Solomon - Criticism

Criticism

According to Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, at the time of the kingdoms of David and Solomon, Jerusalem was populated by only few hundred residents or less, which is insufficient for an empire stretching from the Euphrates to Eilath. According to The Bible Unearthed, archaeological evidence suggests that the kingdom of Israel at the time of Solomon was little more than a small city state, and so it is implausible that Solomon received tribute as large as 666 talents of gold per year. Although both Finkelstein and Silberman accept that David and Solomon were real kings of Judah about the 10th century BC, they claim that the earliest independent reference to the Kingdom of Israel is about 890 BC, and for Judah about 750 BC. They suggest that due to religious prejudice, the authors of the Bible suppressed the achievements of the Omrides (whom the Hebrew Bible describes as being polytheist), and instead pushed them back to a supposed golden age of Judaism and monotheists, and devotees of YHWH. Some Biblical minimalists like Thomas L. Thompson go further, arguing that Jerusalem only became a city and capable of being a state capital in the mid-seventh century. Likewise, Finkelstein and others consider the claimed size of Solomon's temple implausible.

These views are criticized by William G. Dever, Helga Weippert, André Lemaire and Amnon Ben-Tor. Lemaire states in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple that the principal points of the biblical tradition of Solomon are generally trustworthy. So does Kenneth Kitchen, who argues that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy "mini-empire", rather than a small city-state, and considers 666 gold talents a modest amount of money. Kitchen calculates that over 30 years, such a kingdom might have accumulated up to 500 tons of gold, which is small compared to other examples, such as the 1,180 tons of gold that Alexander the Great took from Susa. Similarly Kitchen, and others consider the temple of Solomon a reasonable and typically sized structure for the region at the time. William G. Dever states "that we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every feature of the 'Solomonic temple' as described in the Hebrew Bible".

The archaeological remains that are considered to date from the time of Solomon are notable for the fact that Canaanite material culture appears to have continued unabated; there is a distinct lack of magnificent empire, or cultural development - indeed comparing pottery from areas traditionally assigned to Israel with that of the Philistines points to the Philistines having been significantly more sophisticated. However there is a lack of physical evidence of its existence, despite some archaeological work in the area. This is not unexpected because the area was devastated by the Babylonians, then rebuilt and destroyed several times. Little archaeological excavation has been done around the area known as the Temple Mount, in what is thought to be the foundation of Solomon's Temple, because attempts to do so are met with protest by Muslims.

From a critical point of view, Solomon's building of a temple for YHWH should not be considered an act of particular devotion to YHWH, because Solomon is also described as building places of worship for a number of other deities (1 Kings 11:4). Some scholars historians argue that Solomon's apparent initial devotion to YHWH, described in passages such as his dedication prayer (1 Kings 8:14-66), were written much later, after Jerusalem had become the religious centre of the kingdom, replacing locations such as Shiloh and Bethel. Some scholars believe that passages such as these in the Books of Kings were not written by the same authors who wrote the rest of the text, instead probably by the Deuteronomist. Such views have been challenged by other historians who maintain that there is evidence that these passages in Kings are derived from official court records at the time of Solomon and from other writings of that time that were incorporated into the canonical books of Kings.