Roland

The Bible makes a big thing out of trying to show that King Solomon ruled over a vast, wealthy empire that was the envy of the world at the time. Yet, his name never appears in a single contemporaneous document outside of the Bible (which is probably not contemporaneous anyway).

My question is should we EXPECT his name to appear somewhere else or is it unreasonable to do so? How much evidence from anything in that time period still exists today? The reason I am asking is because I made that point at another site and got the usual "well, why WOULD any pagan want to mention his name?" response?

I'm also wondering if it is reasonable to expect that 2 to 3 million people living and dying in a desert over a forty year period more than 3,000 years ago would leave at least SOME sign that they had been there.

Thanks for your input.

Asha'man

Good questions.

According to Finkelstein and Silberman in The Bible Unearthed, there is no archeological evidence for the great kingdom of Solomon. There is, however, solid evidence that the kingdoms of Israel and Judea developed at very separate rates, indicating that they were probably never part of a single unified kingdom. They measure the development rates by looking at key indicators, such as the presence of public buildings (granaries and bureaucratic buildings), standing armies, organized trade connections, and public records.

In contrast to the grand unified kingdom that Solomon is supposed to have ruled (with no evidence of), there is both internal and external evidence of one of his successors in the northern kingdom of Israel, Omri. Apparently, the Omri dynasty had some noteworthy military might. The earliest nonbiblical record of the Kingdom of Israel is a reference to Omri, and there are three separate inscriptions about his dynasty. Shalmaneser III of Assyria boasted of defeating a strong army that contained a significant chariot contribution from Ahab (Omri’s son). Inside Israel, the ruins of a large stable probably housed those same chariot forces, and there are other building projects that can be attributed to the Omrides.

The HB makes great claims about the grandeur of Solomon’s kingdom, but nothing is found. The same texts play Omri and his dynasty as virtually unknown failures, but the ancient world shows clear evidence of both his existence and his significance. What does this say about the reliability of the HB for historical accuracy?

As for the Exodus, Finkelstein and Silberman state that evidence of much smaller nomadic groups has been found in the Sinai desert, both before and after the supposed date of the exodus, but nothing during the claimed centuries of relevance. If a few million people had lived in the desert for 40 years, the traces should be much easier to find, but no such traces have been found.

Dr Rick

There was a very readable article about these very issues in Harper's Magazine:
False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History

Eldarion Lathria

1: The idea of a few million people tramping through the Sinai for forty (or lotsa) years is logistically impossible. There isn't enough man es-simna for that. There isn't enough pastureage for the livestock needed to support such a mass of people. Take the numbers down by a fact of a hundred, and it's barely possible.

2: Assume that all the events of the O.T. have been exaggerated. Most of the cities of Canaan mentioned in the O.T were miserable peasant villages. The great kings were petty shaykhs of the kind that Alexander used to polish off a dozen at a battle and write in his diary that nothing much happened that day. The kingdom of Soloman was most likely tributary to Tyre, or Egypt, or some other important country. When the histories of the O.T were finally compiled, the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were long dead. The Jews wanted to remember them as greater than they were.

This is a common thing. The kings of Celtic Ireland were ratty clan chiefs, but they are celebrated in song and poetry. Etzel (Attila) was a murdering savage, and Gundibald was a drunken lout, but the legends remember them as paragons of nobility.

Eldarion Lathria