Did A United Monarchy of Israel Actually Exist?

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

The Historicity of The Kingdom of Israel

The study does not purport to prove that the United Monarchy of the Israelites described in the Bible was a historical reality. But it shows that the kingdom’s existence and involvement in major construction at Gezer cannot be ruled out, the authors say.

While some archaeologists praised the team’s efforts, others dismissed the study as irrelevant.

Much research in the last four decades has shown that ancient remains scattered around Israel and once attributed to David and Solomon were in fact dated to about a century after the supposed time of their reign – meaning there was no concrete evidence supporting the historicity of their kingdom.

However, some archaeologists have pushed back against this paradigm, unearthing in recent years impressive 10th century B.C.E. remains at different sites, particularly in central and southern Israel, and averring that these may be evidence that David and Solomon’s kingdom did exist after all.

That has always been the crux of the debate. 

Archaeological evidence is finding it harder to validate the biblical claims.  Settlements have always been dated to the 9th and 8th Century BCE leading up to the Assyrian siege around 701 BCE. 

On the Temple Mount there is not much between the archaeological layers between The Canaanite Red Brick City, and the Assyrian layer. 

It's called the "slum layer".  It was inhabited during the 900s, but evidence of a greater and advance Kingdom have always been lacking. 

Yadin interpreted these standardized Iron Age structures as the hallmark of a strong, centralized state that stretched across the land. The archaeologist promptly assigned them to Solomon, based on the biblical verse that this king built Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor (1 Kings 9:15). The Bible doubles down on this claim specifically for Gezer, saying that Solomon rebuilt it after an unnamed pharaoh set it on fire, and then gifted it to a daughter he gave in marriage to the Israelite king (1 Kings 9:16).

Archaeotheology bugs me. Sometimes it seems they want really hard to validate the historicty of the dates.  And this one has its doubters, but don't dismiss it as irrelevant after the carbon dating checks out..

Accordingly, Finkelstein and others have since assigned these structures to the Omride dynasty, which ruled over the northern Kingdom of Israel (as opposed to its smaller, southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah) in the first half of the ninth century B.C.E.


If the city gates were only built a century after the theoretical time of the purported United Monarchy of David and Solomon, then nothing was left to shore up the historicity of the United Monarchy. If David and Solomon did exist, they may have been merely local chieftains ruling over a tiny Jerusalem and little more, according to the scholars in this camp.

Naturally, the new dating evidence is getting dismissed by the mainstream opinion.

I often thought the Post-exilic writers of the Old Testament took some liberties, as the 2nd temple victors did a RETCON of history. Even Exodus was last edited in 3rd Century BCE. 

So, Biblical Historicity has a lot of propaganda to sift through. I felt they overhyped David and Solomon to make themselves more significant than those renegades that split off from The Canaanite and created their own varient myth, and then found life hard doing so...



Interesting none the less.

There's a poll option, going to try that out..