Abishag (Ch. 1): Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine. Because of the savor of thy good ointments, thy name is as ointment poured forth; therefore do the virgins love thee. Draw me.¹

Chorus: We will run after thee.²

Abishag: The king hath brought me into his chambers.

Chorus: We will be glad and rejoice in thee; we will remember thy love more than wine.

Abishag: The upright love thee. I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of [Shulem], as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me. My mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards, but mine own vineyard have I not kept. Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon; for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?

David: If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds' tents. I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.³

Chorus: We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

Abishag: While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof. A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night between my breasts. My David is unto me as a cluster of henna in the vineyards of Engedi.

David: Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.

Abishag: Behold, thou art fair, my David, yea, pleasant. Also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir. (Ch. 2) I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

David: As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

Abishag: As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my David among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. I charge you, O ye daughters of [Shulem], by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

The voice of my David! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My David is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. My David spake, and said unto me:

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Brothers of Abishag: Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

Abishag: My David is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my David, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

(Ch. 3) By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth? It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I charge you, O ye daughters of [Shulem], by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

(Ch. 3: ver. 6) Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant? Behold his bed, which is Solomon's; threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel. They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night. King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon. He made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of [Shulem]. Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.

Solomon (Ch. 4): Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee. Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices! Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.⁴

Abishag: Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

Solomon (Ch. 5): I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.

Abishag: I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my David that knocketh, saying,

Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

Abishag: I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them? My David put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my David; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my David; but my David had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer. [Descent into the underworld:] The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.  I charge you, O daughters of [Shulem], if ye find my David, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.

Chorus: What is thy David more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy David more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?

Abishag: My David is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven. His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set. His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh. His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars. His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my David, and this is my friend, O daughters of [Shulem].

Chorus (Ch. 6): Whither is thy David gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy David turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.

Abishag: My David is gone down into his garden [into the underworld], to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my David's, and my David is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

Solomon: Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as [Shulem], terrible as an army with banners. Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead. Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them. As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks. There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her. Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

Abishag: I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished and the pomegranates budded. Or ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib.

Friends of Solomon (Ch. 7): Return, return, O Shulamite [from the underworld]; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.

Solomon: How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries. How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples; And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine.

Abishag: For my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak. I am my Beloved's, and his desire is toward me. Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.

(Ch. 8) O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised. I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother's house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.

His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me. I charge you, O daughters of [Shulem], that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.

Relative: Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.

Abishag: Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

Brothers of Abishag: We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.

Abishag: I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favour. Solomon had a vineyard at Baalhamon; he let out the vineyard unto keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.

My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.

Solomon: Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy voice: cause me to hear it.

Abishag: Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

¹Red indicates the voice of Abishag. ²Black indicates the voices of the chorus and the minor characters.
³Blue indicates the voice of King David. ⁴Green indicates the voice of King Solomon.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Once we recognize the point at which David disappears, at the beginning of chapter 3, the appearance of Solomon at 3:6 jumps out at us as nothing less than the arrival of Solomon, whoever he may ultimately turn out to be, in the Lebanon. We immediately see from the above theatrical-like presentation that this particular Solomon does not quite fit the other biblical account that sees him simply as the semi-legitimate successor of David, and we can begin to understand the peculiar plot twists required to place him on the throne, the murders of retribution that follow his ascension, and even the hatred expressed toward him and his progeny by their subjects. In this light, he looks more like a foreign invader than the legitimate king of Israel.

Who Was the Queen of Sheba?

Upon the installation of Solomon, David's son Adonijah asks for the hand of Abishag in marriage. Solomon immediately has him murdered, apparently because marriage to Abishag would somehow (perhaps in a survival of matriarchal succession) reinforce Adonijah's earlier claim to the throne. If our interpretation of the Song of Solomon is correct, Solomon then courts and wins the hand of Abishag and thereby seals his own claim to the throne. Our suspicion is that the paternal ancestry of Solomon—Shulmanu—represented a breakaway faction of the Assyrian Empire. The newly established Egyptian 22nd Dynasty would then have adopted a pro-Assyrian stance, and even Assyrian names for their kings, as a reaction to the threatening presence of Assyrian forces on their border. But who exactly was Solomon? And who was his mother—despite the "explanations" of the Hebrew linguists—simply referred to as "Daughter of Sheba," as another important person in his life was simply referred to as the "Queen of Sheba"? The following preliminary genealogy may serve to shed some light on the matter:

Genealogy of the Early House of David

The reader may have noticed that I have inferred that the "queen" of Sheba was identical with the mother of Solomon, referred to in the bible as "Bath-Sheba" (meaning "daughter of Sheba"). It is commonly assumed that the former was already a queen when she left the land of Saba in southern Arabia. I would like to present an alternative view.

