David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (27 page)

The destruction of Jerusalem and the final razing of the Temple in 70
CE
put an end to the resuscitated belief that God would protect the city and its divinely elected kings from all earthly enemies. But the lingering hope that a Davidic messiah would someday rise to save the people of Israel was still perceived as a dangerous threat to Roman security. Indeed, the efforts the Romans made to snuff out this messianic hope reveal how literally they accepted it. From the writings of the fourth-century
CE
church historian Eusebius, we learn that after the fall of Jerusalem the Romans made at least two attempts to exterminate all those who claimed to be of the Davidic line. Eusebius quotes an earlier Christian writer, Hegesippus, in describing how the emperor Vespasian (69–79
CE
) “gave orders that all that belonged to the lineage of David should be sought out, in order that none of the royal race might be left among the Jews” (III.xii), and how his son the emperor Domitian (81–96
CE
) “commanded that the descendants of David should be slain” (III. xix).

It is highly unlikely that any of the victims were actually genealogically descended from the house of David, which had died out centuries before. But the power of the David and Solomon tradition would not be dimmed even by these liquidations. Jewish messianic rebellions would flare up again in 117 and 132
CE
. More important, the veneration for David and Solomon now lay primarily in the religious imagination, where—invulnerable to Roman arrows, swords, or even the pain of public crucifixion—it would continue to flourish and take on new forms.

EXORCISING THE DEMONS

During the first century
BCE
, when Herod was building his great Temple and the stirrings of radical messianism arose among the underclasses of Judea, another fascinating development in the parallel and competing traditions of David and Solomon occurred. Drawing on the biblical hint that David’s skill with the harp was effective in stilling Saul’s tortured spirit (1 Samuel 16:14–23) and that such exorcistic powers were inherited by Solomon (who also, according to 1 Kings 4:33, possessed an extraordinary knowledge of nature), the belief began to spread that the “Son of David” was a unique protector against demons and evil spirits of all kinds. This belief would, much later, be expressed in Jewish folk traditions in amulets, magic bowls, incantations, and in the protective power of Solomon’s magic ring and the symbolic Shield of Solomon—also known as the Star of David. These beliefs and symbols would eventually descend into the secret lore of mystical brotherhoods and esoteric Judeo-Christian legends, but their origins lay very much in the mainstream of popular Jewish veneration for David and Solomon in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

These traditions originated in the gradual transformation of the image of David—and especially Solomon—into figures of Hellenistic royalty. The Greek traditions of philosopher-kings as men of extraordinary power, combined with the biblical tradition of Solomon’s wisdom and the rich postbiblical Jewish speculation about angels and demons, produced the image of Solomon as a figure to be summoned and appealed to by individual supplicants who sought relief from misfortune, disease, or insanity. Perhaps the earliest example of this vision, as the Spanish scholar Pablo Torijanos has pointed out, comes from an otherwise obscure document among the Dead Sea Scrolls, known to scholars as 11QPsAp
^a
. This small fragmentary text is one of several exorcistic compositions that demonstrate interest in rituals of what might be called black magic in Judea in the Roman period.

This document contains four psalms of exorcism, the last being the biblical Psalm 91, which is explicitly credited to David. In the second composition, the names of David and Solomon are mentioned, with Solomon, in a reconstructed portion, given the power of invoking God’s name to deliver sufferers from “any plague of the spirits and the demons and the Liliths, the owls, and the jackals.” The figure of Solomon addresses the attacking demons directly with the question “Who are you?” This question seems to be the beginning of a ceremony of exorcism. It appears in a later esoteric text called the Testament of Solomon that may include materials composed as early as the first century
CE
. In it, Solomon describes the secrets of controlling demons and explains that he had succeeded in forcing them to work for him in the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem! The similarity of the expressions indicates a shared popular tradition of Solomon, the “Son of David,” as the patron saint of exorcists—a very practical and powerful application of the wisdom that God had granted to him.

Flavius Josephus reflects this widespread belief in the occult powers of Solomon in his report that “God granted him knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. He also composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind forms of exorcisms with which those possessed by demons drive them out, never to return. And this cure is of very great power among us to this day” (
Jewish Antiquities
VIII. 45).

What makes this image of Solomon as exorcist especially intriguing is its connection to New Testament literature. The gospel of Mark reports that when Jesus and his disciples were leaving Jericho in the course of their ministry,

The close correspondence between the title “Son of David” and the act of healing suggests an original identification of Jesus of Nazareth as an embodiment of Solomon’s exorcistic personality. This is quite distinct from the earlier belief in David and Solomon as the founders of the Temple or the long-awaited liberators of Israel.

Eventually, however, all the earlier strains of the Davidic tradition were powerfully merged in the person of Jesus, to make him, in the eyes of his followers, the ultimate inheritor of God’s promises to the Davidic dynasty and the long-awaited savior for all the people of Israel.

