Debating the United Monarchy: Let's See How Far We've Come

The Biblical Sources

The exploits of David and Solomon are familiar and hardly need to be reviewed in detail here, for indeed they are among the most significant characters in the Hebrew Bible. The account in 1–2 Chronicles, 1–2 Samuel and 1 Kings portrays the foundation of the monarchy in Israel and a new chapter in the history of Israel following the chaotic period of the Judges. The biblical text envisions this as a time when Israel transitioned from being a group of dispersed tribes to being what we in the modern world typically refer to as a “state,” the organization of people as a co-ordinated political entity under a person or group granted the right to exercise rule over that entity, to use a simple definition.

The biblical text portrays David and Solomon taking Israel onto the world stage. David's first important conquest is Jerusalem, to which he moves his capital and renames its citadel in his own name (2 Sam 5:5–9), and after dispatching Israel's coast-dwelling antagonists the Philistines, he proceeds to conquer the trans-Jordanian kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, as well as an intervening Aramean coalition coming from north of Israel (2 Sam 8). His son Solomon cultivates trade contacts that bring him riches and exotica (1 Kgs 9–10) and undertakes building projects throughout Israel, foremost among them his Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 6–8). On a surface reading the reign of David and Solomon witnessed not only the forging of Israel as a state but a regionally-significant, powerful, and wealthy one at that. This therefore raises the question that has been at the heart of this debate: to what extent do archaeological remains dating to this period match up or not match up with this description and as a result, what might we say about the historical veracity of the biblical account?

The Old Archaeological Paradigm

Until about twenty years ago, the answer to the above question was in the affirmative, or at least there was no sustained and systematic critique from the archaeological side of scholarship on ancient Israel. The years 1000–925 BCE, which roughly cover the timespan of the reigns of David and Solomon, were comfortably located within the archaeological period commonly known now as the Iron Age IIA, or Iron IIA for short. Archaeological periods in the Levant were distinguished primarily by their particular range of pottery forms, pottery being the most ubiquitous datable find at any archaeological excavation. The most notable archaeological “proof” of the historicity of the biblical description of the period relates to part of Solomon's building program mentioned in 1 Kings 9:15, which lists the cities of Hazor (in the upper Galilee), Megiddo (in the Jezreel Valley between the Galilee in the north and the hill country and coastal plain to the south) and Gezer (at the foot of the Ayyalon Pass, a primary route from the coast to the hill country) among other locations.

Israeli general-turned-archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who had himself supervised excavations at Hazor and Megiddo in the years after the founding of the modern State of Israel, came to realize that each of these sites had a distinct archaeological level (known as a stratum, plural strata) that belonged to this Iron IIA period. This itself was not so remarkable as the fact that each stratum had produced evidence of what archaeologists commonly refer to as monumental “public” buildings, that is buildings that appear to have served some higher function than mere domestic dwellings, including impressive city walls. Not only that, but each of these strata at the three sites had a very particular design for the city gate, featuring an entrance way flanked by a set of three chambers on either side; these gates are commonly known as “six-chambered gates.” Yadin put two and two together. The three strata were from the same period, had similar architecture, and were from the three sites mentioned in 1 Kgs 9:15. Therefore, he reasoned, they must all be evidence of Solomon's building program and impressive evidence at that, a demonstration of the power and reach of Solomon's kingdom (Yadin 1958, 1970).

The Iron IIA period was assumed to have begun around the time of David's ascent to the throne, while the end of the period was placed in 925 BCE based upon the presumed date of the invasion of the southern Levant by the Egyptian Pharaoh known in the Hebrew Bible as Shishak, who turns up on Jerusalem's doorstep in the in the fifth year of the reign of Solomon's son Rehoboam. Shishak is commonly understood to be the same as Pharaoh Sheshonq I, the record of whose campaign into the southern Levant is still to be found albeit in damaged form in the temple precinct of Karnak in Egypt. Though the list contains several biblical sites including Megiddo, the preserved portion does not reference Jerusalem.