The key to this quandary is the quantity and nature of the goods she brought with her from Arabia. As it says in First Kings,

And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices and gold very much, and precious stones....

Later,

And she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents [1 talent=approx. 30 Kg] of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones; there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.

That is approximately 3600 Kg of gold, or 115,000 troy ounces. In modern terms, at the current price of gold (as of August of 2011), that would be approximately 185 million American dollars worth of gold. Clearly, this may be an exaggeration, as much about David and Solomon may be exaggerations, but even so, this was no ordinary "present," no matter how profligate. There can be no other explanation than that it was a dowry paid by one king to another, in preparation for the marriage of the daughter of the former to the latter. This would make her the princess of Sheba, only to become queen upon her marriage to King David. And it was as a princess of the royal house of Saba that she would later insist that her son Solomon should succeed to the throne of Israel. This occurred long before Solomon built his fleet at Ezion-geber, despite the location of the story in the bible, so that the need for camels would indicate that the joint fleet of Solomon and his half brother Hiram, the son of Adonijah/Adoniram/Hiram Abiff ("father of Hiram") and Bath-Sheba, which was capable of bringing vast treasures from as far away as Ophir in India, was not yet available. This marriage, along with all of the other marital alliances engaged in by the early House of David, would finally lead, in 907 BC, to the presence of a descendant of earlier rulers of Kish, Arabia, and Egypt on the throne of Judah.

The City of Solomon

Solomon built temples for his wives, all of the important ones.

Now king Solomon loved many foreign women, besides the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites .... And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines .... For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the detestation of the Ammonites.... Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh the detestation of Moab, in the mount that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech the detestation of the children of Ammon. And so did he for all his foreign wives, who offered and sacrificed unto their gods.

The Levites spun this fact and made those temples dedicated to gods other than Yahweh the product of his old age and his drifting away from the worship of their "true God," but the fact is that the Temple of Yahweh was only one of many and had no special significance to anyone but one of his wives, her fellow worshippers, and the later Levites and their followers. This was because Solomon was not simply king of the Jews. He was king, or leader, of a federation that covered the entire region from the Euphrates River to the borders of Egypt and may have had political relationships as far away as Sheba in southern Arabia and Ophir on the Indus, supposedly reached by a fleet of ships sailing from Eilat and manned by Israelites and Phoenicians. This was no petty mountain kingdom as some have claimed, but neither was it the great empire of the early Jewish kings ruled from the biblical Jerusalem. So again, the bible is right in its broad brush strokes but the details have been fudged to fit the political and theological agenda of a later priesthood.

As we have seen time and time again in the current study, the bible rarely strays very far from the actual truth and there is often a cryptic and easily overlooked clue at hand. So we are justified in asking whether the true location of Solomon's Temple is not hinted at somewhere in the description of events surrounding the breakup of the United Monarchy.

And Rehoboam went to Shechem; for all of Israel were come to Shechem to make him king. And it came to pass, when Jeroboam the son of Nebat heard of it―for he was yet in Egypt, whither he had fled from the presence of king Solomon, and Jeroboam dwelt in Egypt, and they sent and called him―that Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came, and spoke unto Rehoboam ...."

Now Shechem was a seminal location in the lives of the forerunners of Solomon. Abraham built an altar there. It was, according to some, the place where he stopped upon entering Canaan and it was the place where Yahweh himself gave Abraham the future land of Israel. Joseph is supposed to be buried there, though we have already seen that his mummy remains in Egypt. Jacob's sons are purported to have massacred the population at one point. It is mentioned in the Amarna letters found at Akhnaton's short-lived capital of Akhetaton, its ruler Labayu having hired mercenaries from among the Habiru, associated by some with the early Hebrews. Joshua assembled the tribes there for the purpose of making a covenant with them after his conquest of Canaan, and it later became the religious capital of the Samaritans. According to the article on the Samaritans in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1890, the Samaritans

claim to possess the orthodox religion of Moses .... But they regard the Jewish temple and priesthood as schismatical, and declare that the true sanctuary of God's choice is not Zion but Mt. Gerizim, overhanging Shechem ....

