests that the tribal David, as with King Solomon, may have had been known by another name initially. Osman quotes the Encyclopedia Judaica which states, "Elhanan was David's original name, which was later changed to David."⁽³⁰⁾

    David, Solomon and Egypt: A Reassessment is a study into the life and times of David and Solomon and ancient Israel’s relations with and dependence upon ancient Egypt. The study’s two goals are:

1. To broaden the base of evidence used to determine the relations and contacts between Egypt and Palestine at the time of David and Solomon.
2. To engage the biblical evidence once again from a standard historical-critical perspective.

    Up to now, the many studies that commented on relations and contacts between Egypt and Palestine at the time of David and Solomon have engaged and elucidated only the biblical statements, giving little or no attention to what effect any Egyptian evidence might have on the question. Moreover, until this point no one has sought to compile the archaeological evidence for contacts and draw conclusions from it based on the broader contacts between Egypt and Palestine throughout ancient history. The first goal of the study, then, seeks to correct this problem.

    In realizing the study’s second goal, I have concluded that contrary to the generally accepted supposition that this period witnessed significant contacts between Egypt and Palestine, which resulted in significant Egyptian influence on Palestine, contacts were minimal. Indeed, they were considerably less intense and influential than Egyptian/Palestinian contacts earlier or later.

    Consequently, the book is divided into three chapters, as well as an Introduction and Conclusion. The Introduction provides the backdrop for the study, as well as a delineation of some of the past studies that have argued that contacts between Egypt, David and Solomon were strong, with many Egyptian influences on Israelite life during the time. Chapter 1 gives a discussion on the written evidence from Egypt pertaining to the issue. Chapter 2 details the archaeological evidence of Egyptian and Egyptian-related artifacts found dated to this time. Chapter 3 analyzes the biblical evidence. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the evidence and employs it to briefly reevaluate the many theories about Egyptian influence on Israel at the time of David and Solomon.

    After discussing the problems associated with the chronologies of Egypt and Palestine for the early first millennium BCE, Chapter 1 looks at the small handful of texts and art from Egypt that have been used to argue that significant contacts existed between Egypt and Palestine at the time of David and Solomon (ca 1000-920 BCE, the time of the late 21st and early 22nd dynasties in Egypt). Three of these are associated with the 21st dynasty:

1. Siamun’s battle relief, a fragment of a limestone relief portraying a defeat of foreigners, allegedly Philistines, by Pharaoh Siamun;
2. Papyrus Moscow 127, which mentions “Seir” (perhaps Edom); and
3. The Abydos Stela of Shoshenq, which mentions two individuals from Khor, the Syro-Palestinian coast.

    The other three texts are associated with the 22nd dynasty and include:

1. Inscriptions pertaining to Shoshenq I’s campaign to Palestine;
2. The inscription on the statue of a certain Pediest, mentioning the “city of Canaan” and the Philistines; and
3. References to Shoshenq found at the remains of Byblos.

    Close analysis of these six texts shows that none are evidence of any close ties between the peoples of Egypt and Palestine during the time of David and Solomon. Generally, they have been misinterpreted or over-interpreted. For example, Siamun’s Battle Relief, used to argue that Pharaoh Siamun campaigned to Palestine, has largely been misinterpreted. An object in the conquered individual’s hand, almost invariably claimed by scholars to be a Philistine axe, almost surely is not. Consequently, there is nothing to connect the relief with Palestine. Indeed, the only indisputable Egyptian evidence for contact between Egypt and Palestine at this time is Shoshenq’s campaign, and this indicates hostile relations, not close ties of alliance. Moreover, this was a period of relative weakness and isolation for Egypt, not a time of bustling trade, political activity, and cross-cultural pollination of ideas with Palestine. The broad history of Egypt depicted in the written remains from Egypt shows strong contacts with Palestine during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550-1150 BCE), a steady decrease through and past the time of David and Solomon, and a resuscitation only late in the reign of Shoshenq, probably after the death of Solomon.

    The study then details the list of Egyptian and Egyptian-related materials found in excavations. Upon analysis, one immediately notes the paucity of remains, particularly when one contrasts them to other periods. The large majority of items are simple heirloom items such as scarabs and amulets. Most of these are impossible to date specifically to the time of David and Solomon. Similarly, it is almost always impossible to determine exactly when these items arrived in Palestine. The archaeological stratum in which they are found only indicates their final resting point not the time in which they entered Palestine via trade or immigration.

    On the other hand, the types of items or structures that unequivocally attest to trade or Egyptian presence are entirely lacking. These things are Egyptian residences, temples, structures, Egyptian mortuary assemblages and locally made Egyptian pottery. All of these are well attested during times of strong Egyptian presence in Palestine, but entirely absent from Palestine of the 10th century BCE.

    Two other conclusions arise from the archaeological evidence. First, the majority of Egyptian and Egyptian-related items come from the lowland cities—cities that had well-known Egyptian contacts during the earlier Late Bronze period. In contrast, highland sites, the sites usually associated with the Israelites, have so far yielded virtually no Egyptian objects. This is true of Jerusalem as well. The scarcity of Egyptian artifacts in highland sites seems to indicate that Israelites had little or no contact with Egypt or Egyptians at the time of David and Solomon.

    Second, the geographical dispersion of the Egyptian objects found in Palestine for this time suggests that these items entered Palestine via trade with the Phoenicians not through direct contact. Northern sites, close to Phoenicia, have yielded considerably more Egyptian artifacts than southern sites. Moreover, Egyptian goods are consistently found in association with Cypro-Phoenician and Phoenician goods, indicating that the Egyptian items were arriving in Palestine from the North. Contacts with Phoenicia to the north were far more regular than contacts with Egypt.

    This evidence strongly supports the conclusions from Chapter 1; namely, that during the time of David and Solomon there was little contact between Egypt and Palestine. During periods of strong contacts, Egyptian remains in Palestine are abundant, but such does not appear to be the case. Again, the archaeological picture of contacts between Egypt and Palestine shows strong contact during the Late Bronze period, a steady decline through and past the time of David and Solomon, and a resuscitation during the 9th century. The time of David and Solomon clearly is a low point not a high point in Egyptian/Palestinian relations.