THE LOST EMPIRE

“In Search of King David’s Lost Empire” is the title of a piece penned by journalist Ruth Margalit for The New Yorker.

Although it was written two years ago the article is still relevant, perhaps more so today. “The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia, but archaeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true. The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin  sheikh?”   ”Jerusalem, in the tenth century B.C., is an inhospitable place for farmers but a strategic location for men on the run. Human settlement in the Judean highlands is thinly dispersed: five thousand people, spread out in hamlets of about fifty families each. The landscape is rugged, veined with ravines and thicketed with oaks. Rain is unpredictable. To the east lies the desert, hushed and empty. To the west—teasingly close—are the lush lowlands of the Philistine city-states, with their seaside trade routes and their princely homes. Cut off from these coastal plains, life in the hill country is severe. Homes are made of unworked stone; sheep and goats are quartered indoors. There are no public buildings, no ornate furnishings in the shrines. Bands of fugitives, landless  labourers, and tax evaders rove the Judean wilderness. These rebel gangs—viewed by the  neighbouring Egyptians as both a nuisance and a threat—maraud the nearby villages. They collect protection money and pillage the locals, making off with their women and their cattle. They terrorise the Philistines, and then, in a sudden turnaround, offer their services to a Philistine king in exchange for shelter.

Their leader is a wily, resourceful man from Bethlehem, who decides that his people are meant for more than lightning raids and mercenary stints. He sends his men to rout an advancing force, then shares the loot with the highland elders. This wins over the highlanders, and, in time, they make him chieftain of the southern hill area. He takes over the tribal  centre of Hebron, and later captures Jerusalem, another hilltop stronghold. The chieftain moves his extended family to the main homes of the Jerusalem  village, and settles in one himself—a palace, some might call it, though there is nothing extravagant about it. He rules over a neglected chiefdom of pastoralists and outlaws. His name is David.

Israel Finkelstein’s vision of King David—the vagabond, the racketeer—helped make his career as an eminent biblical archaeologist.”

The biblical landscape described by Professor Finkelstein is stark, inhospitable, ostensibly unlike the biblical narrative, but based on “facts on the ground.” Ms. Margalit’s description mirrors the narrative told by Israel Finkelstein.

“The Bible, of course, tells it differently.” Says Ruth Margalit.  “In the Old Testament story, Canaan is where the Hebrews ended their exodus, and where David secured for his people a glorious kingdom. From about 1,000 B.C., he and his son Solomon ruled over a vast monarchy that encompassed four defeated kingdoms, stretching as far north as the Euphrates River and as far south as the Negev Desert. (Archaeologists derive the date from an inscription on a portal gate in the Egyptian city of Karnak, which lists the military conquests of King Shoshenq—thought to be the same king mentioned in the Bible as Shishak.) The United Monarchy, as it is known, represented the golden age of ancient Israel; though it probably lasted no more than a generation or two, its legacy has persisted for thousands of years. According to Finkelstein, for Jews David ‘represents territorial sovereignty, the legend of the empire.’ For Christians, he is ‘directly related to Jesus and the birth of Christianity.’ “For Muslims, he is a righteous prophet who preceded Muhammad. The story of David,” Finkelstein added, “is the most central thing in the Bible, and in our culture.”

“Nadav Na’aman, an authority on Jewish history and a colleague of Finkelstein’s at Tel Aviv University, describes David’s story as ‘extraordinary fiction.’ But he believes that it contains kernels of truth, preserved as the tale was passed down by oral tradition.

In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero. There is no archaeological record of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no Noah’s Ark, nothing from Moses. Joshua did not bring down the walls of Jericho: they collapsed centuries earlier, perhaps in an earthquake. But, in 1993, an Israeli archaeologist working near the Syrian border found a fragment of basalt from the ninth century B.C., with an Aramaic inscription that mentioned the “House of David”—the first known reference to one of the Bible’s foundational figures. So, David is not just a central ancestor in the Old Testament. He may also be the only one that we can prove existed. Yet to prove it definitively would be exceptionally difficult; Jerusalem of the tenth century B.C. is an archaeological void. ‘I can take a shoebox and put inside everything we have from that period,’ said Yuval Gadot, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University.

“Finkelstein has pushed Israeli research to the forefront of science, employing precision radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and image processing that can examine a three-thousand-year-old potsherd and determine how many ancient scribes were involved in its making. An archaeology lab run by Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science has employed the chief forensic investigator of the Israel Police. Despite their advanced technology, these researchers are still engaged in questions that have persisted for more than a century. From where did the early Israelites emerge? When do we first see signs  of a centralised cult with a single deity? More prosaically, but no less crucially, who was David? Was he the all-powerful king described in the Bible? Or was he, as some archaeologists believe, no more than a small-time Bedouin  sheikh? (Nomad).

“Whenever Finkelstein visited the United States, with its heavy influence of religious seminaries, he was met with antagonism.” Ruth Margalit said. “At a conference in San Francisco, a member of the audience pleaded with him, ‘Why are you saying these things?’ The highly regarded Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research began rejecting his papers but continued to publish his detractors. In hindsight, Finkelstein told me in his office, he understands the uproar over the United Monarchy. ‘The description is of a glorious kingdom, a huge empire, authors in the king’s court, a huge army, military conquests—and then someone like me comes along and says, ‘Wait a minute. They were nothing but hillbillies who sat in Jerusalem in a small territory, and the rest of it is either theology or ideology,’ ” Finkelstein said. “So, someone for whom the Bible represents the word of God views what I have to say with complete shock.”

For decades, Israeli archaeology mirrored the country’s politics: it reconstructed the story of an unlikely conquest and a spectacular military expansion. Finkelstein opened up the discipline to larger questions of how peoples move and states form.