PROPHETS OF A NEW GOSPEL

Biblical scholars have wrestled for centuries with the meaning of Jesus’ various messianic titles. Little agreement has been achieved about whether, in the course of his ministry in Galilee and Judea in the late twenties and thirties
CE
, Jesus of Nazareth explicitly identified himself as the Son of David, as other figures of the time surely did. What is obvious is that the authors of the gospels and other early Christian literature, writing shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, went to great lengths to cement this identification. They did it with a major distinction from contemporary Jewish tradition: they stressed that although Jesus was born of the earthly line of David, his messianic legacy was much greater than that of Israel’s founding king.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus perfectly fulfills contemporary Davidic expectations. The genealogy with which it begins traces Jesus’ lineage from Abraham through David, Solomon, and all the subsequent kings and postexilic heirs of the house of David—all the way down to Joseph, “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (1:1–16). Later in the gospel, in its description of Jesus’ preparations for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he bids his disciples to bring him a donkey and a colt, in order to fulfill an ancient Davidic prophecy of Zechariah:
*

According to Matthew, the crowds who lined the route of his procession understood this prophetic message, proclaiming, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (21:9). His subsequent cleansing of traders and money changers from the courtyards of the Temple (the place most closely associated with the postexilic Davidic tradition) is likewise greeted by the onlookers with a messianic acclamation that the Son of David had finally arrived (21:15).

The gospel of Luke also repeatedly stresses Jesus’ Davidic lineage through both his genealogical connections and the circumstances of his birth in David’s hometown of Bethlehem. Indeed, Luke’s quotation of the words of the angel Gabriel, announcing Jesus’ impending birth to Mary, makes the messianic destiny explicit:

For the early Christian community, Jesus was far different from any other messianic contender for the Davidic mantle. In his resurrection from death on the third day after his crucifixion, Jesus had shown himself to be greater even than David, who died and “slept with his fathers, and was buried in the City of David,” according to 1 Kings 2:10. This difference sparked a revolutionary reinterpretation; for Psalm 16, attributed by that time to David himself, seemed to predict that bodily resurrection was a clear prophetic sign of the Davidic legacy:

In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter explains the new gospel succinctly as he addresses the assembled crowds in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem:

Just as the significance of David had been shifted to the Temple and its rituals in the era after the Babylonian exile and to Hellenistic kingship in succeeding centuries, early Christians shifted the focus of Davidic expectations to become the foundation of their own faith. The reputation of David as the fulcrum of the history of Israel was now beyond dispute. But for Christians, the context was no longer just the history of Judah or even Israel. They now saw the figures of David, Solomon, and all other heirs of the Davidic dynasty as forerunners and prophets of the universal savior born in David’s hometown Bethlehem and crucified and resurrected in his capital city of Jerusalem.

Although the ministry, passion, and resurrection of Jesus were now seen as the ultimate fulfillment of the biblical story, David and Solomon remained, in the eyes of all believing Christians, supremely important religious personalities. As the ancient embodiments of true righteousness, wisdom, and repentance, they foreshadowed Jesus’ message. Given their role as eloquent prophets of his messianic mission, the psalms ascribed to them, their biblical legend, and the vivid images of sacred kingship they represented lived on powerfully, at the very core of Christian consciousness.

SCHOLARS OF THE LAW

Rabbinic tradition remained unfazed by Christian identification of Jesus as the true heir of the divine promise to David. Yet the Jewish David and Solomon tradition also underwent a dramatic transformation after the fall of Jerusalem. As the Jews gradually recovered from the shock and the trauma of the destruction of their Temple and holy city, David and Solomon continued to be seen as the definitive model for religious emulation. After 70
CE
, however, the focus of Jewish spiritual life had changed. With the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple sacrifice had given way to study and observance of the biblical ordinances, as they were progressively elaborated and reinterpreted in homiletic commentaries known as midrashim and extensively analyzed and interpreted in the Mishnah and Talmud. David and Solomon’s religious role now shifted: in the traditions and literature of Rabbinic Judaism both were revered, each in his own way, to provide a guiding example for reverence and study of the law.

The American biblical scholar Jouette Bassler has collected a series of representative examples in which David can be seen as the archetype of the pious rabbinic scholar. David’s skill in playing the harp, for example, was seen as necessary for a specific purpose: to rouse King Saul from his slumbers and to encourage him to study the law. In the rabbinic midrash on the book of Leviticus, David himself was seen as a Torah scholar of unparalleled insight, who encouraged his contemporaries to do the same (Leviticus Rabbah 34.16). Indeed David’s devotion to the Torah and its observance, according to rabbinic commentators, caused God to bestow the kingdom on him. Even Solomon—who grew increasingly prominent in medieval Jewish tradition as a miraculous healer and exorcist—was likewise praised for his adherence to the legal tradition, and for his deep understanding of the reasons for the various laws.