Israel Finkelstein and the Low Chronology

Even before the present debate commenced properly, rumblings of concern had already been heard. Noted Tel Aviv University archaeologist David Ussishkin had questioned Yadin's dating of the six-chambered gate at Megiddo, for he argued that the six-chambered gate in fact belonged to the stratum immediately above that to which Yadin had connected it, thereby dating it later than the reign of Solomon (Ussishkin). Then in 1995, Ussishkin's colleague Israel Finkelstein proposed that the Iron IIA period had been misdated too high by about a century, and argued that when this misdating is corrected strata at sites throughout Israel that had been dated to the 10^th century BCE were in fact more likely to have been dated to the very late 10^th and 9^th centuries BCE. This included those strata from Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer discussed above. No longer could those distinctive six-chambered gates belong to Solomon's building projects if they were in fact built long after he lived and reigned. Finkelstein instead re-ascribed them to the powerful 9^th century Omride dynasty of the northern kingdom of Israel. This did not mean that Finkelstein completely denied the existence of David and Solomon or that they ruled some sort of political entity in the highlands of Cisjordan in the 10^th century BCE. With the appearance of the term “House of David” in reference to Judah in the late 9^th century BCE inscription discovered in the early 1990s at the site of Tel Dan in northern Israel, such denial was impractical. Rather, Finkelstein's scholarship has consistently envisioned David and Solomon as the rulers of some small chieftainship centred on Jerusalem and its immediate surrounds, nothing like the description of 2 Samuel and 1 Kings.

Finkelstein deployed archaeological arguments generally relating to relative chronology, the relative relationship in time between different strata and their corresponding archaeological periods. The initial inducement for his proposal related to the date of the Philistines' arrival in the southern Levant after their encroachment into Egyptian territory was repulsed by Rameses III in the early decades of the 12^th century BCE. It was traditionally assumed that the Philistine settlement marked the end of Egyptian control in the Levant, but Finkelstein noted that there were in fact indications that Egyptian presence seemed to have persisted as late as the reign of Rameses VI, in the late 12^th century BCE. Because there was an apparent absence of Philistine pottery at sites in the Levant occupied by the Egyptians and vice versa, Finkelstein concluded that in fact the Philistines were not present there before the Egyptians withdrew; ergo they must have arrived decades later than traditionally thought. This had a profound chronological effect, because the appearance of Philistine pottery is tied in with the start of Iron Age I, the period immediately preceding the Iron IIA discussed above. Pushing down the first appearance of Philistine pottery also pushes down the start of the Iron I from its traditional date in the early 12^th century BCE to the later part of the same century. In so doing, Finkelstein argued that this necessitated the lowering of the beginning of the Iron IIA as well, down to the end of the 10^th century BCE rather than the start. Finkelstein therefore moved the beginning of Iron IIA to around the time of the reign of Shishak while locating its end in the latter 9^th century BCE.

Of equal importance for Finkelstein was the case of the palatial Iron Age compound uncovered at Jezreel. It is agreed that this compound is the palatial residence of king Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel that first appears in 1 Kgs 21:1 and then again as the site of Jehu's coup in 2 Kgs 9–10. Ahab and Jehu ruled in the 9^th century BCE, and after their reigns Jezreel is no longer mentioned; so the compound has always been dated solely to the 9^th century. Finkelstein noted however that the pottery found at Jezreel was very similar to that from Yadin's co-called Solomonic stratum at Megiddo. So how, Finkelstein asked, could that stratum have similar pottery to Jezreel yet be from a century earlier? In addition to noting that six-chambered gates had also been found at Iron Age sites that are not ascribed to Solomon, such as the Philistine city of Ashdod, Finkelstein cast aspersions on what he saw as Yadin's rather uncritical acceptance of the reliability of the biblical text in assigning the six-chambered gates and their accompanying strata to Solomon.

