Not Pharaoh’s Daughter. This coffin cover belonged to a woman who lived in Thebes during Egypt’s 21st Dynasty. Although her name has not been preserved, she seems to have been wealthy and belonged to the clerical class—as indicated by the style of her coffin cover. The woman lived around the same time as Solomon’s bride, the unnamed daughter of Pharaoh, would have lived. Credit:  Photo Robin Stevens/CC by-NC-ND 2.0.

King Solomon was famous for his wisdom and, among other things, his many marital and extramarital relationships. His harem is given at 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3)—surely an exaggeration. According to 1 Kings 11, he also took foreign wives, some of whom led him to idolatry. For example, to satisfy his Moabite wives, he built a shrine to the Moabite god Chemosh. The biblical writer trembles with indignation when reporting Solomon’s falling away.

It is not remarkable that Solomon should ally himself with queens from the lands around him. Such had been royal policy for many kings throughout ancient Near Eastern history. Yet what was remarkable was for Solomon to have married into the Egyptian royal family (1 Kings 3:1).

What was so exceptional about it? Take as an example this exchange found in one of the famous Amarna Letters (c. 14th century B.C.E.), written by the Babylonian king Kadashman-Enlil II to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, more than three centuries before the time of Solomon:

Moreover, you my brother, when I wrote to you about marrying your daughter, in accordance with your practice of not giving (a daughter) you wrote to me “From time immemorial no daughter of the king of Egypt is given to anyone.” … I wrote as follows … Send me a beautiful woman as if she were your daughter. Who is going to say, “She is no daughter of the king!” But holding to your decision, you have not sent anyone.¹

According to biblical scholar Abraham Malamat, there is only one other example of a potential Egyptian princess being given to a foreign ruler—to King Nikmad of Ugarit, according to an Ugaritic document depicting the marriage. However, Malamat concludes that the king probably did not marry an actual daughter of the pharaoh but rather a member of the royal harem. The Greek historian Herodotus reports that King Amasis of Egypt even refused to give his daughter to Cambyses, king of Persia (Histories, Book III:1).²

The alliance of Solomon and Egypt, if true, was truly an exception. The question is, was it a genuine happening or an empty boast? Malamat’s example from Ugarit provides at least a partial precedent. Certainly, the Egyptian ruler who gave an “Egyptian princess” to Nikmad went far beyond what Amenhotep III was willing to do for the Babylonian monarch. A look at the biblical text recounting Solomon’s marriage to an Egyptian princess seems to be in order.

At the end of 1 Kings 2, Solomon has consolidated his rule. Chapter 3 begins with breaking news: “Solomon contracted a marriage alliance with Pharaoh, king of Egypt, taking the daughter of Pharaoh as a wife, and bringing her [to live] in the City of David, until he finished building his palace, and the Temple of YHWH, and the wall encircling Jerusalem” (author’s translation).

FREE ebook: Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus.

Email(Required)

REQUEST FREE BOOK

Fast forward to 1 Kings 9:24: “As soon as Pharoah’s daughter went up from the City of David to the house [Solomon] had built for her, then he rebuilt the Millo citadel.” Again, the text mentions Pharaoh’s daughter mainly in terms of Solomon’s building projects. Alas, no one has identified the house or palace Solomon is said to have built for his Egyptian wife, but some scholars have identified the Millo with the so-called Stepped Stone Structure in Jerusalem.³

Now rewind just a bit to 1 Kings 9:15–17: “And this is the matter of the corvée which Solomon raised to build the Temple of YHWH, his palace, the Millo, and Jerusalem’s wall, and also Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. Pharaoh, king of Egypt, went up and captured Gezer, burning it with fire and killing the Canaanites who dwelled in the city, and he gave it as a dowry for his daughter, Solomon’s wife. Solomon fortified Gezer…”

According to the excavators of Gezer, city walls and gates have indeed been found that date to the tenth century B.C.E., the time of Solomon.⁴ These are similar to fortifications at Megiddo and Hazor. The dating of these fortifications is supported by the biblical text, as well as more recent radiocarbon dates.⁵ Nevertheless, not everyone agrees that these fortifications were built in the tenth century. Some archaeologists date them to the ninth century, long after Solomon’s reign.⁶ In the light of the recent ceramic and radiocarbon evidence, however, this revised dating seems highly improbable.

