The Old Testament describes King David as an important ruler who presided over a great kingdom.
One Israeli archaeologist believes he has found evidence to support this biblical description.
According to The Times of Israel, professor Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University has uncovered clues that suggest the existence of a complex urban network dating to the time of David.
In an article published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, a peer-reviewed and multidisciplinary publication of Hebrew University, Garfinkel identified five cities within a day’s walk of Jerusalem, all of which might have belonged to David’s kingdom of Judea.
Archaeologists have known about these cities for years. At least two of the excavations date to the early 20th century.
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Garfinkel found his clues not through fresh digging, but by scouring archaeological publications from the 1930s onward.
He discovered reports of older excavations that connected these five cities to one another and perhaps to David’s Jerusalem.
“If you take all these sites, they have the same urban concept, they are all sitting on the border of the kingdom and sitting where you have a main road leading to the kingdom,” Garfinkel told The Times of Israel.
“These cities aren’t located in the middle of nowhere. It’s a pattern of urbanism with the same urban concept,” he added.
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Significantly, all of these cities date to around 1,000 BC, which coincides with the biblical rule of David.
Garfinkel did not set out to write a paper that would lend support to the Old Testament.
“I hate to use the term ‘trying to prove the Bible,’ because I’m not trying to prove anything,” he said. Like all good researchers, the professor has followed the evidence.
Nonetheless, cities with similar layouts and roads connecting them to Jerusalem suggest a complex and unified kingdom.
The question of whether Garfinkel’s paper supports biblical descriptions of David’s kingdom depends on how one interprets relative size and complexity.
Late-18th-century Philadelphia had a population of only 40,000, yet it ranked as the second-largest English-speaking city in the world.
Likewise, archaeologists have found evidence of vast civilizations in unusual places.
Readers familiar with David Grann’s 2009 book “The Lost City of Z” might recall descriptions of ancient cities with similar layouts and connecting roads in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
Thus, while Garfinkel’s work cannot “prove” the Bible, it can and does lend meaningful support to significant passages.
And fewer biblical figures rate as more significant than King David.