Finkelstein dubbed his new schema the Low Chronology (as opposed to the traditional chronology). Because the Low Chronology shifts the transition from the Iron I to the Iron IIA to the end of the 10^th century BCE, this relocates the time of the United Monarchy, the rule of David and Solomon, to the Iron I and therein lies its rather serious historical implications. As well as being the time of the Philistines' settlement of the southern coast of the Levant, the Iron I was the time of the Israelites' settlement in the Cisjordanian hill-country, while Canaanite society clung on primarily in the lowland valleys. Under the Low Chronology the 10^th century BCE is stripped of the monumental “public” architecture of the Iron IIA and pretty much anything that most Near Eastern archaeologists would consider to be indicators of the formation of a state, let alone one on the level of what the biblical text seems to assume (Finkelstein 1995, 1996). Finkelstein did not rest on his laurels when it came to supporting arguments for the Low Chronology; I will mention below others that he has deployed since that time where relevant.

The Modified Conventional Chronology and the Introduction of Radiocarbon Dating

The traditional archaeological interpretation did not disappear from scholarship by any means in the wake of Finkelstein's proposed revisions. Not long after he put forth the Low Chronology, Amihai Mazar, who was to become Finkelstein's primary opponent in the developing debate, mounted a critique of Finkelstein's arguments. For instance, he noted that the situation that Finkelstein presented at Jezreel was not so simple, as pottery that was similar to Megiddo came not only from the palatial compound but from earth deposited as a construction fill for the compound itself, suggesting that the same pottery was in use at the site before the compound was built in the 9^th century BCE, likely from a 10^th century settlement overlain by Ahab's construction. In the same work Mazar also prefigured the use of radiocarbon dating, which would come to play a major role in future discussions among Finkelstein, Mazar and other scholars regarding the chronology of the Iron Age (A. Mazar 1997).

It was radiocarbon dating, using material from his own excavations at Tel Beth Sean and Tel Rehov in the Beth Shean Valley in northern Israel, which induced Mazar to propose his own chronological schema. Mazar's Modified Conventional Chronology proposed that the Iron IIA actually lasted longer than either the traditional or Low Chronology had supposed. While he agreed with Finkelstein that the end of the period should be moved down to the late 9^th century BCE, he placed the start of the period within the first few decades of the 10^th century BCE. Under this schema, the historical context of archaeological remains from the Iron IIA becomes much more ambiguous. The strata from Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer discussed above are an important example. If they could have been built at any time between the early 10^th and late 9^th centuries BCE, then they could be ascribed to Solomon, as was Mazar's stated preference, just as easily as they could be assigned to the Omride dynasty as per Finkelstein (Mazar & Carmi).

Even though radiocarbon dating was a relative latecomer to the toolbox of archaeologists studying ancient Israel, it has become the primary focus where chronology is concerned, spawning a multiplicity of duelling articles from Mazar and Finkelstein in particular (see e.g. their chapters in Levy & Higham). Much like Mazar, Finkelstein has used his own fieldwork at Megiddo as a primary source of radiocarbon information. Megiddo is one of the most important Iron Age sites in the Levant and Finkelstein has used radiocarbon dates from its Iron Age strata to buttress his Low Chronology. Dating a stratum by looking at its particular pottery forms is only applicable to relative chronology; ancient vessels don't come with date labels. Radiocarbon dating on the other hand is useful for constructing an absolute chronology, because it provides calendar dates. If we wish to know whether it was the Iron I or the Iron IIA that covered the majority of the 10^th century BCE when David and Solomon would have ruled, we need to know the absolute calendar dates for Iron I and Iron IIA strata. The problem is that radiocarbon dating is not especially precise and its results far from unambiguous. It doesn't provide a single year date for whatever is being dated, only a range of years, usually of a few decades at best, and even then it does not provide one hundred percent certainty for that date range. So though it is useful, its imperfections have meant that Finkelstein, Mazar and others have not been able to agree on an absolute chronology (A. Mazar 2011; Finkelstein & Piasetzky).

