Claim of the biblical descent of the Bagrationi dynasty

As the Bagratid power grew, this claim morphed into an officially endorsed paradigm, enshrined in medieval historical literature such as the early 11th-century chronicle of Sumbat Davitis-dze, and formed the basis of the dynasty's political ideology for the duration of their millennium-long ascendancy in Georgia.

The family's origin is disputed, but the view formulated by the historians such as Ekvtime Takaishvili and Cyril Toumanoff that the Georgian dynasty descended from a refuge prince of the Armenian house of Bagratuni prevails.

[11][12][13] The legend became well known enough to feature in the 45th chapter of the treatise De Administrando Imperio, written c. 950 by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whom the claim apparently reached through the Caucasians serving at the imperial court in Constantinople.

[16] Finally, Constantine's genealogy reaches the two brothers, David and Spandiatis, who had left Jerusalem at the advice of an oracle and settled at the boundaries of Persia, where they founded their kingdom in Iberia (i.e., Kartli) and increased their power through the help of the emperor Heraclius.

[1][26][25] Beside the textual sources, the legend of the Bagratids' Davidic origin is possibly enshrined in the stone effigy in low relief from the medieval Georgian monastery of Opiza, in Shavsheti, and now on display at the Art Museum of Georgia in Tbilisi.

The sculpture represents a nobleman in an act of offering a church model to Jesus Christ, seated upon a throne, blessing the donor, and accompanied by a man with his hands in a gesture of supplication.

Based on the accompanying minimal Georgian inscriptions, the relief is traditionally interpreted by Ekvtime Taqaishvili, Ivane Javakhishvili, and Cyril Toumanoff as a contemporary depiction of the curopalates Ashot I (died 830) with Christ and the biblical King David.

[5] Just after Sumbat composed his history, an 11th-century anonymous author of the so-called Chronicle of Kartli mentions, while relating the event on the eve of the Georgian Bagratid accession to power, the Davidic tradition as existing at the time of Ashot I's father Adarnase.

[35] Finally, the 18th-century Bagratid historian Prince Vakhushti attempted to incorporate the Davidic theory into his chronology, while his father, King Vakhtang VI of Kartli, composed a family tree, integrating the biblical lineage of the Bagrationi with that of the Georgian people, the origins of which was traced by the medieval chronicles to Togarmah, a descendant of Noah.

[37] As the historian Ivan Biliarsky have conjectured, the Caucasian paradigm of Davidic royalty may have influenced the Old Testament-modeled vision of kingship in early medieval Bulgaria, the country then in transition from an ethnic pagan state to a Christian empire, as evident in the case of Tsar Izot, cited in the Narration of Isaiah, the so-called Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle of the Eleventh Century.

The family's alleged Hebrew provenance was utilized and elaborated by the Georgian Bagratids to claim the descent from the divinely appointed model biblical king David, himself a descendant, in an unbroken line, of Adam and the ancestor of Jesus Christ, at the same time obscuring the dynasty's true origin and blood-ties with Armenian cousins.

Runciman suggested that there was no reason to doubt their Jewish origin given the presence of Jews, fleeing from the Assyrian captivity, in Caucasia, "where, as in Babylonia, there were hereditary chiefs who claimed descent from David known as the "Princes of the Diaspora", till the high Middle Ages".