information:highlighting
Archaeological analysis

Of the evidence in question, John Haralson Hayes and James Maxwell Miller wrote in 2006: "If one is not convinced in advance by the biblical profile, then there is nothing in the archaeological evidence itself to suggest that much of consequence was going on in Palestine during the tenth century BCE, and certainly nothing to suggest that Jerusalem was a great political and cultural center." This echoed the 1995 conclusion of Amélie Kuhrt, who noted that "there are no royal inscriptions from the time of the united monarchy (indeed very little written material altogether), and not a single contemporary reference to either David or Solomon," while noting, "against this must be set the evidence for substantial development and growth at several sites, which is plausibly related to the tenth century."

In 2007, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman stated that the archaeological evidence shows that Judah was sparsely inhabited and Jerusalem no more than a small village. The evidence suggested that David ruled only as a chieftain over an area which cannot be described as a state or as a kingdom, but more as a chiefdom, much smaller and always overshadowed by the older and more powerful kingdom of Israel to the north. They posited that Israel and Judah were not monotheistic at the time and that later 7th-century redactors sought to portray a past golden age of a united, monotheistic monarchy in order to serve contemporary needs. They noted a lack of archeological evidence for David's military campaigns and a relative underdevelopment of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, compared to a more developed and urbanized Samaria, capital of Israel during the 9th century BCE.

In 2010, Amihai Mazar wrote that the United Monarchy of the 10th century BCE can be described as a "state in development". He compared David to Labaya, a Caananite warlord living during the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten. While Mazar believes that David reigned over Israel during the 11th century BCE, he argues that much of the Biblical text is of "literary-legendary nature". According to William G. Dever, the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon are reasonably well attested, but "most archeologists today would argue that the United Monarchy was not much more than a kind of hill-country chiefdom".

Lester L. Grabbe wrote in 2017: "The main question is what kind of settlement Jerusalem was in Iron IIA: was it a minor settlement, perhaps a large village or possibly a citadel but not a city, or was it the capital of a flourishing—or at least an emerging—state? Assessments differ considerably". Isaac Kalimi wrote in 2018, "No contemporaneous extra-biblical source offers any account of the political situation in Israel and Judah during the tenth century BCE, and as we have seen, the archaeological remains themselves cannot provide any unambiguous evidence of events."

The view of Davidic Jerusalem as a village has been challenged by Eilat Mazar 's excavation of the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure in 2005. Mazar proposed that these two structures may have been architecturally linked as one unit and that they date to the time of King David. Mazar supports this dating with a number of artifacts, including pottery, two Phoenician-style ivory inlays, a black-and-red jug, and a radiocarbon-dated bone, estimated to be from the 10th century. Dever, Amihai Mazar, Avraham Faust, and Nadav Na'aman have argued in favour of the 10th-century BCE dating and responded to challenges to it. In 2010, Eilat Mazar announced the discovery of part of the ancient city walls around the City of David, which she believes date to the 10th century BCE. According to Mazar, this would prove that an organized state did exist in the 10th century. In 2006, Kenneth Kitchen came to a similar conclusion, arguing that "the physical archaeology of tenth-century Canaan is consistent with the former existence of a unified state on its terrain."

Scholars such as Israel Finkelstein, Lily Singer-Avitz, Ze'ev Herzog and David Ussishkin do not accept these conclusions. Finkelstein does not accept the dating of these structures to the 10th century BCE, based in part on the fact that later structures on the site penetrated deep into underlying layers, that the entire area had been excavated in the early 20th century and then backfilled, that pottery from later periods was found below earlier strata, and that consequently the finds collected by E. Mazar cannot necessarily be considered as retrieved in situ. Aren Maeir said in 2010 that he has seen no evidence that these structures are from the 10th century BCE and that proof of the existence of a strong, centralized kingdom at that time remains "tenuous."

Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa by archaeologists Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor found an urbanized settlement radiocarbon dated to the 10th century, which supports the existence of an urbanised kingdom. The Israel Antiquities Authority stated: "The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE. It can no longer be argued that the Kingdom of Judah developed only in the late eighth century BCE or at some other later date." But other scholars have criticized the techniques and interpretations to reach some conclusions related to Khirbet Qeiyafa, such as Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin of Tel Aviv University, who have instead proposed that the city is to be identified as part of a northern Israelite polity.

In 2018, Avraham Faust and Yair Sapir stated that a Canaanite site at Tel Eton, about 30 miles from Jerusalem, was taken over by a Judahite community by peaceful assimilation and transformed from a village into a central town at some point in the late 11th or early 10th century BCE. This transformation used some ashlar blocks in construction, which they argued supports the United Monarchy theory.