The city had a Bronze Age temple of Baal-berith, "Baal of the covenant," or El-berith, (El of the covenant?) and was conquered and rebuilt by the Israelites in the 10th century after having been destroyed in the 11th, possibly by Abimelech. This was the first tripartite temple in Palestine and in this regard resembled Solomon's missing Temple. Shechem was the first capital of the Northern Kingdom, so that it appears that Rehoboam did not just lose the fealty of the ten tribes of Israel, he was summarily ejected from his own capital, so angry were they at his presumptuousness―or as a direct result of his association with the harsh conditions that followed the catastrophe of circa 934 (see Chapter 8), hinted at but never described in First Kings, where the people of Israel say to him:

Thy father made our yoke grievous; now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.

How did Jerusalem come to be identified with Solomon? Ahmed Osman, in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs, points out that many scholars derive the name Jerusalem, Urusalim in the Akkadian of the Tell el Amarna letters, from the words yarah meaning "to found" and Shalim or Shulmanu, the latter of whom we have already had the pleasure of meeting in the very person of "Solomon" as presented in the Song of Songs. So Jerusalem was "founded by [the god] Shulmanu," not a terribly long etymological distance from the concept of its foundation by King Solomon. The problem with the biblical account is that the city was built in the name of Shulmanu long before the rise of the Jewish kingdom in the area and even before the first Shalmaneser ruled Assyria. Osman disputes the translation, but it is clear that the area of Jerusalem must have been a major cultic center of Shulmanu long before the decay had set in that left the city itself virtually nonexistent by the 10th century BC.

The Arrival of Kingship in Israel

Kenneth Humphries, on his website dedicated to the proposition that the entire bible is fictional―an understandable proposition considering the, especially chronological, distortions it contains―nevertheless manages to retrieve a clue originally discovered by a Swiss collector and former diplomat that speaks to the problem of the true nature of Solomon's Temple. Humphries quotes an Assyrian stele due to Shamshi-Adad V (824-811 BC):

I ascended the Lebanon mountains and cut down the mighty beams of cedar. At that time I carried those cedars from Lebanon and at the gate of the temple of Shulmânu, my lord, I laid them down.... The old temple which Shalmaneser [859-824 BC], my father, had built, had become decrepit, and I, in my skill, rebuilt that temple from its foundations to its pinnacles.... The beams of cedar from Lebanon I laid on it.... When this temple becomes old and decrepit, may a future prince renew its decrepit parts and return the inscription to its place.

Humphries thinks that the Solomon of the bible is the god Shulmanu worshipped in Assyria, which he very well may have been on some level or another of legendary development, but the real implication here is simply that the building of temples dedicated to the God of Solomon out of cedar from Lebanon was not limited to the kingdom of Israel and that there were kings named after Shulmanu elsewhere than at Ashur, just as there were Hammurabis at places other than Babylon and there were Sargons among the descendants of Shem and even Osorkons among the Egyptians.

So here we have three consecutive Jewish rulers whose names look like truncations of theophoric names based on the gods of the Western Semites concurrently worshipped by the Assyrians and other nearby peoples. This phenomenon was not restricted to Israel. According to George Rawlinson, again in his book on Assyria in The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient World, with the beginning of the 22nd Dynasty and extending through the 23rd, the names of the Egyptian kings became Assyrian.

It is very remarkable that exactly in this interval of darkness, when Assyria would seem, from the failure both of buildings and records, to have been especially and exceptionally weak, occurs the first appearance of her having extended her influence beyond Syria into the great and ancient monarchy of Egypt. In the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty ... Assyrian names appear for the first time in the Egyptian dynastic lists. It has been supposed from this circumstance that the entire twenty-second dynasty, together with that which succeeded it, was Assyrian ....

Rawlinson tries to explain this away in terms of intermarriages of the Egyptian kings with foreign rulers, and later historians have claimed that these names are actually Libyan in origin, but the fact is that the beginning of the 22nd Dynasty and the advent of its Assyrian-named kings is precisely concurrent with the rise of Solomon―Shulmanu (or even Shulmanu-asharidu)―so that the picture painted here, after the timeline has been shorn of its inflated valuations, is quite consistent with the background painted by the Old Testament. For it is David who is supposed to have built an empire from the Euphrates to the Nile, and then we are told that Solomon, his immediate successor, formed an alliance of blood with the Egyptians just to the west of David's empire. What is normally lost is that this action, the sending of a daughter of the pharaoh to marry Solomon, is not that of a great power toward a client state. It is the action of a client state toward a regional power, as the Japanese shogun kept the relatives of the local kings, or daimyo, captive at Edo. And we have to suspect that the appearance of Assyrian names in Egypt resulted from the same forces that led to the establishment of Assyrian-named kings in Israel, and that those early kings of Israel were more closely aligned with the Assyrians than has ever been suspected. At this point we need to look at the installation of Saul as king of Israel and whether there is evidence of an Assyrian hand in these events.