Jerusalem

It almost goes without saying that historical and archaeological research into any period in ancient Israel must account for the situation at Jerusalem. In fact the same could be said for any period of the Levant's history up to the present day, considering just how large the Holy City looms in the region's history. But it is here that the debate over the United Monarchy reaches a major sticking point due to the rather frustrating archaeological situation that one encounters in Jerusalem. The city's prominent place throughout the history of the Levant is tied in with its continuous occupation from as far back as the Bronze Age, long before David may have laid eyes upon it, right up to the present day. Part of what makes archaeology possible at most sites in the Levant (and indeed the world) is that even when a site may have had a long history of occupation, that occupation usually ended in any substantial form some time before the present. Sites like Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer have not been the location of a proper settlement for some time; thus they are both accessible for excavation and their remains lie largely untouched beneath the surface. At Jerusalem, the opposite is true. Practically all of the ancient settlement has been built over for centuries and this continuous occupation has caused significant disruption and damage to what archaeological remains have been uncovered, seriously obscuring our picture of the ancient city (Cahill). Worst of all is the situation regarding the Temple Mount, which covers a large area rendered inaccessible to excavation due to the nature of the enormous artificial platform, not to mention the ongoing political situation. If they did exist, there is no hope of archaeological investigation into Solomon's Temple and the associated royal structures described in 1 Kings 6–8, assuming Herod's massive construction project has left anything intact.

The area of Jerusalem that directly concerns the archaeology of the United Monarchy is also its oldest, the City of David. Ancient Jerusalem sits on two hills. The western hill is the location of most of the Old City that visitors see today, and has been permanently occupied since at least the 8^th century BCE. Across a narrow valley lies the eastern hill. At the top of this hill is Herod's Temple Mount, while the southern spur of this hill is the location of the City of David, which slopes down from north to south. The most significant discovery from the City of David of the time before the Iron Age is the enormous Middle Bronze Age defensive complex that protects the Gihon spring, the City's water source. Little if anything of the settlement to which this defensive complex belongs has been found, and when we come to the Iron Age IIA we find a frustratingly similar situation.

Evidence of regular domestic dwellings from the Iron I or Iron IIA in the City of David is lacking, just as it largely is for preceding periods. Rather, the only substantial finds from the earlier part of the Iron Age are to be found in a small area at the top of the slope just below the Ophel, the area immediately adjacent to the southern wall of the Temple Mount. Two instances of monumental architecture have been uncovered there over the course of several different excavations: the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure. The Stepped Stone Structure is a series of artificial terraces formed by interlocking walls that create a series of boxes, which were subsequently filled with rubble and earth. These terraces were themselves then covered with a stone mantle. The Stepped Stone Structure, which rises from east to west on the side of the hillslope, appears to be a rampart or support for the space immediately above it, creating a sort of platform. This has led to the suggestion that the Stepped Stone Structure may be identified as the enigmatic biblical “Millo” (2 Sam 5:9), a structure in Jerusalem whose name in Hebrew seems to indicate some sort of construction fill. It was on this platform that the series of walls known as the Large Stone Structure was uncovered, primarily in recent excavations overseen by Eilat Mazar (E. Mazar 2009).

The relative dating of each of these structures has not proven simple, however. For the Stepped Stone Structure there is not even agreement as to whether the terraces and stone mantle described above were built together or at different times, because pottery found from limited soundings into its foundations and from later houses built atop the mantle could place construction of one or both of these elements in either the Iron I or Iron IIA (Cahill; Steiner,). That the structure existed in some form by the Iron IIA is generally acknowledged, but recall that under Finkelstein's Low Chronology this would date it in absolute terms later than the time of David and Solomon.

The Large Stone Structure would prove to be even more controversial. Eilat Mazar claimed that the structure, which she dated to the Iron IIA period, was to be equated with the house built for David by craftsmen sent as a diplomatic gift by King Hiram of Tyre (2 Sam 5:11) and was physically connected with the upper part of the Stepped Stone Structure. Finkelstein and his Tel Aviv University colleagues challenged her dating and her use of the biblical text. They preferred to date the structure as late as the Hellenistic period, while disdaining what they saw as an overly literal and uncritical use of the biblical text in much the same vein as Yadin. (Finkelstein, Singer-Avitz, Herzog & Ussishkin). This did not dissuade either Amihai Mazar or Avraham Faust from suggesting a date for the building's construction in the Iron I period and an identification with the “Fortress of Zion,” David's primary target in taking Jerusalem (2 Sam 5:7) (A. Mazar 2007; Faust).

