… King David was a mythical figure. And don’t know this:
In “The Birth & Death of Biblical Minimalism” (Biblical Archaeology Review, May/Jun 2011), Yosef Garfinkel notes,
In the mid-1980s the principal argument involved the dating of the final writing of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The minimalist school claimed then that it had been written only in the Hellenistic period, nearly 700 years after the time of David and Solomon, and that the Biblical descriptions were therefore purely literary.
[ … ]
For the minimalists, King David was “about as historical as King Arthur.” The name David had never been found in an ancient inscription.
Hardly had the minimalist argument been developed than it was profoundly undermined by an archaeological discovery. In 1993 and 1994, several fragments of an Aramaic stela were found at the long-running excavation of Tel Dan led by Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. The historical references in the inscription and the paleography of the writing make it clear that it dates to the ninth century B.C.E. Moreover, the text specifically mentions a king of Israel and a king of the “House of David” (Hebrew, bytdwd ), that is, a king of the dynasty of David.
Which “science” dealt with as follows:
The minimalists reacted in panic, leading to a number of suggestions that now seem ridiculous: The Hebrew bytdwd should be read not as the House of David, but as a place named betdwd, in parallel to the well-known place-name Ashdod.2 Other minimalist suggestions included “House of Uncle,” “House of Kettle” and “House of Beloved.”
Nowadays, arguments like these can be classified as displaying “paradigm-collapse trauma,” that is, literary compilations of groundless arguments, masquerading as scientific writing through footnotes, references and publication in professional journals.
Hang on, it gets better: The Minimalists argue that a recently excavated fortress could not have been constructed by Jews but rather by Philistines,
But the archaeology says otherwise. No pig bones have been found at the site, …
Some have likened this situation to dealing with Darwinists and Christian Darwinists: In the end, when does Iovy League speculation cease and evidence get its day in court?