According to First Samuel, the people of Israel began to demand a king to rule over them and protect them against the surrounding nations, all of which had kings. This would have been in 986 BC according to the current reconstruction. They went to Samuel, who was serving as judge and keeper of the Ark of the Covenant at the time. Samuel settled on Saul because...well...er...he was available. It seems his father had sent him on a search after some missing asses and he just happened to visit Samuel at the instigation of his servant to learn "concerning our journey whereon we go." Nothing is said about why the animals were missing nor what exactly his unnamed servant expected to learn about their lost animal hunt. After asking directions from the requisite young maidens drawing water at the town well, Saul manages to find Samuel, who tells him his lost asses have been found and that he is to be king of Israel, because...well...er...Yahweh told him so. Many of the elements here remind us of the machinations people go through to get someone to a surprise birthday party. This is the point where alarm bells should go off in the head of anyone who understands how the editors of the bible liked to hide things from the view of their congregants. It turns out that Saul was the son of Kish―or rather he was named something on the order of "Saul of Kish"―and a longer genealogy is presented going back to Aphiah of the tribe of Benjamin, whoever he was, whose father was a "mighty man of valour," by which is apparently meant a person of some note, at least within the confines of the not exactly globally known patriarchy of Benjamin. This all has the smell of those quaint little stories about the origins of the names of people and places one finds in the bible that have nothing to do with reality beyond perhaps a local folk tale or two. My point here is that Saul basically appears from nowhere out of the mists of time, and his ascension to the hitherto nonexistent throne of Israel is already suspicious, for Kish was a major city of the Sumerians and Akkadians east of Babylon and Saül later appeared as an element in the name of a member of the Assyrian royal family serving as viceroy of Babylonia (Saül-mugina), so that the implication that emerges from the fog along with Saul is that he had some relation to the rulers of Assyria and Babylonia beyond that of his supposed ancestor Benjamin, the son of Yaqaru, king of Ugarit and purported descendant of Hammurabi.

Saul ruled for 20 years according to Josephus, and we can imagine that the authors of the bible would have called it 40 if they had managed to remember to include this important bit of information. Samuel immediately decided that Saul was not the proper king of Israel because...well...er...he didn't follow his instructions to the letter, and immediately ran off to anoint David as king, an anointment that led to David's immediate acquisition of visionary powers (or drug induced psychosis) though it took the better part of two decades for this anointment to take effect, despite Saul's possession by evil spirits who could only be exorcised by David's magical harp. (Who writes this stuff?) The only rational conclusion that can be drawn from this inconsistent patchwork of legends and tall tales is that none of it is true and that Saul was placed on the newly created throne of Israel by forces beyond its borders, with or without the help of the Israelite priesthood and judgeship. The actual transfer of kingship from Saul to David appears to have resulted from the marriage of the latter to Michal, the daughter of the former, indicating the survival of matriarchal transmission of the royal bloodline even at that late date. Again, the ruler of a client state gave his daughter in marriage to the representative of a regional power, in this case, one with Assyrian connections.

Beyond these general outlines, it is difficult to determine precisely what happened during the early years of the Jewish kingdom. It is, however, important to point out the apparently invented nature of the ancestries of Saul and David, especially of the latter, at least before Boaz. As we have already noticed in Chapter 4, there were twelve generations from Joseph to Joshua, a fact that is evident from First Chronicles but edited out of the account in Exodus. In like manner, there are only twelve generations from Jacob to David, a period of four and a half centuries that would lead to an unrealistically long average generation of 37.5 years. As we will see in Chapter 12, it is only as early as David that the gospel authors intersect in presenting their contradictory genealogies of Jesus. So, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest at this point that the key series of events―in the development of the later history and religion of the Jews and ultimately also of the followers, originally, of Yeshu the Nazir―was the arrival of kingship in Israel, a kingship that appeared at a point when the fortunes of Assyria and Babylonia, from the few fragments of written records that remain, were at their lowest ebb.

