Archaeology and the Biblical Narrative: The Case of the United Monarchy

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Of the various approaches to the historicity of the biblical narratives, the most justified one is in my view the claim that the so-called ‘Deuteronomistic History’ preserved kernels of ancient texts and realities. This core included components of geo-political and socio-economic realia, as well as certain information on historical figures and events, although distorted and laden with later anachronisms, legends and literary forms added during the time of transmission, writing and editing of the texts and inspired by the authors’ theological and ideological viewpoint. The authors and redactors must have utilized early source materials, such as temple and palace libraries and archives, monumental inscriptions perhaps centuries old, oral transmissions of ancient poetry and folk stories rooted in a remote historical past, and perhaps even some earlier historiographic writings1. This general approach to the biblical text also dictates the evaluation of the historical reality of those narratives relating to David and Solomon. The views are considerably divided: revisionist historians (the so-called ‘minimalists’) and several archaeologists pointed out the infeasibility of the biblical description of the United Monarchy. Conservatives continue to maintain the biblical narrative as a general framework for historical reconstruction, and those who are ‘in the middle of the road’ search for possible alternative historical reconstructions.2 The