The reference to the Canaanites in Gezer also fits in well with Joshua 16:10 and Judges 1:29, both of which affirm that the Israelites were unable to dispossess the Canaanites of Gezer. Apparently, that was still true until Pharaoh came along and gave Gezer as a dowry to Solomon.

Siamun’s Sphinx. Made of bronze and gold, this sphinx of Pharaoh Siamun measures about 4 inches long and 2 inches high. It is in the collections of the Louvre. Siamun of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty might have been Solomon’s father-in-law. Credit: Rama, CC BY-SA 3.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons

Which pharaoh was Solomon’s father-in-law? Since the text does not name him, it is not clear, but scholars think it was Pharaoh Siamun of the 21st Dynasty or less probably, his successor, Psusennes II.⁷ We are also not given the name of Pharaoh’s daughter.

Why the Egyptian king chose to ally himself with Solomon is a matter of speculation. Since it happened early in Solomon’s reign, it may have been a gesture of respect to David, Solomon’s father, and may hint that David’s reign had been successful. Certainly, Egypt must have been conscious of the fact that it no longer had an empire in the Levant. As a result, it may have been more willing to ally itself with Solomon. Even so, the taking of Gezer might have given Egypt a psychological boost. Upon the death of Solomon, however, Pharaoh Shoshenq I (biblical Shishak), who founded the 22nd Dynasty, flexed Egyptian muscle and devastated Gezer and several other southern Levantine towns in his famous campaign, which is attested in both Egyptian records and the biblical text (1 Kings 14:25–26).⁸ The alliance between Solomon and Egypt was clearly short-lived.

Gezer’s Gate. Archaeologists at Gezer have dated this six-chambered gate to the tenth century B.C.E., the time of King Solomon. Credit: Ori~, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

In conclusion, the biblical allusion to Pharaoh’s daughter as Solomon’s wife seems to not be an idle boast. Given 1 Kings 11, where foreign wives are the instrument of Solomon’s downfall, this is not altogether surprising. Different biblical books have differing agendas. In fact, the much later Book of Chronicles, which seeks only to glorify Solomon, purposely omits any mention of Solomon’s downfall in the Book of Kings. Indeed, the Chronicler’s only mention of Pharaoh’s daughter uses her to show Solomon’s piety: “Solomon brought up Pharaoh’s daughter from the City of David to the house he had built for her. For he said, ‘No wife of mine shall remain in King David’s precincts because they are holy since the ark of YHWH has entered them’” (2 Chronicles 8:11).

Whereas the Book of Kings uses Solomon’s foreign wives to decry him as an idolator, Chronicles uses Pharaoh’s daughter as an occasion to boast of Solomon’s piety. That’s boasting, biblical style!

Philip D. Stern is the author of The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel’s Religion Experience (1991), now in its 2nd edition on JSTOR.org. He was philological editor to a translation of Genesis in W.G. Plaut’s The Torah: A Modern Commentary, rev. ed. (2005), and is currently working on a volume on the patriarchal narratives of Genesis.

Notes:

1. EA 4; William L. Moran’s translation in The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 8–9.

2. Abraham Malamat, “The Kingdom of David and Solomon in Its Contact with Egypt and Aram Naharaim,” Biblical Archaeologist 21.4 (December 1958), p. 98.

3. Nadav Na’aman, “The Interchange Between Bible and Archaeology: The Case of David’s Palace and the Millo,” BAR, January/February 2014.