The lack of historical detail in our knowledge of the period during which Saul, David, and Solomon ruled the land of the Israelites and beyond is no accident. In southern Europe, this period fell within the so-called Greek Dark Ages, and that age of obscurity extended across much of the civilized world of the time. The peculiar thing about the followers of Immanuel Velikovsky is that they have used this dark age and parallel sparsely documented eras in the histories of other civilizations to facilitate their rearrangement of the historical timeline in the furtherance of their literal reading of the bible, artificially expanded chronology and all, whereas the very cosmic catastrophes uncovered originally―if imperfectly―by Dr. Velikovsky may be used to explain in the most profound of terms those very gaps in the historical record. There is something bordering on the schizoid here, for the good doctor and his followers would have us believe that those catastrophes were so intense that they led to a kind of global amnesia analogous to certain varieties of hysteria in the individual, while denying the existence of actual cultural breaks in the development of civilization due to those very catastrophes.

The Greek Dark Ages are normally placed between approximately 1150 and 800 BC. As we shall see in the next chapter, this period covers a number of global events of a decidedly negative if not downright catastrophic nature, within a much longer series, after which civilization seems to have regained its balance long enough to begin keeping serious records again. The actual precipitating event seems to have been whatever caused the tree ring minimum of 1159 BC, synchronous with the Battle of Gibeon in Israelite history and the widespread introduction of iron working in the Near East. 1036, the year of the next event, was the first year of Philistine domination of Israel and was marked by the birth of Samson the Nazir. By 933, Solomon had risen to the height of his power and, as we have already suggested, this further event may have been the cause of the precipitous decline of Israelite power toward the end of the 10th century BC. Only after the event of 810 does the world seem to have fully regained its equilibrium, perhaps because of the limited effects of that event. So there is no reason to be surprised that no one in Egypt or Mesopotamia took much notice of what was happening on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. These great civilizations barely took note of each other during this period!

As George Smith recognized in his Assyria from the Earliest of Times to the Fall of Nineveh, the time of Saul, David, and Solomon was marked by the decline of Assyrian power in the region. Yet, as we have just seen, the first three kings of united Israel had names that can be seen as Assyrian in origin. And then the Egyptians began to use anomalous Assyrian style names at the time of the appearance of Solomon on the throne of Israel. There was even a series of Osorkons (or Sargons) during the 22nd Dynasty. How do we square these two disparate tendencies without resorting to a Velikovsky style re-sorting of the historical record? The clue is the appellation given to Saul, "ben Kish." Despite the attempt by the biblical editors to turn this into a familial reference, it is a clear indication of the nature of the Assyrian influence that appears, seemingly out of nowhere, at the time of the ascendancy of Saul. For Kish was, as we have already mentioned, one of the ancient capitals of Sumer as far back as 2950 BC, perhaps the principle city of the Sumerians. It was later conquered by the Akkadians who formed the joint kingdom of Sumer and Akkad and by the time of Saul Akkad had been under Assyrian rule for 600 years, so that its inhabitants must have been thoroughly Assyrianized. They would have, no doubt, spoken the Assyrian language, worshipped their gods, named their children after those gods, and obeyed their laws. But as the Assyrian power waned, it is reasonable to assume that the former nationalistic fervor of the city would have begun to reassert itself, perhaps resulting in a military campaign that would have battled its way northward along the upper reaches of the Euphrates River recently vacated by the Assyrians and finally marched southwards along the western arc of the Fertile Crescent until it reached the city of Shechem. This is the point where Samuel would have found himself in the position of either accepting the kingship of Saul or having his judgeship crushed by the invading army from Kish. Later, Solomon would build a port at the extreme northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, suggesting an attempt to reestablish the southern sea lanes of the Akkadian Empire that we will look at more closely in Chapter Eleven. The association of the "Queen" of Sheba at Saba in southern Arabia with Solomon fits well with this attempt to reestablish hegemony over the former southern possessions of the Akkadians, even as far as India. The Sabaeans themselves had outposts in what is now Ethiopia where the Ark is purported to rest.

A decade or so before the death of Solomon the mid 930s saw the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the return of Assyrian power to the region. Ashur-dan II began his reign in 935 or thereabouts. He was the first Assyrian king to conquer adjoining lands in well over a century, thus applying pressure from the east on Solomon's confederation. To what extent this reawakening of Assyrian influence was tied to geophysical events is currently unknown, though it is a reasonable hypothesis within the context of the current reconstruction.

