ABSTRACT
Part II of this investigation of early 10th-century BCE Jerusalem continues with those historical interests and interpretive concerns outlined in the previous chapter. Following upon the portrayal there of the everyday, agrarian spaces of David’s Jerusalem, my intent in this chapter is to explore this location’s stronghold character and to reflect on the site’s ideological potential during the first decades of the 1st millennium BCE. In attending to these defensive and ideological features of the ancient settlement, the guiding question of this chapter’s investigation is that posed by A. Alt nearly a century ago: why did Jerusalem, and not other highland sites positioned in more strategic locations or with a longer heritage of political authority in the southern Levant, become the ruling center of an Iron Age dynasty?2
