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Rethinking the David–Solomon Polity as a Transitional, Semi-Pastoral, Polymorphic Kingship

  • Korean Journal of Old Testament Studies
  • Abbr : KJOTS
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.119~151
  • DOI : 10.24333/jkots.2026.32.2.119
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Old Testament Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology
  • Received : January 31, 2026
  • Accepted : February 19, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Lee Sak (Yitzhak Lee-Sak) 1

1연세대학교 한국기독교문화연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent proposals of Erez Ben-Yosef and Zachary Thomas, this study offers a critical reassessment of the Davidic-Solomonic polity against the polarized maximalist-minimalist landscape to challenge the habitual recourse to “chiefdom”, “territorial state”, or “empire” as primary explanatory frames. First, it argues that linear, evolutionary models of political development ─ from tribal confederation to chiefdom, then to state/territorial state and empire ─ tend to overdetermine the tenth-century BCE Israelite case and thereby obscure the genuinely composite texture of its social organization. Second, through a historical-critical rereading of the lists of the royal officials and the institutions of tribal assembly and elders in the Samuel-Kings corpus, the study contends that David and Solomon governed a political-administrative order fundamentally anchored in kinship relations, yet marked by forms of functional differentiation consistent with an incipient bureaucracy. David’s administrative infrastructure appears relatively limited, operating primarily through military networks of loyalty, personal retinues, and negotiated alliances. Solomon’s regime, while introducing more formalized districts and mechanisms of provisioning and tribute, nonetheless presupposes clan-, lineage-, and tribal-based authority as well as deliberative modes of governance. Third, the polity’s institutional profile is best described not as a monocentric state or an empire but as a polycentric, composite kingdom in which clan-kinship structures, tribal-lineage confederative elements, and chiefdom-like dynamics coexisted with emerging processes of administrative rationalization. More broadly, the David-Solomon kingdom is interpreted as a negotiated, coalition-based kingship that took shape within semi-pastoral and semi-sedentary traditions under tenthcentury southern Levantine conditions ─ constrained agrarian surplus, a temporary imperial vacuum, and heightened mobility. Accordingly, its historical plausibility should be assessed less by the monumental signatures typically expected of chiefdoms, territorial states, or empires than by the flexibility, adaptability, and contingent integration characteristic of transitional polities.

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