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Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy)

"United Monarchy" redirects here. For the union of monarchies under a single sovereign, see Personal union.
Not to be confused with Kingdom of Israel (Samaria).

Kingdom of Israel
𐤉𐤔𐤓𐤀𐤋[1]
c. 1047 BCE–930 BCE
Land of Israel Shewing the Purveyorships in the Reign of Solomon, published by James Wyld in 1819 based on the Books of Kings
Land of Israel Shewing the Purveyorships in the Reign of Solomon, published by James Wyld in 1819 based on the Books of Kings
Common languagesHebrew, Aramaic
Religion
Demonym(s)Israelite
GovernmentHereditary theocratic absolute monarchy
Kings 
• 1047–1010 BCE
Saul
• 1010–1008
Ish-bosheth
• 1008–970
David
• 970–931
Solomon
• 931–930
Rehoboam
Historical eraIron Age
c. 1047 BCE
930 BCE
Preceded by		 Succeeded by
Twelve Tribes of Israel
Kingdom of Israel
Kingdom of Judah
Today part of

According to the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible, a United Monarchy or United Kingdom of Israel[7] existed under the reigns of Saul, Ish-bosheth, David, and Solomon, encompassing the territories of both the later kingdoms of Judah and Israel.[8][9][10]

Whether the United Monarchy existed—and, if so, to what extent—is a matter of ongoing academic debate.[11][12][13] During the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late 8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[14][15] Scholars remain divided among those who support the historicity of the biblical narrative, those who doubt or dismiss it, and those who support the kingdom's theoretical existence while maintaining that the biblical narrative is exaggerated.[16] Proponents of the kingdom's existence traditionally date it to between c. 1047 BCE and c. 930 BCE.

In the 1990s, Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contended that existing archaeological evidence for the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE should be dated to the 9th century BCE.[17][18]: 59–61  This model placed the biblical kingdom in Iron Age I, suggesting that it was not functioning as a country under centralized governance but rather as tribal chiefdom over a small polity in Judah, disconnected from the north's Israelite tribes.[19][6][20][21] The rival chronology of Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar places the relevant period beginning in the early 10th century BCE and ending in the mid-9th century BCE, addressing the problems of the traditional chronology while still aligning pertinent findings with the time of Saul, David, and Solomon. Mazar's chronology and the traditional one have been fairly widely accepted,[22] though there is no current consensus on the topic.[23] Recent archaeological discoveries by Israeli archaeologists Eilat Mazar and Yosef Garfinkel in Jerusalem and Khirbet Qeiyafa, respectively, seem to support the existence of the United Monarchy, but the dating and identifications are not universally accepted.[18][24] The historicity of Solomon and his rule is also hotly debated. While the current consensus allows for a historical Solomon, it regards his reign as king over the United Monarchy in the tenth century BCE as uncertain and the biblical description of his apparent empire's lavishness as most probably a massive anachronistic exaggeration.[25][26][27]

According to the biblical account, on the succession of Solomon's son Rehoboam, the United Monarchy split into two separate kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel in the north, containing the cities of Shechem and Samaria; and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, containing Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple.