We are therefore left with a rather difficult situation at Jerusalem, in that we have two instances of monumental construction that were both likely in existence by the Iron IIA, but with little definite idea of their purpose and ambiguity in terms of their relationship to the history related by the biblical text. The primary lacuna in Jerusalem's archaeological record, however, is the absence of evidence for wealth and splendor of Solomon's Jerusalem that the biblical text describes. If, for example, the claim of 1 Kings 10:27 that Solomon deposited silver in Jerusalem like stones in its multitude has even a shred of truth behind it, one would not guess it by looking at Jerusalem's archaeological record. Hence it is no surprise that Finkelstein has argued consistently throughout his work that Jerusalem proves the negative, that it was not in fact the capital of David and Solomon's glorious kingdom (Finkelstein 2007b). For Amihai Mazar though, this overlooks the significance of the Stepped and Large Stone Structures in that they indicate to him the presence of a state in the 10^th century BCE (A. Mazar 2007). Even more to the point, Finkelstein's colleague Nadav Na'aman has pointed out that the historical situation regarding the United Monarchy can be compared to that of Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence for occupation in Jerusalem in the Late Bronze is even more minimal than it is for the Iron IIA, and yet the existence of a settlement there is corroborated by way of the letters from Jerusalem's ruler Abdi-Hepa to his Egyptian overlords preserved in the archive of court correspondence at Amarna, the short-lived capital of the infamous Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten (Na'aman).

A further problem is the absence of evidence for writing and the production of texts in Jerusalem at the time of the United Monarchy, but I will return to that below. For now, suffice it to say that Jerusalem continues to be a sticking point in this debate and likely will not be the place from which will emerge some new discovery to advance it.

Khirbet Qeiyafa

In many ways Qeiyafa is Jerusalem's exact opposite. It is small, out of the way, was properly occupied for only a very brief period, and was quite obscure even within the archaeological profession before it began to appear in the pages of publications both popular and scholarly. The hilltop site overlooks the Elah Valley across from the sites of Socoh and Azekah, described in 1 Samuel 17 as the location of David's fateful duel with Goliath. Excavations uncovered a town occupied for a brief period at the very beginning of the Iron IIA period before being abandoned, leaving behind a precise snapshot of material culture undisturbed and unobscured by later occupation. The town was formed by a belt of houses ringing the site, whose back rooms formed the town's defensive wall, complete with two gates. Such town planning matches other settlements of this period in Judah, though the presence of Philistine pottery also attests to contact with the coast (Garfinkel & Ganor).

The discovery of an undisturbed assemblage of pottery dated tightly to the beginning of the Iron IIA period was to be significant for the question of the period's chronology discussed above, for if the pottery could be associated with radiocarbon dates, it could help to pinpoint the absolute date of the period's beginning. In short, the radiocarbon dating that resulted did no favors to the Low Chronology as it indicated that Qeiyafa was occupied for a brief few decades around the transition from the 11^th to the 10^th century BCE, closer to the Higher or Modified Conventional Chronologies (Garfinkel, Streit, Ganor & Hasel). For excavation director Yoseph Garfinkel, the site's Judean character and early dating were both fatal blows to Finkelstein's entire historical revision and a vindication of the historicity of an early Israelite state ruled from Jerusalem. Finkelstein by no means surrendered his position so easily, though, for he did not accept that Qeiyafa had to be associated with such a state, if only because he doubted that the number of similar fortified sites in Judah or even the region's approximate population in the Iron IIA allowed such a reconstruction (Finkelstein & Fantalkin).

