Story

David Captures Jerusalem

c. 1000 BCE

Biblical Narrative

After seven years and six months in Hebron, all the tribes of Israel came to David and said: Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh. The Lord said unto thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel. So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and king David made a league with them before the Lord; and they anointed David king over Israel. He was thirty years old when he began to reign, and reigned forty years: in Hebron seven years and six months over Judah, and in Jerusalem thirty and three years over all Israel and Judah.

The king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land. They mocked him from the walls: Thou shalt not come in hither, except thou take away the blind and the lame, thinking, David cannot come in hither. Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David. He said that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter and smiteth the Jebusites — and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David's soul — he shall be chief and captain. So Joab the son of Zeruiah went up first, and was made chief.

David dwelt in the fort, and called it the city of David. He built round about from Millo and inward. He waxed greater and greater; for the Lord God of hosts was with him. Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and carpenters, and masons; and they built David an house. David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's sake. From this neutral mountain — neither Judah nor Israel, neither Jebusite nor Israelite by tribal tradition — the king ruled twelve tribes that had a thousand reasons to mistrust each other.

David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David.2 Samuel 5:7

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The City of David — the steep ridge south of the Temple Mount, between the Kidron and Tyropoeon valleys — has been excavated continuously since Charles Warren in 1867 (Royal Engineers); through Kathleen Kenyon (1961–1967), Yigal Shiloh (1978–1985), Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron (1995–2010), and Eilat Mazar (2005–2021). The 15-acre Iron Age ridge fits the Jebusite town described in 2 Samuel: small, well-watered by the Gihon spring, naturally defensible. The Middle Bronze fortifications of the Spring Tower and the Pool Tower — massive masonry around the Gihon — show that the site had been a fortified water-stronghold for nearly a thousand years before David.

Eilat Mazar's 2005 announcement of the Large Stone Structure on the upper ridge — a substantial public building she dated by ceramics to the late eleventh / early tenth century BCE — was framed as the palace David built (2 Samuel 5:11). The interpretation is contested. Israel Finkelstein's low-chronology team dates the same fills to the ninth century, decoupling them from David. Amihai Mazar's modified conventional chronology accepts an early-tenth-century date but cautions against a too-confident equation with David's palace specifically. The public-building character itself — large, freestanding, masonry-walled — is not in dispute; only the century and the king.

The Stepped Stone Structure, the massive retaining-wall buttressing the eastern slope below the Large Stone Structure, has been investigated since Macalister and Duncan in the 1920s. The current consensus is that it was built in stages from the Late Bronze through Iron II, with its monumental form essentially in place by the early Iron Age. Together the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure compose what Mazar called the Davidic acropolis — by far the most ambitious monumental complex of any tenth-century Levantine highland site, even on the most skeptical chronology.

Whether or not we name it David's palace, the Large Stone Structure on the City of David ridge is the most monumental tenth-century building so far excavated in the Judean highlands.Mazar, Biblical Archaeology Review 32 (2006)