This truncated account doesn’t do justice to Ruth Margalit’s exhaustive,  well written article. It serves as a preamble for the search for post-biblical lost Jewish kingdoms. If you have nothing better to do, try accessing her article with this link https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire  

Let’s begin with the Samaritans who trace their origin to the northern Israelite tribes who were not deported by the Neo-Assyrian Empire after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel. They believe that Samaritanism is the true religion of the ancient Israelites, preserved by those who remained in Israel during the Babylonian captivity; this belief is held in opposition to Judaism, the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, which Samaritans see as a closely related but altered and amended religion brought back by Judeans returning from Babylonian captivity. Samaritans consider Mount Gerizim (near both Nablus), and not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to be the holiest place on Earth.

Once a large community, the Samaritan population shrunk significantly in the wake of the bloody suppression of the Samaritan Revolts against the Byzantine Empire (mainly in 525 CE and 555 CE). Mass conversions to Christianity under the Byzantines, and later to Islam following the Arab conquest of the Levant, also reduced their numbers greatly. In the 12th century, the Jewish  traveller Benjamin of Tudela estimated that only around 1,900 Samaritans remained in the regions of Palestine and Syria.

As of 2022, the total Samaritan population stands at less than 1,000 people. The Samaritan community is divided between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and the Samaritan compound in Holon. Males outnumber females in this divided small community; hence its survival now depends to a large degree on imported brides  from the Ukraine. An innovative solution adopted a few years ago,  that brings to mind the era  of the mail-order brides in the U.S. The newcomers are obliged to convert to the Samaritan religion. If the project succeeds it will be doubly beneficial, increasing the sect’s population and gene pool.  

The Samaritans are better known to the wider public through the “parable of the Good Samaritan” related  in the Gospel of Luke.

The  Karaites, a post-biblical breakaway community isn’t really relevant to the search for lost Jewish kingdoms. They remain an almost irrelevant offshoot of Judaism.  

On the other hand, the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along the Red Sea in the Arabian Peninsula is definitely relevant.

According to Professor Glen Warren Bowersock, historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.  “Friends and colleagues alike have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I have told them about the history I have been looking at. In the southwestern part of Arabia known in antiquity as Himyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. For just over a century after that, its kings ruled, with one brief interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecu­tion of its Christ­ian population. The record sur­vived over many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians, but incredulous scholars had long been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It is only within recent decades that enough inscribed stones have turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.

This bizarre but militant kingdom in Himyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Himyar, they engaged and destroyed the armies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous, upheaval in the history of pre-Islamic Arabia. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events. A vigorous team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has pioneered research on the Jewish kingdom in Himyar.

Through Christian and Muslim rule, Jews continued to be a strong presence in the Arabian Peninsula. This is clear not only from Mohammed’s (often conflictual) dealings with them but also from the influence that Judaism had on the new religion’s rituals and prohibitions (daily prayers, circumcision, ritual purity, pilgrimage, charity, ban on images and eating pork).

In Yemen, the heartland of the Himyarites, the Jewish community endured through centuries of persecution, until 1949-1950, when almost all its remaining members – around 50,000 – were airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. And while they maintain some unique rituals and traditions, which set them apart from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, no one would doubt that they are indeed, the last, very much Jewish descendants of the lost kingdom of Himyar.

With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Arab tribes sought to conquer North Africa and continue to Europe via Spain. The major obstacle to a conquest of the Maghreb was the presence of a Berber queen in the mountains of present-day Algeria. Her tribe, the Gerawa, had converted to Judaism earlier in the century; their queen, Dahia al-Kahena, either converted with them or was Jewish by birth.

This era signalled the end of the Byzantine dynasty in a geographical area that was home to Byzantines, Arabs and Jews, as well as Christian Berbers.

Kahena was a formidable warrior commanding a strong army. Hassan ibn Ne’uman, an Arab Egyptian prince, successfully defeated the Byzantines in Carthage in 687 and set forth to meet her in battle; she defeated  him decisively. Hassan returned to Egypt, where he awaited reinforcements for about five years. Finally, Hassan assembled an army large enough army to confront and defeat the Berber queen.

The story of the Jewish Berber queen is filled with fact and fiction; lack of contemporary sources makes it difficult to decide how much of the narrative is fact. There are contradictions in different versions of her life and battles. Her age and the duration of her rule are uncertain, although the shortest rule attributed to her is 35 years.

Yet even after peeling away the romanticization, certain facts remain undisputed and are supported by a Judeo-Arabic poem written by local Jews damning her for having created such devastation for her own people. Her success as a warrior stood her in good stead until she chose a self-defeating means of withstanding a second attack by a strengthened Arab army. Her poor judgment led to her own destruction and that of Byzantine North Africa. The defeat that she suffered cleared the way for the Arab conquest of Spain in 711, the only country in Western Europe to experience Islamic rule.

The quest for a long-lost Jewish empire leads to the Khazars a semi-nomadic Turkic people. In the late 7th century AD the Khazars established a major commercial empire covering the south-eastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. They created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Along a major artery of commerce between Eastern Europe and South-western Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early mediaeval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East, and Kievan Rus'. For some three centuries (c. 650–965) the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.

The late 19th century saw the emergence of the theory that many of today's Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora that migrated westward from modern-day Russia and Ukraine into modern-day France and Germany. Linguistic and genetic studies have not supported the theory of a Khazar connection to Ashkenazi Jewry. The theory still occasionally finds support, but most scholars view it with considerable scepticism. The theory is sometimes associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The search for a long-lost Jewish empire has yielded many legends and few facts.

Most of what I have written is quoted from open sources.  I simply glued them together and waited for an opportune time to write about the quest for the long-lost Jewish empire.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni                                                                                        25^th of August, 2022.