Quote: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.

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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).

Quote: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.