This throws into relief the problem of exactly how to tell whether the archaeological record reflects the existence of a state as it is usually understood by archaeologists. Further, if a state can be seen in the archaeological record of the Iron IIA, does it reflect something like the United Monarchy described in the biblical text? We have already seen how the difficult situation in Jerusalem can be read as either indicative or counter-indicative of the existence of such a state in the Iron IIA, but what about outside Khirbet Qeiyafa? Again, the traditional archaeological paradigm would point to Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer as evidence for a state, but if Finkelstein is correct that these postdate the United Monarchy and actually belong to the Omride rule of the northern kingdom of Israel, they don't really shed any light on the 10^th century BCE.

If similarities in architecture and town planning can't serve as a common ground for discerning the presence of a state, perhaps a smaller-scale line of evidence could be used. Any kingdom, especially one such as the biblical United Monarchy, needs a degree of administration, the management of human and physical resources, and individuals involved in administrative activity in order to keep it running. The biblical text certainly seems to offer such a picture. David has a small cadre of officials including a scribe (2 Sam 8:20), while Solomon has an even more extensive administrative apparatus replete with a group of provincial governors (1 Kgs 4). The question of indicators of administrative activity in Iron IIA Israel has not escaped this debate either, and again the evidence, or what limited amount we have at least, has been read differently by the two different sides of the debate.

Before discussing those interpretations though, we should briefly consider the evidence that archaeologists are dealing with, and Khirbet Qeiyafa has become quite important in this regard. The Iron IIB period, which follows the Iron IIA in Israel and covers the late 9^th to 8^th centuries BCE, is famous for the presence of the LMLK jar stamps, literally a stamp impression on the handle of a particular type of storage jar bearing a Hebrew legend that translates as “(belonging) to the king” (see Keimer). At Qeiyafa, a group of earlier storage jars were found with deliberate thumb impressions in their handles made before the jar was fired. Garfinkel and his fellow excavators, noting that similar thumb impressions were found at other Iron IIA sites in Israel, have suggested that these thumb impressions may be some sort of forerunner to the later LMLK system (Kang & Garfinkel).

Note that the LMLK system is conspicuous specifically for its use of writing, in contrast to the lack of writing accompanying the thumb impressions. The amount and use of writing in the Iron IIA period is tightly intertwined with the question of the presence of a state at that time in Israel. Unlike the Iron IIB, when literacy seems to have expanded significantly, judging by the number of epigraphic finds alone, our current corpus indicates that the Iron IIA was a time when writing was practiced by only a small number of trained scribes. Qeiyafa has produced two inscriptions written on pottery, the most common medium for writing that survives into the archaeological record in Israel. The most recent inscription is fragmentary but certainly contains the name “Ishba'al,” while a clear translation and interpretation of the other, much longer inscription has not proven possible as yet (Garfinkel, Golub, Misgav & Ganor; Misgav, Garfinkel & Ganor). Aside from these two examples there are few others found in Iron IIA strata. Jerusalem itself has only produced one, an inscription on a piece of pottery that likely indicates the vessel contained wine (E. Mazar, Ben-Shlomo & Ahituv; Petrovitch). The longest inscription commonly dated to the 10^th century BCE in Israel, an apparent agricultural calendar written in a small stone slab found in the early excavation of Gezer, was actually recovered from the excavation's dump and not in situ, that is not in its original location of deposition.

None of the limited number of examples of writing from the Iron IIA can be unambiguously associated with royal administration. Moreover, the earlier part of the Iron Age in the Levant lacks examples of the kind of monumental royal inscriptions familiar from other kingdoms of the ancient Near East, such as Assyria. For Finkelstein, this lack of evidence for the use of writing in the 10^th century BCE is an indictment of the idea of a historical United Monarchy, for as he sees it, the scribal activity that such a state would necessitate is lacking in the archaeological record (Finkelstein 2010). Amihai Mazar's primary counter to this regards one serious problem with our present state of evidence: the lack of surviving papyrus. It is well understood that papyrus was the medium of much textual production in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, especially for documents intended to be more permanent than some short note jotted down on a piece of pottery. That it was used in Iron Age Israel is known by the discovery in excavation of many small seals and bullae, and the impression of the seal in the clay glob used for sealing papyrus scrolls. There are even a few such seals and bullae found in Israel dated around the 10^th century BCE or shortly after. Unlike Egypt, the climate of the southern Levant is not dry enough for papyrus usually to survive. Mazar therefrore argues that is difficult to judge the situation around writing and scribalism in 10^th century BCE Israel when one of the primary media for writing has been lost (A. Mazar 2007).

