King Whoever

Who are you, little man? I look into your sad eyes…and see only resolve not to share your secrets. But you’re out in the open now, in the sunlight. You won’t understand what the Internet is just quite yet, but you’re well featured on it…and that means that even though you obviously can’t see any of us, we can all see you. It’s sort of hard to explain. But it’s a good thing, mostly.

You haven’t been out there in full view for all to admire for long. I know that, and I can imagine how disorienting this kind of unsought-after publicity must be for someone your age—you have, after all, spent the last three thousand years buried under a huge mountain of dirt and debris—and it’s clearly going to take a while to adjust to the modern world. But you’ll like it here once you get used to it. Or you mostly will.

You really do look good for someone your age. What? Yes, of course I understand that the end part your nose is just missing-in-action and that your nose didn’t really look like that when you were alive. Your chin too, obviously. But you still cut a rather dashing figure, even without the bits and pieces that have fallen away over the millennia. Nice hair, too! I like the cornrows on top and the ringlets on the side. (In our world, only hasidim and the women in Jane Austen novels wear side ringlets like that. On me, they wouldn’t look that good. But I like them on you.)  I have a beard too, by the way, although mine reaches all the way up the side of my head to meet my sideburns and yours looks like it just stops halfway up your face. But it’s actually sort of cool that way, now that I take a second look. A little pasted-on looking maybe, but still appealing.

While we’re being frank, your mouth is a little crooked too—but maybe that was just the sculptor trying to make you look regal. Yes, obviously, regal: you are wearing a golden crown, aren’t you? Even I know what that means! And your crooked mouth is more than made up for by your soulful eyes, my little friend. (Okay, okay, I’m done with the little guy stuff—I know you weren’t really 2 inches tall, or that your head wasn’t.) I suppose it’s unlikely we would have been friends had we been each other’s contemporaries. (I don’t actually know any kings in this world I inhabit and I suppose I probably wouldn’t have known any in yours either.) But maybe we could have just hung out together sometimes anyway. When my daughter Lucy was about eight or nine, she taught me how to braid hair. I was pretty good at it too! So I’m sure I could learn how to do cornrows. You know what, I bet we could have been pals.

*

He really is two inches tall. Or at least his head is. And he really has spent the last three thousand or so years underground, buried deep beneath the ruins of biblical Abel Beth Maacah, a tel located just south of the Israeli-Lebanese line near the border town of Metula, until he was unearthed just recently by a team of archeologists from the Hebrew University and California’s Asuza Pacific University under the supervision of Professor Naama Yahalom-Mack of the Hebrew University. And his story clearly goes back that far as well. No one can say for sure who he is. But that he was someone—that goes without saying. To read more about the excavations that led to his discovery, click here.

Based on the datable detritus amongst which he was found, it seems certain that King Whoever lived in the ninth century BCE. In its day, Abel Beth Maacah was the Trieste of its day, sitting at the spot where the borders of three powerful kingdoms met: the Kingdom of Israel to the south, the Phoenician kingdom of Tyre to the west, and the kingdom of Aram (with its capital at Damascus) to the east. The town is mentioned a few times in the Bible, most notably in the Second Book of Samuel, where it is the setting for the decapitation of one Sheva ben Bikhri, a Benjaminite who unsuccessfully tried to stir up a rebellion against King David and who then, having sought refuge in Abel Beth Maacah, was rewarded for his efforts by having his head cut off and tossed over the wall into the waiting arms of David’s general Yoav, who, delighted, promptly called off the siege of the city and sent his troops home instead. What he did with Sheva’s head exactly is not recorded. (For readers who can’t get enough, this story is retold in detail in my novel, Heads You Lose.)

This, however, is definitely not Sheva ben Bikhri’s head. For one thing, the crown guarantees that we are looking at a king. For another, why would anyone make a bust of Sheva ben Bikhri, a failed malcontent? So, a king. But which one? Presuming a ninth-century monarch doesn’t cut down the field as much as you’d think: without going outside the Bible, we have several reasonable possibilities to choose between. The little guy could be King Ethbaal of Tyre, the father of our own Queen Jezebel and father-in-law of King Ahab of Israel.  For that matter, he could be King Ahab himself. Or he could plausibly be one of Ahab’s two sons who reigned after him, King Ahaziah or King Jehoram. Or he could be King Jehu, who seized power from the House of Omri (to which Ahab and his sons belonged) by, among other things, shooting an arrow through King Jehoram’s shoulder blades with such force that it pierced his heart and exited his chest on the other side. Or it could be King Ben Haddad or King Hazael of Damascus. All would be reasonable choices. We’ll never know. The thought, though, that this is what an ancient king looked like and probably an ancient Israelite one (the tel is the site of an ancient Israelite city, after all)—that thought is remarkably attractive to me. I’ve read about these guys my whole life. I’ve written about them too…but who ever thought I would be able actually to see one of them?

That question is just a bit misleading, however. For example, there actually is  a portrait of King Jehu to compare our fellow with, although not a particularly flattering one.

One of the most amazing archeological finds of the nineteenth century was the discovery in 1846 by Sir Austen Henry Layard of the so-called Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, which he found at a place called Nimrud in northern Iraq and which contains the oldest known picture of a person mentioned in the Bible: none other than King Jehu himself. We can be fairly certain, however, that this is not the portrait the king himself would have chosen to be remembered by as it depicts him prostrate before King Shalmaneser of Assyria as he offers him the tribute that is listed in detail on the obelisk as well: “silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with a pointed bottom, golden tumblers, tin, a staff [fit] for a king, and spears.” (The concept of buying off superpowers with gifts to keep them from swallowing your country into their empire is a very old one.) And here he is, the king of Israel with his royal derrière higher off the ground than his royal head as he kisses Shalmaneser III’s imperial feet and attempts to buy him off with some really expensive presents:

Is that our guy? The hair is the same, as is the beard (although it looks like it meets his sideburns here—but surely that’s just a detail.) Why he’s wearing a smurf’s hat, who knows? But it certainly could be our guy. Maybe his head was cold when he took his royal crown off, which you obviously have to do when you beg the big guys to take the money and leave your people alone!

There are remarkably few pictures of ancient Israelites. In the throne room of King Sennacharib of Assyria, there is a famous frieze depicting the Battle of Lachish, which pitted the Assyrians against the Kingdom of Judah in 701 BCE and which the Assyrians won handily, taking these two Judahite soldiers captive.

What the story with their hair was, who can say? And how they got their beards to match seems even less easy to imagine. To people my age, they will resemble most of all those type-ball things once featured in IBM Selectric typewriters. (Kids, ask your parents about this: typewriters were something like printers, except you had to input each word separately and couldn’t make any changes without having to type the whole thing over again.) But, joking aside, there’s something serious here to contemplate: the Bible talks endlessly about the Israelites, but this is what they actually looked like. Does any of these guys look like someone you might run into at a UJA reception? If you ignore their remarkably thick necks, they somehow do. Also, nice moustaches!