Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy)

The Kingdom of Israel (Hebrew: מַמְלֶכֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, Mamleḵeṯ Yīśrāʾēl) was an Israelite kingdom that may have existed in the Southern Levant. According to the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible, a United Monarchy or United Kingdom of Israel existed under the reigns of Saul, Ish-bosheth, David, and Solomon, encompassing the territories of both the later kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

Whether the United Monarchy existed—and, if so, to what extent—is a matter of ongoing academic debate. 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. 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. 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.^{: 40 : 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. 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, though there is no current consensus on the topic. 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. The historicity of Solomon and his rule is the subject of significant debate. Current scholarly consensus allows for a historical Solomon, but regards his reign as king over Israel and Judah in the 10th century BCE as uncertain and the biblical portrayal of his apparent empire's opulence as most probably an anachronistic exaggeration.

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.