The Deuteronomistic History

The books of 1–2 Samuel and 1 Kings, which contain the primary description of the United Monarchy in the biblical text, form part of the Deuteronomistic History or DtrH, the history of Israel from just before its entrance into the land of Canaan through its settlement, the establishment of the monarchy and the final destruction of the Judahite state and exile of many of its people by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. First proposed by Martin Noth, the DtrH encompasses the books of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings excluding Ruth (Noth). It is agreed that the DtrH takes the theology of the book of Deuteronomy as its primary lens through which to view the vicissitudes of Israel's history and particularly the evaluation of its kings; indeed, this is why Noth named it as such. But practically everything else concerning the DtrH is contested, though two issues most directly concern this discussion: its date and its historical intentionality.

Dating the DtrH and Its Sources

Turning first to the date of the text, many different arguments for many different dates for all or part of the DtrH have been proposed since Noth, who preferred to date it to the period of the Babylonian exile. Many scholars, including those involved in this particular debate, do now accept that large parts of the DtrH in fact are better dated before the Exile and in particular can be located around the reigns of kings Hezekiah and Josiah of Judah in late 8^th and 7^th centuries BCE. As noted above, this seems to have been the time when Hebrew literacy and interest in writing seems to have been most widespread. Moreover, 2 Kings records both Josiah's and Hezekiah's reformist attitudes in favor of the strict and orthodox adherence to the worship of Israel's national god Yhwh centred in Jerusalem, one of the central tenets of Deuteronomistic theology.

Thus, there was quite possibly a long gap, as much as a few hundred years, between the time of the United Monarchy purportedly existed and the beginning of the composition of the Deuteronomistic History. So the question must become this: To what extent did the authors of the DtrH have earlier sources and if so, could those sources be as early as the 10^th century BCE? The biblical text would certainly lead one to think that texts were produced under the United Monarchy, as both David and Solomon count scribes among the members of their respective courts. In the world of the ancient Near East, scribes in the employ of the state would typically be responsible for recording annals of royal administration and the king's activities, and were likely involved in the composition of publicly-displayed monuments praising the king's achievements in warfare, diplomacy and construction, including temples. The survival of such a record might explain how a later author of the DtrH would be aware of Sheshonq I's foray into Israel in the latter 10^th century BCE.

Yet we know of these functions of scribes precisely because of the amount of epigraphic evidence uncovered in the excavation of the cities of the Near Eastern states that document them, from clay tablets to great stone stelae. As noted above, Israel, Jerusalem in particular, lacks such clear evidence from the 10^th century BCE, leading Finkelstein to flatly reject the idea that royal records that one might expect given the biblical text could actually have been produced in the 10^th century BCE. This does not mean that he rejects absolutely any possibility of even some genuine historical memory surviving from the time of the United Monarchy. For example, he notes that the prominent role of the Philistine city of Gath in the narratives concerning David are unlikely to have been a concoction of an author writing as late as the 7^th century BCE given that Gath was destroyed by king Hazael of Damascus in the late 9^th century and barely resettled thereafter (Finkelstein 2007a). But his statement that the idea of a royal archive of texts from the time of Solomon is nothing more than a “mirage” (Finkelstein 2010: 5) clearly demonstrates his position as far as actual first-hand written sources are concerned, for the biblical description of the United Monarchy.