4. William G. Dever, “Archaeology and the Bible—Understanding Their Special Relationship,” BAR, May/June 1990.

5. Steven M. Ortiz and Samuel R. Wolff, “New Evidence for the 10th Century BCE at Tel Gezer,” Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 1 (2021), pp. 221–240; William G. Dever, “Solomon, Scripture, and Science: The Rise of the Judahite State in the 10th Century BCE, “Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 1 (2021), pp.102–125.

6. See “Monarchy at Work? The Evidence of Three Gates,” sidebar to “Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers,” BAR, July/August 1997.

7. Yigal Levin, “Did Pharaoh Sheshonq Attack Jerusalem?” BAR, July/August 2012.

8. Abraham Malamat, “The Kingdom of David and Solomon in Its Contact with Egypt and Aram Naharaim,” Biblical Archaeologist 21.4 (December 1958), p. 99.

Read more in Bible History Daily:

Solomon’s Temple Destruction Gives Clues to Modern Science

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

The Doorways of Solomon’s Temple

Searching for the Temple of King Solomon

The Royal Purple of David and Solomon

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

Solomon’s Temple in Context

Solomon & Sheba, Inc.

Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.

The post Did Solomon Really Take an Egyptian Bride? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Our next collection is, “Exodus/Egypt.” It will be available, free to all, until Monday, April 20th. Stay tuned for future topics, introduced each Friday.

And if you haven’t read our collection “Where Jesus Walked, now is the time. It goes back into our members only vault Monday April 13th, 2020.

Exodus/Egypt

It’s the most dramatic event in the Hebrew Bible—the flight of the Israelites from Egypt and their miraculous escape across the Red Sea. The articles we’ve selected here address several key issues: How much history is contained in the Biblical account? What was life like in ancient Egypt? What is the story of the Ten Plagues trying to convey? And much more.

The articles below were hand-selected by Biblical Archaeology Society editors especially for members of the BAS Library.

Shock and Awe: The Exodus Narrative

BAR Video Archive
Mary Joan Winn Leith

Regular Biblical Archaeology Review contributor Mary Joan Winn Leith provides a fresh perspective on the language and imagery of the Book of Exodus by exploring ancient Egyptian iconography of power and authority. Through their acute awareness of Egyptian propaganda and art, the biblical writers and storytellers successfully inverted the very same imagery to illustrate Pharaoh’s ineptitude when confronted by Moses and the Israelite God Yahweh.

Israelites Found in Egypt

BAR, Sep/Oct 2003
by Manfred Bietak

The history behind the biblical tradition of Israel in Egypt has always excited scholars and laymen alike. The subject may seem somewhat worn out, however, especially in view of the current “minimalist” tendencies in scholarship. I do not claim to be a Bible scholar myself—I am an Egyptologist. But sometimes an outsider can shed new light on an important subject. I hope that will be the case here.

How Reliable Is Exodus?

BAR, Jul/Aug 2000
by Alan R. Millard

Recent attacks on the historicity of the Exodus raise the question of whether or not a text prepared long after the event is likely to be historically accurate. For it is undoubtedly true that the text of Exodus was prepared centuries after the events it describes. The Exodus would have occurred, in archaeological terms, in the Late Bronze Age (13th century B.C.). According to the Biblical chronology, the Exodus occurred before the establishment of the Israelite monarchy in about 1000 B.C. The existing Exodus text, however, was hardly prepared before that time.

Pharaoh’s Workers: How the Israelites Lived in Egypt

BAR, Jan/Feb 1999
by Barbara Lesko and Leonard Lesko

Whatever doubts scholars may entertain about the historicity of the Exodus, memories of an Israelite sojourn in Egypt seem too sharply etched to dismiss out of hand. The Biblical account simply contains too many accurate details and bears too many correspondences with Egyptian records to ignore. And although in our current state of knowledge we cannot say whether or how ancient Israelites labored for the pharaohs, we do know the conditions under which Egypt’s own laborers worked. Indeed, archaeologists at Deir el-Medina, Egypt, have uncovered the well-preserved village—including the homes, tombs, statuary, personal letters and legal documents—of the Egyptian craftsmen who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Readers can decide for themselves whether the Israelites worked in similar circumstances before the onset of a great oppression.

Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go

BAR, Jan/Feb 1998
by Abraham Malamat

Nothing in the archaeological record of Egypt directly substantiates the Biblical story of the Exodus. Yet a considerable body of Egyptian material provides such close analogies to the Biblical account that it may, in part, serve as indirect proof for the Israelite episode.

Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence

BAR, Sep/Oct 1994
by Charles R. Krahmalkov

The Exodus from Egypt, followed by the invasion and conquest of Palestine, lies at the heart of the Biblical account of Israel’s origins. A number of modern scholars, however, reject the entire story. It is, in their view, little more than a pious fabrication written hundreds of years after the events described.

Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues

BR, Jun 1990
by Ziony Zevit

When the enslaved Israelites sought to leave Egypt, Pharaoh said no. The Lord then visited ten plagues upon the Egyptians until finally Pharaoh permanently relented—the last of the plagues being the slaying of the first-born males of Egypt. Some of the plagues are the type of disasters that recur often in human history—hailstorms and locusts—and therefore appear possible and realistic. Others, less realistic, border on the comic—frogs and lice. Still others are almost surrealistic—blood and darkness—and appear highly improbable.

Red Sea or Reed Sea?

BAR, Jul/Aug 1984
by Bernard F. Batto

If there is anything that sophisticated students of the Bible know, it is that yam sûp, although traditionally translated Red Sea, really means Reed Sea, and that it was in fact the Reed Sea that the Israelites crossed on their way out of Egypt.

Well, it doesn’t and it wasn’t and they’re wrong!

The post Exodus/Egypt appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) report that a Greek warrior’s helmet recovered from the Bay of Haifa likely belonged to a Greek mercenary who fought for the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II around 600 B.C.E.

The post Greek Warrior’s Helmet Found in Bay of Haifa appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

by James Kugel

New York: Free Press, 2011, 256 pp.
$26
 
Reviewed by William W. Hallo
 
James Kugel is not your average, garden-variety scholar. He taught at Yale until Isidore Twersky made a special trip to Israel to recruit him for Harvard. There, rumor has it, his classes—even on such chaste topics as medieval rabbinic exegesis—were so over subscribed that he had to conduct weekly sessions for his numerous teaching assistants just to keep them up to speed. Not surprisingly, his numerous book-length publications specialize in presenting unconventional ideas. He first made his mark with The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History, 1 which revolutionized the study of Hebrew poetics. In The Bible as It Was,2 he acquainted readers with the entire rich Jewish literature of Late Antiquity. In The Ladder of Jacob,3 he gave us “ancient interpretations of the Biblical story of Jacob and his children.”

His life has been as exceptional as his works. After years of taking every second semester off to teach at Bar-Ilan University, he decided he needed to move to Israel full time&#8212 not surprising to me, since on a visit to Jerusalem, my wife and I had gone for Sabbath services to a small Sephardic congregation that turned out to be his congregation. (If you should ask what kind of a Sephardic name is Kugel, the answer is that it was Kaduri when his family arrived in America; in Israel his name is now Ya’acov Kaduri.)

The new book under review here is vintage Kugel. Diagnosed with a kind of cancer usually fatal, he decided to abandon work on a book in process and instead to chronicle the trajectory of his disease and his reactions to it. After a decade of treatment, he is confident that he has licked his illness, and shares with us the insights inspired by the contemplation of his own mortality. These insights can be summed up, however inadequately, under two headings: one, a scientific proof for the existence of God; the other, a new theory of the origin of religion. It goes without saying that both insights are heavily indebted to Jewish sources in general and to the Hebrew Bible in particular. The original subtitle of the book was in fact announced as On the Foundations of Jewish Belief.

