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Episode 9: A United Monarchy?

Conversations in the Archaeology and History of Ancient Israel with Israel Finkelstein Episode 9: A United Monarchy? - Albright Live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecG1eHHawMY

Transcript:

Israel Finkelstein is a leading figure in the archaeology and history of Ancient Israel. Over 40 years of field work and research, he has helped to change the way archeology is conducted. The Bible is interpreted and the history of Israel is reconstructed. I sat down with Israel over several sessions to talk about how a lifetime of work has informed the story of ancient Israel.

The United Monarchy: Period of David and Solomon

Israel, welcome back to the Albright. We've already spoken about the end of the Bronze Age, the rise of Ancient Israel, settlement of the Philistines. And now we reach the critical point of the United Monarchy. That is the period of David and Solomon - of course, Saul preceding both of them - which by biblical reckoning should match up archaeologically to the 10th century BCE.

Of course, this is a very hot topic... Solomon in particular, and David to some extent... is a significant part of Western culture. You know, Medieval monarchs modeled themselves after the stories of Solomon. Solomon still plays an important role in popular culture today. Uh, even in Islam... Solomon, Suleiman, is an important...

islamic prophet. So the fact that this is so... important for world culture, I think we have to look at this in a little bit more detail than we would otherwise. So I think we also will devote several episodes to this topic, to the United Monarchy and to the 10th century archaeology in particular. Why don't we start with...

The Biblical Context

your view of the biblical view of Solomon? Indeed. The Bible has a very clear view about the history of Ancient Israel. We have already mentioned this several times in our conversations. So, in order to understand the... the rise of David and the United Monarchy, we need to pull back to the book of Judges.

And in the book of Judges, we have this... atmosphere of... unruly situation, of a chaotic situation, after the settlement, after the rise of Ancient Israel. And at the end of the book of Judges, there is one verse which is, if you wish, the introduction to the United Monarchy. The last verse says 'In those days there was no king in Israel' - which means that there is an appeal to be like all others and to have a king, and the book of Samuel goes into the description of the earliest king in Ancient Israel, king Saul, and

then from there to David and Solomon. And then, of course, the Bible describes this amazing prosperity in the time of David and Solomon. David is the conqueror, he takes territories and he extends the border of the kingdom of Israel. And Solomon is the builder and the trader, the one who really reaches the peak prosperity - culturally, economically, from the point of view of writing activity in his court, and so on.

And then there's a twist in the story, in chapter 11 of the first book of Kings. When Solomon is old, he sins, he marries foreign women. They lead him to apostasy and because of... of his apostasy, the God of Israel decides to break the great glamorous United Monarchy into Israel and Judah. So this is the end of the great United Monarchy in the 10th...

Territorial Extent

in the 10th century BC. The Golden Age, in particular the period of Solomon, what are the extents of this territory? The Bible speaks about conquests far away. The kingdom of Israel is described in the text as some sort of a mini empire in the 10th century BC. However, there are different descriptions in the Bible.

One description speaks about a very vast mini empire, if you wish, stretching from the Euphrates in the north, all the way to the border of Egypt in the south. And another text, which is - in my opinion - more interesting historically, is speaking about the borders of the United Monarchy as stretching from Dan to Beersheba - the two...

Chronology and Biblical Sources

cities, one in the north, Dan, and one in the south, Beersheba. We've now mentioned the 10th century a few times now. How are we able to take this biblical text and try to plug it into an absolute date? The only way to do this is to... go according to the biblical material on the later monarchs. Which means the biblical material on the kings of Israel and Judah.

Starting in the early 9th century BC, the biblical text is supported by extra biblical sources. Let me give you one or two examples. The participation of king Ahab of Israel in the battle of Qarqar against Shalmaneser III in 853 BC, so we know exactly where we are. Or the reference in the Mesha Stele to Omri, king of Israel, which takes us a step back from the days of Ahab to the beginning of the 9th century.

So if we follow this logic of the kings of Israel and Judah from the 9th century to the beginning of the two... kingdoms, we reach, I would say, the middle--second half of the 10th century BC. And this puts up in the 10th century... for David and Solomon. The internal chronology of the Bible paired with outside sources that we can date by other methods gets us back into the middle of the 9th century.