Above I have already discussed Amihai Mazar's objection on archaeological grounds to Finkelstein's position above, but this is not the only avenue by which we may explore the question of earlier sources. For this we turn to Baruch Halpern, an important voice in discussion of the United Monarchy's historicity, who takes a stance very different to that of Finkelstein. The avenue that Halpern's work has opened up concerns clues contained within the text itself, and what those clues suggest about the text's date. I will mention just one of the clues that Halpern discusses: the particular portrayal of Solomon as a “natural philosopher” to use Halpern's term (Halpern: 114). According to the text, knowledge of the natural world forms part of Solomon's unmatched wisdom (1 Kgs 4:33), while he also collected exotic animals (1 Kgs 10:22). Halpern notes that such a focus on the knowledge and collection of the natural world was a prominent theme of ancient Near Eastern kingship in the 11^th and 10^th centuries BCE before petering out in the 9^th century BCE; it figures quite prominently in the inscriptions of Assyrian kings in this period, who were beginning to stretch their reach towards the Levant, at least as far as Phoenicia. Halpern concludes that Solomon was unlikely to be portrayed by a purely de novo text composed in the later period of the Judahite monarchy, and this would instead appear to be rooted in a document contemporary with Solomon (Halpern 2001).

The evidence thus seems to be pulling in two different directions, for if there was the lack of epigraphic evidence for the 10^th century BCE that Finkelstein points to is so fatal, how could there have been a textual source for Solomon's reign that is likely to have been written only around the time he would have lived? This presently remains a sticking point.

Evaluating the DtrH and its Authors

Even aside from the issue of the date of the DtrH and its possible sources, the problem still remains of how to use a history composed with an overt theological predisposition in understanding the historical world behind it. Like any ancient historiographical work, the DtrH was composed from a particular perspective for a particular purpose. It cannot a priori be assumed to be a completely objective and transparent explication of Israel's history and it certainly does not pretend to be. The difficulty that this accentuates, one that is at the core of this debate, is to what extent the DtrH is understood to be or not to be grounded in historical reality. Put more plainly, did the authors of the DtrH base their historiography in what they understood to have been real history, or was it dictated foremost by their particular theological position?

Halpern and Finkelstein again represent the two contrasting views on this matter. For Finkelstein, despite whatever minimal memory of the 10^th century BCE they may have had, the Deuteronomistic authors, whom he locates firmly in the reign of Josiah in the late 7^th century BCE, have constructed their history entirely in the service of their contemporary theological aims. More specifically, he views the 7^th century BCE Deuteronomistic rendering of David and Solomon's reigns as nothing more than a “Golden Age,” an ahistorical time recalled in a falsely idealistic fashion. This “Golden Age,” in recalling Israel under David and Solomon as powerful and wealthy, contrasted with Judah's situation in the period towards the end of the monarchy, when it was reduced to a small state at the mercy of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. In Finkelstein's view therefore, the picture of David and Solomon's reigns provided in the DtrH is unusable for a more objective historical reconstruction (Finkelstein 2007b).

Halpern, on the other hand, views the DtrH and its authors much more favorably in terms of their historical intentionality, in that he discerns a faithful, respectful and sincere use of sources used to weave together a meaningful history. In contrast to Finkelstein, Halpern views the work of the DtrH's authors more as the judicious use of sources to build a historiographic foundation upon which to elucidate a Deuteronomistic interpretation of Israel in history. Thus he rather understands the process by which the DtrH's authors sought to construct their work in opposite terms to Finkelstein. In this, Halpern stresses that ancient Near Eastern historiography, and especially royal historiography, needed to work from the basis of its historical reality lest it be exposed to ridicule and subversion from an audience who would see through blatant invention.

Halpern certainly does not deny that the DtrH contains artful touches and manipulations, but he views them more as a tool typical of ancient Near Eastern literature used by the authors to flesh out and discuss the particular issues and themes they wished to convey; he certainly does not see them as a way for the DtrH's authors to cynically fool their audience. Given the number of connections and convergences with the wider ancient Near Eastern world that he and others have drawn out for the biblical picture of both the United and Divided Monarchies, Halpern concludes the DtrH's portrayal and interpretation of the reigns of David and Solomon were necessarily founded upon a conscious effort toward a fair and grounded representation of history (Halpern 1988, 2001).