By the early tenth century BCE, the highland villages that had once lived by seasonal herding and terrace farming were evolving into more complex political units. Population had grown, social hierarchies were emerging, and the need for coordination in defense, trade, and tribute encouraged the rise of local chieftains. From these small beginnings would come the monarchies of Israel and Judah, distinct states, not yet unified, but sharing a common language, religion, and memory.

From clan confederations to royal houses

The biblical account presents an ideal of a United Monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon: one people ruled from Jerusalem, blessed by Yahweh’s favor. Yet archaeological evidence reveals a more modest reality. The tenth century shows signs of early chiefdoms in the Judean and Ephraimite hills, villages coalescing under local leaders, but no great centralized state.1 Monumental architecture, administrative seals, and standardized pottery only become widespread in the ninth century, coinciding with the rise of the northern Omride dynasty.

The stories of David’s conquests and Solomon’s splendor thus reflect a theological memory, not a literal empire. The writers of Samuel and Kings, composing their histories centuries later, looked back through the lens of exile and imagined a golden age of unity, what Israel should have been under divine guidance. Historically, Israel and Judah seem always to have been parallel monarchies, developing independently but intertwined by culture and faith.

The northern kingdom of Israel

By around 880 BCE, under Omri and Ahab, the northern kingdom emerged as a true state. Excavations at Samaria reveal planned fortifications, palatial architecture, and evidence of scribal administration.2 The Omrides built alliances with Phoenicia and Aram, introduced luxury goods, and dominated the olive oil and wine trades. External sources, the Mesha Stele of Moab and the Tel Dan Inscription, confirm their historical presence.3

Politically pragmatic, the Omrides tolerated multiple cults: Yahweh, Baal, and Asherah. The biblical writers’ condemnation of “Baal worship” reflects later monolatrous ideology, not necessarily the realities of ninth-century state religion.4 Israel’s religion in this period remained plural yet centripetal, with many shrines and symbols, but a growing tendency to identify Yahweh as the national god among them.

Judah: the smaller southern kingdom

While the north prospered, Judah remained poor and agrarian. Jerusalem covered less than fifteen hectares, its population perhaps two or three thousand.5 Yet the Davidic dynasty constructed an identity that outlasted its power. The theology of Zion and covenant, Yahweh’s eternal promise to David and his “chosen city”, gave Judah a symbolic prestige unmatched by its northern neighbor. That ideology, rooted in faith rather than force, would later define Judaism itself.

The rise of scribal culture

The administrative needs of monarchy fostered a scribal revolution. From the ninth century onward, ostraca, seals, and inscriptions appear throughout the highlands.6 The Hebrew script, adapted from Phoenician prototypes, served taxation, correspondence, and record-keeping. Literacy was confined to elites, royal officials, priests, and bureaucrats, but it changed everything. For the first time, memory could be fixed in text.

Scribes gathered and edited oral traditions: victory songs, heroic tales, tribal genealogies. Over time these coalesced into literary corpora, the nucleus of the narratives that would become Samuel and Kings.7 Writing enabled the articulation of theology as law, the preservation of prophecy as canon. It also created a new class of intellectual mediators, men who both served the court and critiqued it.

Religion and power

As kingship took shape, so too did the theology that justified and limited it. Yahweh, once a god of wandering clans, was reimagined as the cosmic monarch, enthroned above cherubim and commanding heavenly hosts. Royal psalms proclaim him “King of Glory” and “Lord of Hosts,” divine patron of the earthly throne. Yet prophets such as Elijah and Elisha arose to challenge the court, warning that divine favor depended on justice and covenant fidelity. This dialogue between power and prophecy prevented Israelite religion from becoming mere royal ideology; it remained morally restless, perpetually self-critical.8

Cultural synthesis and identity

By the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, the two Hebrew kingdoms had become established monarchies within the Near Eastern political world. Whether they had once shared a brief confederation under early chiefs later remembered as David and Solomon is uncertain. Archaeology shows only modest 10th-century settlements, not the empire of biblical imagination. The ideal of unity, cherished by later writers, was theological, a symbol of harmony between people and God rather than an historical polity.

Despite political division, cultural exchange was constant. Trade, pilgrimage, and migration linked the kingdoms. After the fall of Samaria to Assyria in 722 BCE, thousands of northerners fled to Judah, bringing with them stories, songs, and scrolls. Their traditions enriched Jerusalem’s religious life and merged with its temple theology. From that synthesis, northern prophecy, southern priesthood, and exilic reflection, the foundations of biblical monotheism were laid.

Excursus: The Problem of the Solomonic Empire

The biblical Solomon embodies Israel’s golden age: wealth, wisdom, and universal dominion. Yet archaeology offers no confirmation of a tenth-century empire centered on Jerusalem.

Jerusalem’s scale

Excavations reveal 10th-century occupation on the City of David ridge but little monumental architecture. The settlement, covering perhaps fifteen acres, held a few thousand people, insufficient for imperial administration.9

Fortified cities and chronology

Yigael Yadin once attributed the six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer to Solomon, citing 1 Kings 9:15. Later radiocarbon data and stratigraphic analysis now date these structures to the ninth century BCE, the time of Omri and Ahab.10 The architectural grandeur once called “Solomonic” is in fact Omride.

Trade and mines

The famous copper mines at Timna and Faynan, long dubbed “King Solomon’s Mines,” have been redated. Recent research shows large-scale operation in the 10th–9th centuries by Edomite chiefs, not Israelites.11 No trace of Judahite control exists there.

Reconstructing Solomon

The absence of evidence for empire does not prove Solomon a fiction. A small Jerusalem-centered polity may have existed, its memory later magnified. The Deuteronomistic authors, writing during or after the Babylonian Exile, projected the political and religious unity of their own ideal back onto the tenth century. Solomon’s grandeur thus became theological nostalgia, a way of expressing faith in a God who once blessed a united Israel and might do so again.12

• 1. Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press, 2001), 107–145.
• 2. Norma Franklin, State Formation in the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 54–68.
• 3. K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 33–38.
• 4. Thomas Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 43–47.
• 5. Avraham Faust, “The Size of Jerusalem in the Eighth–Seventh Centuries BCE,” Israel Exploration Journal 53 (2003): 101–112.
• 6. Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2010), 21–27.
• 7. Baruch Halpern, The Constitution of the Monarchy in Israel (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 109–116.
• 8. Shalom M. Paul, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 69–72.
• 9. Eilat Mazar, The Palace of King David (Jerusalem: Shoham, 2009), 45–59.
• 10. Amihai Mazar, “The Iron Age Chronology Debate: Is the Gap Narrowing?” Near Eastern Archaeology 74 (2011): 50–55.
• 11. Erez Ben-Yosef et al., “A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna,” Antiquity 88 (2014): 641–657.
• 12. Thomas Römer, The Invention of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 133–142.