JERUSALEM 3000
When did King David conquer Jerusalem?
About 3,000 years ago, King David conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites and established the capital of his kingdom there. The city continued as the capital of the kingdom for 400 years, until its first destruction at the hands of the Babylonians in 586/7 BCE. This period is known as the First Temple period, and is documented in the Biblical books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and the various prophets.
In trying to determine the precise dates of historical events from the Biblical period, we must address several methodological questions:
1. Years in the Bible are often reckoned not as a single, continuous sequence, but rather as the number of years in a king's reign or since a major event for example, "in the twenty-seventh year of Asa king of Judah" (I Kings, 16:15).
2. When the Bible sums up the years in a king's reign, we do not know whether or not this includes the years when the king was a regent or shared the kingship.
In setting a probable date for the conquest of Jerusalem by King David, we rely on several references in Biblical and outside sources.
I Kings 2:11 cites the length of the reign of King David: "The days that David reigned over Israel were forty years: seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem."
II Chronicles 9:30 cites the length of time that King Solomon ruled: "Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel forty years."
The Bible also relates another event, whose date can be determined with greater precision, namely the campaign by Shishak, king of Egypt, against the land of Israel. According to the Bible, this took place "in the fifth year of king Rehoboam" (I Kings 14:25). Archeological findings indicate that Shishak's campaign wreaked destruction in the Jezreel Valley, and a stele found at Megiddo documents the event. Other independent sources for Shishak's campaign reinforce the dating of this event as having taken place in the middle of the third decade of the tenth century BCE, probably in the year 924.
This year serves, in the opinion of most scholars, as the point of reference for dating the conquest of Jerusalem by King David. All that remains is to count back: the fifth year of the reign of Rehoboam is the fifth year after the end of Solomon's reign. From this we subtract the years of the reigns of Solomon and David (40 each), arriving at a date of 1003/4 BCE.
Even after these calculations, some uncertainty still remains, as we do not know if the Bible reckons the 40 years of Solomon's reign as the years he reigned independently as king, or whether they include the years he shared the kingship with his father, King David.
Thus, despite a margin of error of 7-10 years in the dating of Shishak's campaign or in calculating the reign of King Solomon, the trimillenium of the conquest of Jerusalem by King David is being celebrated as close as possible to the date agreed upon by most scholars, namely 1005-999 BCE.