Is There Balm in Gilead?—Romulus and the Lost Tribes of Israel

In 773 BC, Romulus was born, purportedly somewhere near the Tiber River. Twenty years later, in 753, he murdered his twin brother Remus and founded Rome. The year before, he had murdered his great-uncle Amulius, king of the Latins at Alba Longa, thus restoring his maternal grandfather Numitor to the throne. Later, in Israel, Pekah ("ben Remaliah") murdered Pekahiah in 734 to become the last independent king of Israel. By the end of 731, Tiglath-Pilesar of Assyria had conquered most of the Northern Kingdom and Hoshea had supposedly murdered Pekah and become king himself of the remaining fragment of the kingdom, or was the governor of Israel under the Assyrian king. Yet Pekah is supposed to have reigned for 20 years, which would bring his kingship down to 715, ruling somewhere other than Israel over the remnants of what have come to be known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. 715 was the very year that Romulus died at Rome and was replaced by the Sabine, Numa Pompilius. Though far from provable at this point, the limited evidence available to us suggests that Romulus and ben Remaliah were the same person, that he was king of the ten tribes in Israel and later at Rome, that he murdered his way to the top before finally losing decisively to the Assyrian Empire, and that he led his followers, Moses-like, out of Israel to their new home in what is now Italy. Like Moses, the infant Romulus is supposed to have been retrieved from a crude boat that was floated down the river, in this case, by Amulius. The river was the Tiber.

In this regard, Thomas Blackwell enumerates the similarities between Romulus and Moses in his Letters Concerning Mythology, published at London in 1748:

...  I. Romulus at his birth was exposed in the river for fear of a great king: So was Moses.  II. Romulus was spared by the water, and most fortunately preserved: So was Moses. III. Romulus was educated as a shepherd, and kept his supposed father's flocks: So did Moses.  IV. Romulus defeated and killed the king who had caused him to be exposed: So did Moses.  V. Romulus led forth tribes to new seats, was a lawgiver and founder of a state: So was Moses.  VI. Romulus introduced a senate or court of elders into his new polity: So did Moses.  VII. Romulus was both king and priest, and had a brother more priestly than himself: So was Moses and had a brother the same.  VIII. Romulus conquered kings, and with hands lifted up to heaven, averted a defeat, and obtained a victory: So did Moses.  IX. In fine, Romulus disappeared from among men, prone to worship him as a god, the manner of his death and place of his burial being equally unknown: So did Moses in every point.

Some of these parallels are strong, i.e., the two accounts strongly resemble each other, and some are weak. The parallel to the Exodus is weak, in that there are none of the miraculous elements in the Romulan tale that we find in the Mosaic. Neither do we find any sense of the flight from adversity and repression among the followers of Romulus that we find in the bible. So the question arises, is there supporting evidence for the identification of Romulus with the leader of a later exodus of elements of the ten tribes from the Northern Kingdom?

As Peter G. Bietenholz writes in Historia and Fabula,

Romulus ... was historical, Gronovius maintained. He had immigrated to Latium from Syria, since Syria was the only place where his name could be found. In fact Gronovius could point to a Jewish namesake. He was Remaliah (or Romelias), the father of King Pekah of Israel (2 Kings 15.27). No less bizarre is the evidence Gronovius marshalled in support of his thesis; he discussed religious and constitutional practices enacted by Romulus that betray an oriental origin.

One wonders why Bietenholz thought the evidence "bizarre." Along the same lines, John Mason Good, Olinthus Gregory, and Newton Bosworth wrote in 1813 in Pantologia:

Gronovius is of opinion, that Romulus was neither a Gaul nor Affrican, but a Syrian; since Josephus and Nicephorus translated the name by υιος Ρωμελιου [removing the peculiar ligatures from the original], the son of Romelia, of whom mention is made in scripture.

This last was lifted without attribution from other works, beginning at least as early as A Complete Dictionary of the Greek and Roman Antiquities of 1700, by Pierre Danet. The work cited is the Dissertatio de Origine Romuli ... of 1684, by Jakob Gronovius (1645-1716). The text of Gronovius makes a distinction between the spelling of Josephus and that of Nicephorus:

At is ipse & ab Ægyptiis interpretibus & ab Josepho plane scribitur υιος Ρομελιου, ab Nicephoro autem Ρωμελιου [my emphasis].

The only mention of Romelias (Remaliah) in Josephus is translated by William Whiston (1667-1752) as follows:

... Pekahiah ... ruled but two years only, after which he was slain with his friends at a feast, by the treachery of one Pekah, the general of his horse, and the son of Remaliah, who had laid snares for him.

Nowhere, as far as I can tell, does Gronovius tell us where exactly he found the untranslated name Romulus in Josephus, except that it is supposed that Josephus used a Greek edition of the Hebrew bible in constructing his own history. Even if this is true, it would not be irrational to suggest that he would have known who Pekah was from the original Hebrew version. I can only assume that the same is true of Nicephorus.