Yeah. And then, from there we take the internal biblical chronology and continue to trust it and count backwards into the 10th century... Right. ...to Solomon. Yes, indeed. There is one more piece of information, which is a little bit problematic, but we will need to take it into consideration in one of our next...

talks, and this is the evidence in the book of Kings of... on the campaign of Pharaoh Sheshonq I, in the Bible - Shishak, to the land of Israel. Because we don't know exactly the date of the Sheshonq campaign and we'll get to it later. However we know, I think, there is a limit to what we can do with the reign of Sheshonq I, between - let's say - 960 and 920, grosso modo, BC.

Historicity of David and Solomon

So this also puts us in the 10th century, in the context of the first king of Judah after Solomon, I refer to Rehoboam. So this roughly one century gap in our solid chronology, before we have to turn to the biblical text... begs the question: Is all of this historical? The figures of David and Solomon, in my opinion, are historical.

Why am I saying this? First and foremost, perhaps because of the inner biblical logic. I don't really see the logic of plucking them from the story of Ancient Israel, especially because of the very strong rooted tradition in the Bible, which goes back to David and Solomon, perhaps especially to David. The second reason...

is the Tel Dan inscription. 25 years ago, something like that, an inscription was found at Tel Dan in the north of Israel, in the territory of the Northern Kingdom, on the border with Damascus. In fact, in an area which was contested between Damascus and Israel in the 9th century. An inscription put there by Hazael king of Damascus in the second half of the 9th century, he is mentioned several times in the Bible; and he refers to the kingdom of Judah as the House of David, which means he knows that there was a founder of a

Problems with the United Monarchy Narrative

dynasty, this is the genre of the time. It is the equivalent to the Assyrians calling... the kingdom of Israel 'Bit-Humri', referring to Omri as the founder of the first prosperous great dynasty of the Northern Kingdom. So in the same manner, Hazael of Damascus speaks about Judah as the House of David. David and Solomon are historical.

But the description of this great United Monarchy is highly problematic and the problems come from all sides of scholarship: Ancient Near East, Bible and archaeology. Let's tackle these problems with the United Monarchy one at a time. Let's start with the Ancient Near East. How doesn't it fit? Yes, let's start with the Ancient Near East.

Here we need to... go back to one of the rules that we described when we spoke, in our first episode about Bible and archaeology in general. And that rule was not to pluck the archaeology and history of Canaan/Ancient Israel from the broader picture of the Ancient Near East. Right. And when we look at the broader picture, we zoom out, what do we see? We see the period of great empires, the collapse at the end of the Bronze Age in the late 12th century.

Taking us into a period of sort of chaotic situation... in the, let's say, 11th century BC, especially in the southern Levant; and then to the rise of the territorial kingdoms. Now, territorial kingdoms in the Levant, in the... in Western Asia, are documented starting in the late 10th century. Which raises the question whether it is possible to imagine a great kingdom in the southern part of the Levant, of the southern far margin of the great cultures, with a capital in Jerusalem, which is not one of the

Biblical Problems and Literary Composition

most important cities at the time. Okay. And how does the story of the United Monarchy come into conflict with biblical things? Regarding the biblical text there are several problems, more than one. The first one, I would say, is again the question of literacy and composition of biblical texts. As we have already discussed, and we are...

I suppose we'll get back to it later again, there is really no evidence for the possibility to compose literary text in this part of the Ancient Near East in the Iron Age, before around 800 BC. Which raises the question of how did the biblical authors who lived in Jerusalem, basically those who describe the great United Monarchy - they lived in Jerusalem in the late 7th century BC, not before - how did they know about events that took place, ostensibly, in the 10th century BC? Not only that, because then there is another question, which is a

by-product of the first one - whether really the description is a description of something that... was in the memory of the public and was transmitted orally during the centuries? Or that the... a description, a given description, is the retroject... retrojection of a situation in the time of the authors, back to the 10th century BC.

Right, we saw this during our Philistines video. Right. And we'll get back to this also today, when we'll speak about Megiddo, gates and so on, in a... in a minute. So these are two of the biblical problems, not to mention a third one, which is, you know, the impact of the ideology and theology of the later authors on the description of this legendary kingdom, the beginning of the Davidic dynasty.

The Issue of Stratigraphy

And evidently there... there's a stratigraphy to these stories of David and Solomon. Ah, Yes. Sure. There is another point, you're right, the stratigraphy. Because even to a person who is not trained in biblical exegesis, it is, I think, not very difficult to see that the text is stratified. So the text needs to be approached in the same way that we approach an archaeological site.