  1. ^
    • Rollston, Chris A. (2010). Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age. Society of Biblical Literature. pp. 52–54. ISBN 978-1-58983-107-0.
    • Compston, Herbert F. B. (1919). The Inscription on the Stele of Méšaʿ.
  2. ^ "Bible Gateway passage: Ezekiel 8 – New International Version". Bible Gateway.
  3. ^ "1 Kings 11:5 Solomon followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians and Molech the abomination of the Ammonites". biblehub.com.
  4. ^ "2 Kings 23:13 The King also desecrated the high places east of Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which King Solomon of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites". biblehub.com.
  5. ^ "Jeremiah 11:13 Your gods are indeed as numerous as your cities, O Judah, and the altars of shame you have set up—the altars to burn incense to Baal—are as many as the streets of Jerusalem". biblehub.com.
  6. ^ a b Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2001). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Stories. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-86912-4.
  7. ^ Van der Veen, Peter (1989–90). "Early Monarchy in Israel" (PDF). Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum. 2. Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Science: 72–78.
  8. ^ Dever, Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah, SBL Press, 2017, pg. 349
  9. ^ Harvey, Graham (1996). The True Israel: Uses of the Names Jew, Hebrew, and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, Inc. p. 164. ISBN 978-0-391-04119-6.
  10. ^ de Vaux, O.P., Roland (1997). Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions. Translated by McHugh, John. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-4278-7.
  11. ^ Amihai Mazar, "Iron Age Chronology: A Reply to I. Finkelstein" Levant (1997), pp. 157–167
  12. ^ Amihai Mazar, "The Debate over the Chronology of the Iron Age in the Southern Levant" in (eds. Lvy & Higman) The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text, and Science (2005), pp. 15–30
  13. ^ Raz Kletter, "Chronology and United Monarchy: A Methodological Review", Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (2004), pp. 13–54
  14. ^ Garfinkel, Yossi; Ganor, Sa'ar; Hasel, Michael (19 April 2012). "Journal 124: Khirbat Qeiyafa preliminary report". Hadashot Arkheologiyot: Excavations and Surveys in Israel. Israel Antiquities Authority. Archived from the original on 23 June 2012. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  15. ^ Finkelstein, Israel; Fantalkin, Alexander (May 2012). "Khirbet Qeiyafa: an unsensational archaeological and historical interpretation" (PDF). Tel Aviv. 39: 38–63. doi:10.1179/033443512x13226621280507. S2CID 161627736. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  16. ^ Mazar, Amihai (2010). "Archaeology and the Biblical Narrative: The Case of the United Monarchy". Archaeological and Biblical Perspectives: 29. For conservative approaches defining the United Monarchy as a state 'from Dan to Beer Sheba' including 'conquered kingdoms' (Ammon, Moab, Edom) and "spheres of influence" in Geshur and Hamath cf. e.g. Ahlström (1993), 455–542; Meyers (1998); Lemaire (1999); Masters (2001); Stager (2003); Rainey (2006), 159–168; Kitchen (1997); Millard (1997; 2008). For a total denial of the historicity of the United Monarchy cf., e.g. Davies (1992), 67–68; others suggested a 'chiefdom' comprising a small region around Jerusalem, cf. Knauf (1997), 81–85; Niemann (1997), 252–299 and Finkelstein (1999). For a 'middle of the road' approach, [proposing] a United Monarchy of [greater] territorial scope though smaller than the biblical description cf., e.g., Miller (1997); Halpern (2001), 229–262; Liverani (2005), 92–101. The latter recently suggested a state comprising the territories of Judah and Ephraim during the time of David, which was subsequently enlarged to include areas of northern Samaria and influence areas in Galilee and Transjordan. Na'aman (1992; 1996) once accepted the [fundamental] biography of David as authentic and later rejected the United Monarchy as a state, cf. id. (2007), 401–402.
  17. ^ Andrew Tobolowsky, "Israelite and Judahite History in Contemporary Theoretical Approaches," Currents in Biblical Research (2018), pg. 40
  18. ^ a b Thomas, Zachary (22 April 2016). "Debating the United Monarchy: Let's See How Far We've Come". Biblical Theology Bulletin. 46 (2): 59–69. doi:10.1177/0146107916639208. ISSN 0146-1079. S2CID 147053561.
  19. ^ Lipschits, Oded (2014). "The history of Israel in the biblical period". In Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi (eds.). The Jewish Study Bible (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 2107–2119. ISBN 978-0-19-997846-5. As this essay will show, however, the pre monarchic period long ago became a literary description of the mythological roots, the early beginnings of the nation and the way to describe the right of Israel on its land. Though the archeological evidence also does not support the existence of a united monarchy under David and Solomon as described in the Bible, meaning the rubric of "united monarchy" is best abandoned, it remains useful for discussing how the Bible views the Israelite past. [...] Although the kingdom of Judah is mentioned in some ancient inscriptions, they never suggest that it was part of a unit comprised of Israel and Judah. There are no extrabiblical indications of a united monarchy called "Israel."
  20. ^ Kuhrt, Amélie (1995). The Ancient Near East, c. 3000–330 BC, Band 1. New York: Routledge. p. 438. ISBN 978-0-41516-762-8.
  21. ^ Wright, Jacob L. (July 2014). "David, King of Judah (not Israel)". The Bible and Interpretation.
  22. ^ Faust, Avraham; Garfinkel, Yosef; Mumcuoglu, Madeleine (2021). «The Study of the 10th Century BCE in the Early 21st Century CE: An Overview». Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 1: 1-14. "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)"
  23. ^ Lester Grabbe, Ancient Israel, 2017, pg. 84
  24. ^ "Crying King David: Are the ruins found in Israel really his palace?". Haaretz. Retrieved 18 July 2021. Not all agree that the ruins found in Khirbet Qeiyafa are of the biblical town Sha'arayim, let alone the palace of ancient Israel's most famous King
  25. ^ Grabbe, Lester. The Dawn of Israel: A History of Canaan in the Second Millennium BCE. 2023. T&T Clark. p. 255-259. “It is essentially a folktale about an Eastern potentate – it is royal legend or Königsnovelle.” “Thus, it looks difficult to discover much in the Solomon story that strikes the critical reader as likely to be historical.” “[T]he temple story has been inflated into a legendary extravaganza.” “[T]he Solomon story is the most problematic of those relating to the early Israelite kings, providing the thickest cloud of obscurity over the history that lies behind it.”
  26. ^ Dever, William G. (2021). "Solomon, Scripture, and Science: The Rise of the Judahite State in the 10th Century BCE". Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. 1: 102–125. doi:10.52486/01.00001.4. ISSN 2788-8819.
  27. ^ Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2006). David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition. Free Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780743243629.


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