However, beyond the assertions of Gronovius, it is true that the name of Pekah, the Hebrew equivalent of Picus, the legendary first king of the Latins (though, I should emphasize in the interest of accuracy, not the first king at Rome) was almost invariably associated with that of his supposed father. As Jeremy Hughes writes in his Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology,

... Pekah is almost always referred to as 'Pekah ben Remaliah' in Biblical texts (and simply as ben Remaliah in Isaiah 7.9) ....

The biblical account has Pekah murdered by Hoshea, long before he had ruled for 20 years. The Assyrians, on the other hand, claim that it was they who killed Pekah. In reality, Pekah seems not only to have managed to escape but to have taken many of his followers with him, a development for which neither the Assyrians nor their lackeys were willing to accept responsibility.

Together, Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Naphtali attacked Jerusalem in a vain attempt to draw Judah into a Syrian led alliance against the Assyrians, though the editors of the bible cannot agree on whether the attack came under the rule of Jotham or Ahaz. In either case, the contention by Gronovius that Romulus was Syrian finds even greater support from the close political ties between ben Remaliah and the ruler of Damascus.

Are we in a position to suggest what really happened? According to the legends, Romulus and his (possibly mythical) brother Remus were the sons of Rhea Sylvia, the daughter of Numitor (the brother of Amulius), and the god Mars. Pekah, on the other hand, at least according to the bible, was the son of Remaliah. Could it be that the peculiar genealogy of Romulus actually masks the merging of the royal families of Alba and Gilead? Adding fuel to the fire, Romulus is not the only king of the Latins who has a doppelganger among the rulers of Judea and Samaria. Amulius, the mortal enemy of Romulus, also appears, in the form of Amaziah, king of Judah at Jerusalem.

Amaziah became king of Judah in 798 BC and ruled for 29 years, counting inclusively, as they do in the bible, until 770, the 14th year of Jeroboam II according to Josephus, when he was supposedly murdered by his successor, Azariah. Amulius, on the other hand, seized the throne of Alba in 780 BC and ruled until he was murdered by Romulus in 754. Yet Amulius is supposed to have ruled for 44 years, which would place his ascension to the throne in the year 798, counting exclusively, as the Romans did, the very year that Amaziah became king at Jerusalem. Not proof but more evidence of parallel rulers in Latium and the Levant.

In 785, Joash ben Jehoahaz, king of Israel, plundered Jerusalem. The next year, in 784, Azariah, the son of Amaziah, became co-regent of Judah, allowing his father, perhaps allied with the Assyrians, to begin what looks like a long-term effort to exact vengeance on Israel from a base on the Italian Peninsula. In 780, Amaziah (known as Amulius to the Latins) seized the throne at Alba Longa from Numitor, the legitimate successor to Proca Sylvius, who had just died. Amulius ruled at Alba Longa while his son ruled at Jerusalem. The legends, apparently in error, have Amulius as the younger son of Proca. The error may result from the fairly common confusion of king-lists with genealogies.

Beyond our two doppelgangers, surprisingly enough, there is a third ghostly presence in Israel who mirrors, this time, the supposed foster father of Romulus. He is the predecessor of Pekah, King Pekahiah. As Algernon Herbert (under the pseudonym "Nimrod") wrote in 1828, in the third volume of his Nimrod: A Discourse on Certain Passages of History and Fable,

Meleager was begotten (as Romulus was) by Mars, that is to say, by Picus or Enyalian Jove. Enyalius, according to the story which John Malalas has preserved for us, was the son of Neptune and married the daughter of Jupiter Picus: He conquered Africa and was the first who instituted Equestrian Games, those are the Pyrrhic dance .... Jupiter Picus father of Enyalius is the Picus Martius who reared Romulus, and is confounded with the odious dæmon Mars for this reason, that Mars in itself did not imply the bad power ....

Pekahiah is a compound of Pekah and Yahu, the equivalent of the Roman Jupiter Picus, Pekah being the Hebrew form of Picus and Yahu being the equivalent of the great Roman father god Jupiter.

The word Picus itself explains much of the story of the early days of Romulus. Angelo de Gubernatis, in 1872, in the second volume of his Zoological Mythology, refers the reader to the work of Professor Adalbert Kuhn, in which Kuhn compares,

... the Vedic Hawk and the Vedic fire-bhuranyus with the Hellenic Phoroneus, the Latin picus Feronius, the incendiaria avis, the picus that carries thunder, and that which carries food to the twins Romulus and Remus, and which enjoys wine with King Picus, progenitor of a race, and with the corresponding German traditions. I shall only observe here the mythological relationship between picus and the corvus pica ... in order to return to the equivocal Vedic word vrikas, which means wolf and crow, whence also arose and fostered itself the confusion between the she-wolf that nurses the twin Latin heroes, and the woodpecker which, in the same legend, offers itself as their nourisher.