It needs to be read, so to speak, layer by layer, and it is quite evident that... there are texts in the description of the great United Monarchy which may take us back a little bit from the time of the authors. However, there are other texts which can be read only on the background of the realities of the days of the authors.

Archaeological Evidence

That takes us to archaeology. How does the United Monarchy fit with ... a century plus worth of archaeological excavation? Archaeology is the most important point here and the most problematic, I would say. Because this description of a great United Monarchy with beautiful buildings with trade, prospering economy, all these must find some sort of evidence in the archaeological record.

We must see this. And indeed from the very beginning, archaeologists understood that when they approach the biblical story of Ancient Israel, there are two periods which should, theoretically speaking, be easy to verify, historicity. One is the conquest of Canaan - because in a conquest you are in a situation of either you find or not a destroyed city in excavations, a layer of destruction.

And in the case of the United Monarchy - scholars, researchers, archaeologists, were looking for this period of prosperity in the 10th century BC. Now, the first place to start, to try locate, so to speak, the United Monarchy is, of course, in Jerusalem. The capital. The capital. However, Jerusalem has been a big problem from the beginning.

First of all, all the attempts to uncover significant remains from the 10th century in Jerusalem failed; in the "City of David", which was considered as the location of the ancient mound of Jerusalem. The City of David is this ridge which stretches from the Temple Mount to the south. There is nothing... significant...

from the 10th century BC. And then... one can come up with a different perspective, to argue that the mound of Jerusalem was located on the Temple Mount, but then there is another problem that it is impossible to carry out - for obvious modern reasons, political, religious, so on - it is impossible to carry out proper archaeological investigation on the Temple Mount.

Searching for Evidence at Megiddo

Jerusalem seems to be a lost case. Extensive archaeology and the "City of David" has revealed nothing, no possibility of the Temple Mount. So are there other places that we can look for the United Monarchy? Indeed. Scholars, relatively early, turned to the search in other places. And the focus of that search was at Megiddo.

From the very beginning of the 20th century, Megiddo - the site which the two of us have been excavating now for a long time - Megiddo has become the laboratory. The place where researchers were looking for evidence for the great United Monarchy. Why Megiddo? Because Megiddo had already been an important place before; because Megiddo is located on a main highway to the north; because Megiddo is located in the Jezreel Valley, the bread basket of Ancient Israel; and because Megiddo is specifically referred to as a place of activity of king Solomon in this

famous verse in the first book of Kings. The excavation in Megiddo has gone on since the very, very early 20th century. Has anything from the United Monarchy shown up in that time? I think there are three phases in the search for king Solomon at Megiddo. The first one is during the excavations of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

I'm speaking about the beginning of their dig in the 1920s, when they uncovered, close to the surface of Megiddo, several sets of pillared buildings, which were interpreted as ancient stables. And they made the connection between these buildings and king Solomon, according to what? According to two different sources in the biblical text.

One, speaking about the fact that king Solomon had cities of chariots and horses; and the other one, the activity of king Solomon at Megiddo. Nowhere it is said that those stables were at Megiddo, this connection had been offered by the excavators of the University of Chicago. But this was the great... the first solution for king Solomon at Megiddo.

The Gate Theory and Administration

After a while, it became clear that this is not a good solution, especially chronologically. Because with the continuation of excavations at Megiddo, even before the two of us, it became quite clear that the stables at Megiddo should be dated later than the 10th century, probably to the 8th century BC - which means they belong to the last Israelite town at Megiddo before the takeover of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th century.

So not possible to associate these buildings with king Solomon. But there's another layer that predates the stables, that also has significant architecture. Indeed. And the second solution for Solomon at Megiddo came in the late 1950s with the excavations of Yigael Yadin, the very well-known, famous Israeli archaeologist at Hazor in the north.

And why Hazor? What's the connection between Hazor and Megiddo? Because Hazor and Megiddo are referred to in the same breath in a verse in the Bible regarding activity... building activity, construction activity of king Solomon. Yadin dug at Hazor and found this gate which was similar to the gate that had been excavated before him at Megiddo by the University of Chicago.