As to proving divine existence, or what the author ultimately calls “the reality of God,” he has marshaled a dizzying array of specialized fields in both the hard and social sciences, notably neurophilosophy and evolutionary biology, to buttress his arguments. In each case, to judge by the extensive endnotes, he has read the latest surveys of the field, be they cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, or such unfamiliar specialties as sociobiology and ethology (see, e.g., p. 81). This reviewer has to plead ignorance of all these fields and will therefore confine his comments to the foundations of religious belief, especially as set forth in the second half of the book, which is more conventionally based on Biblical (and occasionally ancient Near Eastern) proof texts.

The notion that animal sacrifice was meant to “defuse the inherently violent tendencies in humanity” is attributed primarily to Rene Girard and to Walter Burkert (p. 211, note 2) but rejected by Kugel. For a different assessment of the “origins of the sacrificial cult,” see the reviewer in Origins: The Ancient Near Eastern Background of some Modern Western Institutions 4 or in The World’s Oldest Literature: Studies in Sumerian Belles-Lettres.5 Part of the difference may be a matter of definition, or even etymology, with Kugel describing sacrifice as the giving up of something valuable, almost in the sense the term has acquired in American baseball, while an alternative understanding of the concept goes back to the Latin “making something holy.”

The ultimate sacrifice is said to be illustrated by the king of Moab offering up his son to relieve a siege, but recent opinion on the relevant verse (2 Kings 3:27) favors an alternative understanding of the Biblical tale: Based on Amos 2:1 (and anticipated by medieval exegetes), it was the son of the Edomite king whom the king of Moab sacrificed.6

Kugel quotes widely and at length from all parts of the Hebrew Bible, always in his own English translations. These translations are informed in equal parts by medieval Rabbinic exegesis and modern critical analysis, the latter already illustrated in the title of the book. Kugel reads ṣaLMaWeT in Psalm 23:4 not as the familiar “valley of the shadow of death” but as “deep shadow” (ṣaLMuT).

For Bible scholarship in Israel, the past year has been nothing short of devastating, with the demise of such giants as Moshe Greenberg, Moshe Weinfled, Menachem Harran, Shemaryahu Talmon, Abraham Malamat, Hayim Tadmor and now Anson Rainey. No one mortal can expect to succeed to this pantheon of savants, but with this book, his 12th as sole author, Kugel bids fair to fill that role. Indeed, to paraphrase his favorite source, who knows but that it was for a time like this that he was kept alive (Esther 4:14).

Kugel is at home in the literature of all the world, ancient, medieval and modern; western and eastern; Jewish and Christian, although most of his citations do come from the Hebrew Bible.
 

Notes

1. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981).

2. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
Univ. Press, 1997).

3. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006).

4. William W. Hallo (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1996), pp. 212–222.

5. William W. Hallo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 517–528.

6. See simply Hallo in Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds., Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), pp. 46f.
 

 
William W. Hallo is professor emeritus of the department of near eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University and former curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection.

The post In the Valley of the Shadow appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Malamat made important contributions to the study of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East–particularly in our understanding of the emergence of Israel, the collapse of the kingdom of Judah, and the relationship of Mari and the Hebrew Bible. He wrote several articles for BAR on these topics.^a

According to Professor Shmuel Ahituv, one of Malamat’s former students, Malamat was “a gifted lecturer and a charismatic teacher. His lectures—whether before a classroom of students or before the general public—were a masterpiece of rhetoric…students used to crowd in, sitting on the steps and window sills [of the lecture hall].”

Malamat was born in 1922 in Vienna. In 1935, in the face of growing anti-Semitism, his family immigrated to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Hebrew University and also studied at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem and later at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. He began lecturing at the Hebrew University in 1954.

Malamat’s publications, written in Hebrew, English, German and French, numbered more than 300. He served as editor of the Israel Exploration Society’s Hebrew bulletin Yediot from 1956 to 1967 and was on the editorial boards of the Israel Exploration Journal and the Zeitschrift für Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.

He was a member of countless international societies and academies, and was invited to many universities abroad as visiting professor and guest lecturer. His students and colleagues published a festschrift in honor of his 70th birthday, Eretz-Israel 24: The Abraham Malamat Volume.—D.D.R.
 

 
Notes