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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Michael Hasel

The Battle Over David

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for Jesus Christ, the word made flesh.

We thank you that we can come on the Sabbath day that Jesus inaugurated in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve so many years ago.

And we thank you that we can come into your presence today knowing that we are worshipping with fellow believers around the world, and that we are worshipping with our Creator God today.

We Pray that you would guide us into his truth.

Now if the Bible has such an impact in the world today, why is it that there is such skepticism about the Bible today?

I don't think that's a coincidence either, by the way, because whenever you have an inspired work like the Bible changing millions of lives over the centuries, Satan is at work in unprecedented ways.

A few years ago, I had the privilege to be invited here to Los Angeles to speak at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles.

It was a one-day symposium on the history of David and Solomon, and major scholars were invited from all over the world.

But anyway, I was invited to be part of this, part of 4 speakers that were speaking on that topic at the American Jewish University, located right across from the Getty Institute here in Los Angeles.

And the first speaker in the morning was a professor from University of California here in Los Angeles, UCLA.

And his topic was to look at the biblical text and look at a particular passage relating to David and Solomon.

And I sat in the front row and listened as he carefully and systematically destroyed the biblical text and cut it apart and dissected it into pieces using the historical critical method.

And when he was done, there was nothing left of the history of Solomon's building activity in Judah during the 10th century BC.

The next speaker was from Claremont Graduate University, and her topic that morning was on David in film.

I knew we were in Los Angeles and Hollywood wasn't very far away, but I didn't realize that there was such a...

But anyway, she was a film critic and a theologian, and she went through systematically and looked at how Hollywood and other producers had depicted David over the centuries in film.

And she did this in a very systematic way, but she also did it with a tinge of sarcasm all the way through, a sarcasm that was growing with film after film, because she showed how Hollywood tried to depict David as a kind of prefigured messianic figure that pointed towards Jesus.

And this was the American Jewish University.

And the audience, which was in a theater.

I'm sorry, they call this an amphitheater, but it's incorrect.

Because an amphitheater, if you know anything about amphitheaters, that's like the Colosseum in Rome.

So when I heard I was coming to the De Maso amphitheater today, I thought, oh I'm gonna have to be turning around like this all the time.

So anyway, so we were in a theater about this size, about 450 people, all Jewish, business people, lay people, students, faculty members, and so forth from the community here in Los Angeles.

And I knew of 1 Adventist family that were sitting right in the back, right about there.

They had come 3 hours to drive there just to hear these presentations.

And so we were all there, and she systematically went through, film by film, mentioning the actors and so forth, and dissecting it.

And every time she mentioned Jesus as a kind of forward-thinking, prophetic view of David, there was snickering in the room.

In fact, it kind of became a crowd and speaker thing that went back and forth and it kept building, so that by the end of her presentation, after an hour and a half, people were actually downright laughing.

And it kind of culminated in the last movie or film production that she chose, which was the VeggieTales version of David as the Sprig of Asparagus meeting the giant cucumber.

And she said, actually, she says this version is the most accurate version of all of the versions as far as the Bible goes, even though it's a cartoon.

But you know, it's kind of funny, and everybody laughed again.

I felt so uncomfortable during this hour and a half, right before lunch, that I almost left the room a couple of times, but then I thought, now I'm 1 of the speakers, and I'm sitting next to the other speakers in the front row and I probably, out of politeness, should stay.

But I thought, how is this symposium going to end?

So we had lunch then, and I had lunch with the third speaker, who had flown all the way from Jerusalem to be part of this conference.

He works for the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is the government agency that gives licenses to excavate in Israel.

Very high-ranking office, a PhD from Oxford, a British Jewish Israeli scholar, and we had lunch together with the other Avanist family that was there, and we talked a little bit, and then it was his turn to speak after lunch.

And his job and my job were to talk about archeology and David and Solomon.

He was to speak about Jerusalem, and I was supposed to speak about archaeology and some of the recent findings in the rest of the country.

And when he was done with Jerusalem, in fact, he started out by referring to the impact of David in the arts.

And he talked about Michelangelo's famous sculpture of David, which is today in Florence.

And he says this is a huge, huge sculpture.

And if you've ever been there, and I have, and it's quite moving.

My wife, actually, who's an art historian, started crying when she saw it.

But anyway, there's this huge statue there in Florence.

He says, this is a larger than life depiction of David.

He says, then there's the more diminutive or smaller depiction of David, which was done by another sculptor.

And he says, this is the 1 that was given to the Citadel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is standing today, a copy of it.

He says, this is a smaller version of David flying off.

You see Goliath's head there at the bottom in the corner.

And anyway, so, you know, and he says, this is a, you know, he's only about this high.

I've seen him many times, only about this high.

He says, this is another version, and so forth.

But he says, we don't really know who David is.

He says, we have all these different ideas about David, but we have no idea who he is.

And then he went systematically through the archeology of Jerusalem and basically said, this scholar says this, this scholar says this, this person says this, this person says this.

And when he was done, nobody in the room knew what to believe either.

So luckily that amphitheater, unlike this, I'm sorry, that theater, unlike this 1, had a backstage area, because they also used it for theatrical productions, I guess, at the university, had a backstage area.

And I had been, since the last few minutes of his presentation, I'd been pacing back and forth in the backstage, praying, Lord, what do you want me to say?

And the Lord is always good to us, isn't he?

Because the Lord and his spirit work in incredible ways.

And so I was introduced very kindly by Professor Zioni Zevitt, the organizer of the conference, and then it was my turn to speak, and I said to the audience that day, I said, we've gone today from Michelangelo's idea of David, which is larger than life.

We've gone to Verrecchio's version of David, which is smaller than life.

And we've gone to a sprig of asparagus meeting a giant cucumber.

And there was laughter, of course, because that was the mood everybody was in.

And I said, but for every single person in this room, whether we are Christian or whether we are Jewish, there is a real David in history.

And that real David in history matters to every single person here and every single person in this city.

Because that real David is not about a scholarly reconstruction.

That real David is about your identity and my identity.

And it is about who we are, and it's about where we come from.

And at that moment, you could hear a pin drop in the room.

And then I lifted up the recent National Geographic that had just come out the month before this conference, And I said, in this National Geographic, we read about the search for King David.

The cover story was focusing on the project that I'm going to be talking about with you today.

And this National Geographic issue talks about the search for King David, and 1 of the scholars in this, and I was reading from the issue, I said, 1 of the scholars here says that he destroyed Solomon, and that Solomon never existed, and that he destroyed Solomon, as if you can do that after 2, 000 years, but he destroyed him.

And in fact, that David as well is questionable in terms of the extent of his kingdom and so forth.

If you take David, This is from the National Geographic article.

If you take David and his kingdom out of the book, you have a different book.

The narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction.

And what I'm going to share with you today is what I shared at the American Jewish University there, adapted a little bit for a Sabbath sermon, that basically we have new evidence now, just uncovered in the last couple of years, that have revolutionized our understanding of the early kingdom of Judah and the early United Monarchy of Saul and David and Solomon.

And this is new data, and I'm just presenting the data.

So we're going to look today at Kiribati Qeiyafa, a small unknown site that has not been excavated or known until 2007 when my colleague, Professor Yosef Garfinkel, the Yigal Yadin Professor of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew University, the oldest chair in archaeology in Israel, contacted me while we were in professional meetings here in San Diego, just a little south from Loma Linda, and he contacted me and said, I have a new project that I'm starting.

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The Battle Over David

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