So, then he looked at the books and discovered, so to speak, another gate like this, similar, at the town of Gezer, which is farther to the south, on the border of Judah, between Israel and Judah. And he made the connection. He said, 'Well, look, here are the three main administrative cities mentioned in relation to king Solomon in verse 15 in the...

in chapter 9 in the first book of Kings, speaking about Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer, and in the three cities we have similar gates'. So he came up with the idea that there was this elaborate administration in Jerusalem and that the architects of king Solomon dispatched plans to the countryside; and in the countryside, the local people constructed similar gates.

So this was the solution which was on the table for relatively many years. I suppose, between... the late 1950s and around the... the middle of the 1990s. There are several problems with the theory of the gates. First of all, stratigraphically and chronologically, it is also quite clear, especially today, we'll get to it in a minute, that we are not speaking - with the gates - about the 10th century.

The gates cannot be earlier than the 9th century. Some of them are in the 8th century. Gates like this were found, later than the excavations of Yadin, in other places in the southern Levant, some of them outside of the borders of the United Monarchy, even according to the biblical description. Also, there's the question of the biblical verse: whether we are dealing here with a biblical verse that indeed preserves the memory of the 10th century, or the author of this text retrojected a situation in his time or close to...

to his time, back to the 10th century, to the days of this... great king of the... early days of the Davidic dynasty. Yadin used this passage... in First Kings, which mentions Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, all as places built by Solomon. Is there a moment in time in which it makes sense for those three sites to be mentioned at...

together? Excellent question. I think that the only historical reality for the three places together is... during the days of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. These three places are well known to have been major administration centers of the Northern Kingdom: Hazor in the northern Jordan Valley, Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley and Gezer in the south, on the border with Judah.

The Palaces at Megiddo

So, the historical reality should be sought somewhere there in the 9th or 8th centuries BC. And even Hazor is only added to the Northern Kingdom a little bit later than the other two anyway. Starting in the days of the Omride dynasty. Yadin had another idea about the palaces at Megiddo and their connection to the gate and Solomon and the 10th century.

Yes, and the palaces have become even more important in this reconstruction of the great United Monarchy for Yadin, at least, than the gates. Yadin excavated at Megiddo in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s and found remains of a very beautiful building, a large one, which he described as a palace built of well-cut beautiful blocks.

This palace, and another one which belongs to the same layer at Megiddo, the two of them were interpreted by Yadin as belonging to the 10th century, and they have, in fact, become the symbol of the great United Monarchy. So there have been problems from the outset. The first one was the following: one of the two palaces had mason marks on the blocks, on the well-cut blocks; and similar mason marks were found at Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom, which is said to have been built by king Omri in the 9th century, while Solomon is the 10th...

is in the 10th century. So what do we have here? These are the two... not sites and not layers, the two buildings with similar mason marks found in the Land of Israel. So, you have only two possibilities here - either you push Samaria... you pull Samaria to the 10th century BC, or you push the palace at Megiddo to the 9th century in order to make them in the same period.

A while later, excavations took place at the site of Jezreel, not so far from Megiddo, to the east. And this was a period when excavations were already carried out in a very good control over ceramic typology, simply because we knew better, let's say, in the 1990s. And then, while the excavations were going on at Jezreel, about 20-25 kilometers away from Megiddo, it has become clear that the pottery assemblage at Jezreel - is similar to the pottery assemblage at Megiddo in the layer of the Jezreel - is similar to the pottery assemblage at Megiddo in the layer of the

palaces - the two of them are similar. However, for many reasons, Jezreel was dated to the 9th century and Megiddo was in the 10th century. So again, it's the same question, how to explain this? You need either to pull Jezreel up to the 10th century or push Megiddo down to the 9th century. These are the two options.

In this sense, Samaria and Jezreel are complimentary in this, in that both, even from a biblical point of view, are stated to have been built, founded by the Omride dynasty. So as you say, we have this push or pull - do the palaces go down to the Omride dynasty, or do these two... cities founded by them move back to Solomon? Are there other things that we can bring to bear on this issue from outside of Israel? Yes, so in order to decide whether to pull or push, we need to zoom out and look a little bit broad...

in a broader sense. There are several points here. The first one: if indeed we continue with the idea of Yadin that the palaces belonged to the 10th century, in fact, we are left with a very problematic situation that there is no layer at Megiddo and in other places for the great Omride dynasty of the 9th century, a dynasty which indeed prospered also according to extra-biblical texts.

