Approximately 3,000 years ago, a new type of building emerged in the land of Israel as a standard structure in sites across the region. Pottery too took on a remarkable level of uniformity at around the same time.

And pagan cultic sites that had stood for hundreds of years — even millennia in some cases — were destroyed and abandoned.

Any of these phenomena could be explained by a number of different scenarios, according to archaeologist Avraham Faust and biblical scholar Zev Farber. But the two say there is only one explanation that accounts for all of them together: the creation of a unified society under the strong hand of a single ruler.

In other words, a united monarchy of the type that the Bible says was adopted by the people of Israel and Judaea in the early Iron Age, led by Kings Saul, David, and Solomon.

“The Bible says that Israel decided to change their strategy and go for a king in the 10th century,” Farber, a senior editor at the Academic Torah Institute, told The Times of Israel. “Now, did they decide to appoint someone? Did somebody muscle their way in? That’s already a level of resolution we can’t answer.”

“The specifics are less relevant,” he added. “It does not have to be three [kings], maybe there were two, maybe five. However, the scaffolding that the Bible provides about the 10th century appears to align with the physical data from the 10th century.”

In “The Bible’s First Kings – Uncovering the Story of Saul, David, and Solomon,” published this year by Cambridge University Press, Farber, and Faust, a member of the Department of General History at Bar-Ilan University, describe the emergence of a thriving kingdom in the highlands of the southern Levant during the 10th century BCE.

The book brings together archaeology, anthropology, and biblical scholarship to support the thesis that the kingdom did exist and that findings from the ground offer evidence for it — although not necessarily for the specific monarchs who led it. It processes “an enormous amount of data,” according to Faust.

With no direct first-hand evidence of the existence of a King David, his predecessor Saul, or inheritor Solomon, nor of the biblical account of their monarchic rule over an expanding kingdom from the Judaean hill country to Samaria and the Galilee, scholars have long questioned whether the biblically attested polity referred to today as the United Monarchy was ever a historical reality.

In the 1990s, researchers reinterpreted monumental remains that had been traditionally dated to the relevant period as having come later, leading scholars to conclude that the powerful United Monarchy and its legendary sovereigns were likely foundational myths forged during the rule of later Israelite kings rather than rooted in historical fact.

Citing new discoveries and radiocarbon dating since then, Faust and Farber seek to put the idea of the monarchy back on its throne. The debate is far from settled, with academics continuing to argue over both the accuracy of dates and how to interpret various pieces of evidence.

One example is Khirbet Qeiyafa, a 3,000-year-old settlement some 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) southwest of Jerusalem that is considered by many one of the new discoveries that corroborates the existence of a kingdom in the area.

However, some archaeologists have questioned whether its 10th-century dating is indeed accurate (as radiocarbon can easily leave margins of error of decades) or if it was even an ancient Israelite site.

Noting that the scholarly debate has transcended the bounds of academia and drawn wide popular interest, Faust and Farber said they sought to make their book accessible and appealing to the general public, even if it is targeted to fellow academics.

“I hope readers will see that history is interesting, with new data and ideas continually emerging to shape our understanding of the past,” Faust said, sitting alongside Farber during a video interview. “More specifically, I believe the book demonstrates that the highland polity existed, and there is still much we can learn from the Bible.”

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Times of Israel: What was your goal in writing this book?

Avraham Faust: Since the 1990s, the historicity of what is usually referred to as the United Monarchy, or the kingdom of David and Solomon, has been the subject of an ongoing heated debate. This book aims to integrate a vast amount of data and paint a broader picture of how we view the history behind the biblical story, drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and a critical reading of the biblical text. This bigger picture is composed of many smaller patterns or questions, and while sometimes there can be different answers to any single question, one of the strengths of our scenario is that all the answers to the specific questions fit into the broader picture, which is the........

© The Times of Israel