Continuing our reconstruction, Romulus was apparently born to Pekahiah and Rhea Sylvia, the daughter of Numitor, seven years after Amaziah, the king of Judah, had seized the throne at Alba Longa. Clearly, a plot was afoot. In 770, Azariah ascended the Judahite throne, leaving his father to rule the Latins at Alba Longa. Sixteen years later, in 754, Romulus, of mixed Latin and Gileadite ancestry, killed Amulius and returned his grandfather to the throne. Back in Israel, Jeroboam II was king. In 753, Romulus began the building of Rome. By 752, Numitor was dead, Alba Longa was no longer the home of kings, and ben Remaliah was in a position to plot the conquest of Israel.

Interlocking Rule in Latium and the Levant during the 8th Century BC
 

YEAR BC	SHECHEM	ROME	ALBA LONGA	JERUSALEM
803			Proca Silvius
802
801
800
799	Joash b. Jehoahaz
798				Amaziah [29]
797
796
795
794
793
792
791
790
789
788
787
786
785				(Sacked by Joash)
784	Jeroboam II			+Azariah [52]
783
782
781
780			Amulius [44]
779
778
777
776
775
774
773			(Birth of Romulus)
772
771
770
				Azariah
769
768
767
766
765
764
763
762
761
760
759
758
757
756
755
754			Numitor [2]
753		(Ab urbe condita 1)*
752		Romulus
751
750	(E Manuscript)
749
748
747
746				+Jotham [16]
745
744	Menahem
743
742
741
740
739
738
737
736
735	Pekahiah [2]
734	Pekah b. Remaliah (Romulus [20])
733
				Jotham
732				(Invaded by Pekah)
731		("Lost Tribes" to Rome)
	Tiglath-Pilesar III			Ahaz [16]
730
729
728
727
726
725
724
723
722	Shalmaneser V
721
720	Sargon II
719
718
717
716
715				Hezekiah
		Numa Pompilius
*433 years from the fall of Troy by the current reconstruction.  []Number of years ruled.  +Co-regent.  Orange=Realms of Amaziah/Amulius.  Blue=Realms of Romulus/ben Remaliah.

The most important gap in our knowledge, even after we have made a preliminary synthesis of the Latin account with the one in the bible, is that of the nature of the relationships among the various political entities involved. There are, however, various clues available to us. Isaiah, for example, in emphasizing the supposed ancestry of Pekah, refers to him rather condescendingly as ben Remaliah, as if his father, at least in the eyes of the commentators, was a nobody. More likely, the Hebrew equivalent of the genitive case here is a mistranslation and refers not to the man's father but to his place of origin, the newly founded city of Rome, as Saul's "father" Kish was actually his city of origin. Hence, we have Romulus of Rome, allied with the king of Damascus, Rezin, sitting on the throne of Israel after he had already founded Rome. The implication is that Romulus was not king of Israel only, but the ruler of a larger realm, perhaps we might call it the Romulan Empire, and that the armed attack from Gilead represented, not a local affair, but a foreign conquest with much broader implications.

On a parallel but opposite track, we have Amaziah engaged in extending the power of Judah—really the city-state of Jerusalem—to the city of Alba Longa in Latium in the north of the Italian peninsula, perhaps, again, in response to pressure from the Assyrians, even as the Greeks were colonizing Magna Graecia in the south.

In support of the presence of large numbers of Israelites at Rome at this time, I would refer the reader to what Martin Bernal wrote in 2006:

Latin's massive borrowings from Greek are well known and understood. I maintain that between 800 and 400 BCE Latin borrowed almost equally heavily from Semitic, either directly from the Punic or indirectly through Etruscan and Greek. . . . Borrowing on such a scale would indicate prolonged and intense contact between Canaanite and Latin and Etruscan speakers.

What Bernal fails to point out, though it is rather obvious, is that "Canaanite" at this point in time is primarily a euphemism for the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Bernal, after all, is trying to demonstrate that the failure of the scholarly world in the recent past to identify the true origins of Greek civilization was based, at least in part, on anti-Semitism, yet even he cannot bring himself to call these "Canaanites" by their real name. Bernal continues a few paragraphs later:

For a city set on seven hills, the name Rōma and the Etruscan clan name Ruma are more plausibly derived from the common Canaanite place-name Råmåh "citadel, high place" than from some version of the Indo-European root *sreu "flow."