Also, placing the two palaces at Megiddo in the 10th century with the material culture which accompanies their... them, pottery and the like, creates a major, a severe problem with the coordination of the chronologies of the region vis-à-vis the west - Cyprus and Greece in the west - and also with Syria in the north.

Not only that, we need to keep in mind the problem with Jerusalem and the highlands of Judah. Which means the Jerusalem... in Jerusalem there is no evidence for prosperity in the 10th century BC, so... how is it that there are these palaces in the countryside and nothing in the capital? And... the Jerusalem countryside, the highlands south of Jerusalem is very sparsely settled in the 10th century.

The Low Chronology Proposal

So this raises another question of the manpower for the great United Monarchy for conquest and for construction activities. You addressed these chronological problems already 25+ years ago in your now famous proposal of the Low Chronology. Tell us about that. This happened when I started preparing myself for the Megiddo expedition.

So, for the excavations of the two of us now at Megiddo. I noticed all these problems that I listed a few minutes ago, and I said to myself, how to resolve them? And I came to the conclusion. That... if we take the two Megiddo palaces down from the 10th century to the 9th century - with all the consequences regarding stratigraphy, ceramic typology, and chronology and so on - we can resolve all these difficulties.

Of course, except for one - we are, sort of, losing the great United Monarchy because... taking the two palaces out of the scene leaves the great United Monarchy with no archaeological evidence in the field. So what to do? I put this in writing and I proposed this in the middle of the 1990s. I was naive enough to think that...

you know, people will say 'well, this is logical, let's think about it', you know. A huge uproar... began, and a big discussion, a big debate on the 10th century, on the chronology, on the Low Chronology, on the United Monarchy. The whole thing was put into one pot of a big dispute. Here, in the world, I remember conferences in the United States speaking about it.

Radiocarbon Dating

After a while we exhausted our considerations. We had to come up with some sort of another solution, how to resolve this dispute... between the two... contesting camps. About 20 years ago, we came to the conclusion that we need to turn to radiocarbon, to carbon 14 dating. Which means to disconnect the discussion from the...

one's understanding of the biblical verses. Because radiocarbon is not influenced by the Bible. Radiocarbon is about organic material, which is tested in the laboratory and provides half-life chronology. If done properly from the point of view of taking good samples from good contexts, and interpreted in a proper way, can lead us to uncertainty of only 30 years.

Which means we are speaking about 3000 years back with an uncertainty of 30 years, this is an amazing result. Sure. And the radiocarbon results that started accumulating about 20-15 years ago, very clearly showed that indeed the layer of the palaces at Megiddo and the entire horizon of... contemporary layers that had been associated with king Solomon, in fact dates to the 9th century BC.

Challenges to the Low Chronology

So this was, in fact, the final blow for the theory of the great United Monarchy from the point of view of archaeology. Simply, we are left with no evidence for this great United Monarchy, neither in Jerusalem, nor in the countryside centers of Ancient Israel - Megiddo, Hazor and other sites. You talk about a final blow to the United Monarchy, yet there was significant pushback on this, and many people over the years talked about a final blow to the Low Chronology.

So you see how naive I am. This is the only thing that we can say here. Of course there were reactions, and in the last few years, there are several... sites, which have been mentioned as providing evidence against the Low Chronology, against this idea... which contradicts the historicity of a great United Monarchy, does not contradict the historicity of the kings, contradicts, you know, the...

Historicity of this... empire in the 10th century BC. There were several of them. The first one was the claim that a palace that can be associated with king David has been found in Jerusalem, in the "City of David". However, in a situation like this, one needs to look at the nitty gritty of archaeology, at the things which are not that...

attractive in the first, you know, look - which means the pottery assemblages, radiocarbon studies, styles, stratigraphy, connection of walls, architecture and so on. About the building in Jerusalem, I can say two things. First of all, that we are not dealing with a single building, in my opinion. And secondly, that,...

taking into consideration the pottery found associated with it and radiocarbon studies of similar layers, similar assemblages of pottery in other sites, the building cannot date earlier than the 9th century BC. So again, we are not in the 10th century, in the days of king David. A palace should be pretty obvious, I would think, especially since we were so quickly to jump on the palaces of Megiddo as Solomonic.

What is, what is the structure in Jerusalem? In my opinion, the structure in Jerusalem should be linked to the expansion of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount in the direction of the spring, which is a little bit away from the original location of the mound, according to my interpretation. And thereby I understand this structure as some sort of fort protecting the water.

