Cilicia (I Kings 10:28-29)32 fed the royal coffers. Vast copper smelteries, the largest known in the ancient world, belched their smoke to the skies at Ezion-geber.33 Ambitious public works gave employment to thousands. Aside from the temple and the military installations mentioned above, there was a palace for the king—which took longer to build than the temple (cf. I Kings 6:37-38; 7:1)—an armory (7:2), the royal court (7:7), a palace for pharaoh’s daughter (7:8), and many other things. The Bible does not tire of telling of the wealth and splendor of the court of Solomon (I Kings 10:11-29).
V
That all this represented a fundamental change is obvious, and it is important that we evaluate it.34 It was a change which affected the whole structure of Israelite society. The people of Yahweh had become the Kingdom of Israel, the citizens of the Davidic state.
1. Little was left of the old order. The tribal league had given way to the state centered in the king. Such a development was inevitable as David conquered the Canaanite cities of the land and incorporated their population into Israel’s structure, and then went on to subdue a polyglot empire. There was need for a standing army, administrative and judicial machinery, the levying of taxes, if such a state was to be governed. But the tribal league had no such machinery. In fact David, not the tribal league, had created the structure. It centered in David, and it was up to him to hold it together. Even the capital city, Jerusalem, was his personal holding. The state had to be organized under the crown. No doubt David’s census (II Sam. 24) was a step, and a bitterly resented one, toward measures for conscription and the raising of taxes—both anathema to Israel. The process reached its climax when Solomon virtually abolished the tribal league and substituted for it twelve administrative districts subject to the crown (I Kings 4:7-19). Two of the district governors were the king’s own sons-in-law (4:11, 15). The people of Yahweh’s covenant had become the people of Solomon’s state.
In the process charisma gave way to the dynasty. This, too, was a gradual and inevitable change. Saul had been a charismatic hero acclaimed king. David, too, was a charismatic; but a private army and considerable political skill had furthered his rise, until he was formally elected king. But the state which David built was so personally his own that it needed an heir of David to hold it together. By the time David grew old, the question was not if his son would succeed him, but only which son would do so—and the reader of the court history of David (II Sam. 9–20; I Kings 1–2) knows what a rivalry that was. When Solomon came to the throne (I Kings 1), it was by palace plot, without reference to charismatic qualities or popular will at all. Charisma would never again select a leader in Jerusalem. The leader designated by Yahweh’s spirit had given way to the anointed son of the anointed king.
Nor was there much left of the ancient tribal simplicity. Israel, which had passed from the nomad to the agrarian life with the conquest, was now by way of becoming a commercial society with a considerable industrial superstructure. There was wealth; and some grew rich, while others, especially by contrast, grew poorer. There was the makings of a proletariat. There were princes, and there were also slaves. And above it all was the resplendent court of Solomon with its standing army, its functionaries and flunkies, its harem, and its princelings to the manner born. The nomad ideal persisted, and was to persist, but it was less and less of a reality. Such a state could never exist without tension, a tension which more than once flared into open rebellion. The feeling grew in the hearts of many: “We have no portion in David” (II Sam. 20:1).
2. Yet the state produced Israel’s Golden Age. Never again would she see the like. In one brief generation she had been transformed from a loose, disjointed tribal league, fighting for its life, into a united, self-conscious nation of some importance in the world. Most of the land thought of as “promised” was now, for the first and last time, in Israelite hands—a fact she never forgot. Literature and culture flourished as never before, and there was unexampled material prosperity. It was a proud thing to be an Israelite in the tenth century B.C.
So the Davidic state made an unforgettable impression. It must have seemed to many that Israel’s destiny had been realized in it beyond fondest dreams: that the promise to Abraham—“I will make of you a great nation” (Gen. 12:2)—had been amply fulfilled, and God had indeed established his Kingdom under his anointed in peace. In any case, we shall have to reckon from now on with the “David idea.” In the hard times which the future was to bring there grew a nostalgic yearning for “the good old days” of David. David himself suffered a transformation; the evil that he did forgotten, he was remembered as the man after God’s own heart whose house was to rule forever (II Sam. 7:16; 23:5). The age of David became no less than the lost Age of Gold. It would be impossible for a man of Judah to think of the coming Messiah save as a David redivivus, a new David.
This could only have been intensified as David and Solomon centered the national religious feelings upon Mount Zion. Now the religion of old Israel had never been tightly centralized. The worshiper might without sense of sin offer his sacrifices, as Samuel did, at any one of dozens of shrines. Yet the heart of the tribal league had always been the Ark shrine, which had last stood at Shiloh (I Sam. 1–4). But this had long lain in ruins, and the Ark had languished in neglect at Kiriath-jearim (I Sam. 7:1-2). David was the one who at length brought the Ark to Jerusalem (II Sam. 6) and set it up in a tent shrine there with Zadok and Abiathar (the latter of the house of Eli) as priests (II Sam. 20:25). It was a step of consummate acumen. For David thus linked his state to the Ark, to Shiloh and the tribal league, to the Mosaic heritage, and made claim to be the patron and protector of that heritage. The magnificent temple which Solomon built could only have served to enhance the prestige of Jerusalem as the rallying place of the national faith, the very dwelling place of Yahweh’s presence on earth.35 Other shrines were not, of course, ruled out, but they were overshadowed. The process which was to weld all the hope of Israel to Jersualem the holy city had begun.
3. But it must be said that this brought in a mortal danger. An official, state-supported religion had been created, and where such exists, the danger is immense that it will place itself wholly at the service of the state and will begin to hallow the state in the name of its God. To be sure, there were factors that prevented Israel from deifying the state to the extent that this was done elsewhere in the ancient Orient. The king was not a god, as he was in Egypt. Nor could he properly be regarded as a divinely ordained mediator of the national “salvation,” a sort of “living Messiah,” as he was in Babylon.36 The Israelite state was too near its beginnings for this. It had not existed, as it were, from all eternity. There still lived men who could remember that the state had been founded by the action of their own fathers, and that it had replaced the older order of the covenant league. To many of them the old order seemed both preferable and normative, the new a dangerous innovation. Israel could never with good conscience hallow the state as a divine institution.
Yet inevitably state and cult were integrated with each other. We must not forget that the shrine on Mount Zion was a royal installation; David had founded it, and Solomon had lavished all the wealth and prestige of the state upon it. David’s own sons were ordained as priests there (II Sam. 8:18 [Heb.]). Although the details are not clear to us, it is likely that the king himself played a central role in the cult (e.g., II Sam. 6; I Kings 8). The king in turn was hailed in the ritual as the (adopted) son whom God would surely defend from his foes (Pss. 2:7; 89:27; II Sam. 7:14). How much of a pagan royal ideology Israel absorbed, and how rapidly, cannot be said with assurance. But as the monarchy absorbed foreigners and came into contact with foreign nations, it must have assimilated foreign ideas as well.37 We may believe that not a few in Israel became accustomed to view the state in a wholly pagan light.
In any case the temptation was insidiously present to place religion at the service of the state. That the king had power over the clergy is illustrated by the fact that when the veteran priest Abiathar was so ill-advised as to hew to the wrong political line (I Kings 1:7, 25), he was summarily dismissed by Solomon (I Kings 2:26-27), past faithful service to the contrary notwithstanding. It was inevitable that
