4David’s Jerusalem: The Early 10th Century BCE Part I: An Agrarian Community

Entombed beneath the homes and bustling streets of 21st-century Jerusalem are the ruins of those ancient cities that preceded it. The material remains of these past Jerusalems attest to the location’s long and meaningful history within the eastern Mediterranean world, and to the rise and decay of those powers that once controlled the location. The intent of this chapter and the next is to attend to the traces of one of these venerable, long-buried layers of Jerusalem’s past in order to reconstruct the landscape and lifeways of that site whose legacy gave rise to the cultural memories surveyed in the preceding chapters.