Introduction

Until some thirty years ago, the main contours of the biblical story about the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon, or what came to be known as the “United Monarchy,” was viewed as historical. The Iron Age I (roughly the 12th–11th centuries BCE), which preceded the emergence of the monarchy, has generally been regarded as an era characterized by fairly simple societies occupying the highlands on both sides of the Jordan River. Toward the end of this era, according to the consensus that was largely based on the biblical narrative, there was a process by which society became more complex, peaking in the 10th century BCE when kingdoms, or states, emerged. Among these kingdoms was that of David and Solomon, also known as the “United Monarchy” (e.g., Kenyon 1960; Aharoni 1979; Mazar 1979; 1980). In the 1970s and 1980s many scholars were profoundly influenced by the neo-evolutionary approaches that dominated the social sciences at the time (e.g., Service 1962; Fried 1967), and biblical scholars and archaeologists debated the nature of the process, when can we identify chiefdoms, and at the time of which biblical figures can we speak of early or mature states (e.g., Frick 1985; Gottwald 1979; Chaney 1986; Hauer 1986; Finkelstein 1989). This discussio which peaked in the 1980s, was cut short in the 1990s, initially by the boom of the minimalist school in biblical studies and later as a result of the debate over Iron Age chronology. The minimalists questioned the historical validity of the information incorporated in the Hebrew Bible in toto, challenging any reconstruction that was based on this source, which they claimed was written as literature many centuries after the events it purported to describe (e.g., Whitelam 1996; Davies 1992; Thompson 1999). While this school had a significant impact on biblical scholarship (despite attracting few adherents), it exerted little influence in archaeological circles, whose importance grew significantly at this time. This was a result of their lack of familiarity with the archaeological data, which they viewed at the time as “mute,” and was exacerbated by their treatment of the finds that contradicted their assertions, for example the Tel Dan stele and their suggestions that it does not refer to the “House of David” or that it was even forged (e.g., Davies 1994; Lemche and Thompson 1994) – claims that mainstream scholarship viewed as completely baseless and as resulting from refusal to accept the evidence (e.g., Rainey 1994; Lemaire 1998; Dever 2001: 29–30, 128–129). The challenge posed by the low chronology of Finkelstein (1995, 1996; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001) and the rise of the Tel Aviv School proved more substantial. Indeed, as we shall see, the debate that it generates persists to this day, and was naturally also seized upon by the minimalists, who until this time had largely ignored the material evidence, to support their skeptical approach. As a result of these debates, however, the United Monarchy gradually became contested, and David and Solomon, to borrow the term of the late Gary Knopper (1997), “vanished” from the scholarly discourse (see also various papers in Handy 1997). If until then one could find articles dealing, for example, with David’s army or the economy of Solomon’s reign (e.g., Mazar 1986; Meyers 1983), since the late 1990s mere references to Solomon were very limited, without needing a lengthy justification as to why this figure should be viewed as historical in the first place. There were only a few detailed attempts to salvage the core of the narrative (e.g., Halpern 2001) or the historicity of Solomon’s temple and palace (e.g., Garfinkel and Mumcuoglu 2013; 2016). The caution that resulted from the debates was clearly a welcome development, and one of the outcomes of the exchange was the advance of Mazar’s Modified Conventional Chronology (e.g., Mazar 2005; 2011). Still, the fierce and sometimes emotional exchange that evolved led to the creation of different approaches, and various scholars became committed to this or that “school.” One could at times feel that there were cases in which new data was judged not by their merit but by whether or not they fitted the theory. And if they were not easily accommodated, the data were sometimes bent to fit existing paradigms rather than to examine them. Consequently, different schools and scholars often repeated well-rehearsed views, sometimes using superior fire-power rather than arguments to overwhelm the audience. The sophisticated methods of data collection and analysis that resulted from the debate significantly narrowed the chronological gap between the schools, leading most scholars to follow various versions of the traditional, or modified, chronology (e.g., Stager 2003; Mazar 2011; Katz and Faust 2014; Garfinkel et al. 2015; 2019; Dever 2017; Faust and Sapir 2018; Ortiz 2018; Master 2019), and even Finkelstein raised his chronology dramatically, agreeing that not only the Iron Age IIA, but perhaps even the late Iron Age IIA, started already in the 10th century BCE (e.g., Finkelstein and Piasetzky 2011: 51; Kleiman et al. 2019: 534–535). Given the heightened emotions and high stakes, these developments were insufficient to end the dispute, as the minor gap that remained between the schools was sufficient to justify different historical reconstructions; and so the debate goes on. Given the emotional reactions, many preferred to leave the arena and others avoided joining the discussion in the first place. Hence, despite the great progress in research and the large amount of data acquired over the years, we witness a number of scholarly groups that to a large extent talk past each other, while many sit on the fence and avoid the 10th-century debate altogether. This has led to what seems like a stalemate, manifested by the lack of any attempts to create an arena for fruitful and constructive debate and to foster a deeper understanding of this transformative period.