David's Jerusalem: Between Memory and History

by Daniel Pioske

The history of David's Jerusalem remains one of the most contentious topics of the ancient world. This study engages with the fierce debates about the nature of the location by examining recent archaeological evidence from the site and by exploring the relationship of these material remains to claims made about David's royal center in the Hebrew Bible. After a consideration of various theoretical questions that surround the analysis of an ancient past represented in written texts from antiquity, Pioske's work explores how David's Jerusalem was remembered within writings composed in the late Iron Age (the Books of Samuel-Kings) and late Persian/early Hellenistic (the Book of Chronicles). With these literary images in mind, this volume then transitions into a detailed reconstruction of the landscape and lifeways of early 10th century BCE Jerusalem, or the location connected to David in the biblical narrative. Through this juxtaposition of the memories of Jerusalem preserved in the biblical writings and a reconstruction of the site derived from contemporary historical research, Pioske calls attention to the difficult relationship between a remembered past and a historical one, and invites the reader to consider David's Jerusalem as a location that inhabits the realms of both history and memory.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2014

Reviews

[Hans Kristensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply brilliant. A book I will come back to in the future