The Site of Khirbet Qeiyafa

It was built in the 9th century when the city expanded. The site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, which has only recently been excavated and published, has also played a major role in this discussion. Yes, of course. The site... first of all, I need to say that the site is an important site, is an extremely interesting one...

for understanding indeed the situation in the 10th century BC. Because the site is fortified, which is relatively unique for the 10th century, and secondly, the chronology is solid over there because the site has been dated... with radiocarbon samples. The site was interpreted as an example of a fortress from the time of king David, showing, you know, the administrative power of Judah...

as early as his time in the 10th century BC. And some of the finds even showing the ability to compose texts in the 10th century. So here we see the distance between, you know, the first piece of evidence regarding the site, which is important and the date, and the interpretation. Because, the next question should be, what is the territorial affiliation of this site? There are several possibilities here.

The first one is indeed with Judah. And this is a viable possibility, but there are other possibilities. Either to see this site as some sort of a... a remnant of Canaanite life in the Shephelah, in the lowlands, continuing into the 10th century BC, and we know this phenomenon form other places in the southern Levant.

And there is another possibility, which is no less viable, No less workable, so to speak, this is the possibility that the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa is associated with a Northern territorial formation. That is to say, an Israelite - to differ from Judah, judahite - territorial formation in the 10th century BC.

And I guess that we'll be speaking about it in one of our next talks. So, Khirbet Qeiyafa also cannot turn the picture around. There is another piece of evidence which was put on the table recently, and this is... the possible participation of Judah in the time of Solomon with the copper production in the far south, in the Arabah Valley, near the Gulf...

the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and south of the Dead Sea. There... The sites excavated where this evidence was put on the table are extremely important for understanding the history of the Levant and beyond, in fact, because of the copper production. However, in this case too, there is no way whatsoever to link them with Judah, king Solomon or any monarch...

ruling from Jerusalem. There is a final point that I wish to stress speaking about these attempts to show that the Low Chronology is wrong. And this is the naive idea, in my opinion, that one can come with a single strike and destroy the entire structure, you know, of what we know today about biblical exegesis, archaeology of the 10th century, radiocarbon studies and the like.

Summary and Narrative

One strike and everything can go back to" normal" with the great king Solomon in the 10th century BC. This is a bit naive. We've touched on several aspects of the United Monarchy, textual sources, archaeology, the big picture of the Ancient Near East. How would you put all of this together into one narrative of...

A summary. Summary. A summary. The summary should go as follows. David and Solomon are historical figures. They ruled indeed in the 10th century BC. They ruled over small territory in the southern highlands from a small, relatively modest, Jerusalem of the time. Which means that we have here a typical situation of the longue durée, of the long term.

That is to say, the situation in the 10th century, in fact, continued what we know about previous centuries - if you wish, all the way back to the Amarna period in the 14th century BC. Jerusalem is still modest, the territorial formation in the southern highlands is still small and limited to the highlands, did not yet expand to the lowlands.

The real great dynasty of Ancient Israel, with very strong evidence, archaeological evidence, is the Omride dynasty of the 9th century. So structures, buildings, which had been associated traditionally with king Solomon should, in fact, according to many considerations, including radiocarbon dating, be affiliated with the Omride dynasty.

So the description of a great United Monarchy is not an historical description. In fact, it should be understood as some sort of an idea... territorial ideology of a United Monarchy to-be, thought about and put in writing in the time of king Josiah of Judah in the late 7th century - when a possibility o

f a Jerusalemite king ... uniting the territories of former Israel and Judah and re-establishing a "great United Monarchy" as it used to be in the time of the founder of the dynasty, looked possible. But the story doesn't end here, in my opinion. We still need to ask the following question: So is this all invented? Was an author sitting in Jerusalem in the late 7th century BC inventing all this idea of a United Monarchy? I believe that the answer is negative.

I think that the authors in Jerusalem in the late 7th century BC, when they promoted the idea of a great United Monarchy, had in... in front of them an example for a United Monarchy. However, it was ruled by an Israelite king from Samaria, not from Jerusalem and in the 8th century, not in the 10th, and we will get to it in one of our later conversations.

All right, that's quite the teaser. Next time, let's take a look at someone who we've neglected - the famous king Saul. Yes, indeed, he too is important in the story. See you next time.

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