Free David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman

David, but in a showdown with a formidable Philistine force far to the north. With his madness steadily building and with the Philistines victorious, he takes his own life in a tragic act of desperation on the battlefield (1 Samuel 31:4).
    Saul’s tragic fall and David’s rise are thus inseparable in the biblical narrative. But is there any way to separate history from legend? What can archaeology tell us about the very beginnings of kingship in ancient Israel?
    WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE?
    The biblical story of King Saul raises some difficult questions. Was Saul a historical figure? If so, can archaeology help us determine exactly where and when he ruled? Still more complex is understanding the Bible’s contradictory depiction of Saul as hero, sinner, and tragic, tormented figure—being chosen by God as the savior of Israel and then unforgivingly condemned by him. Considering that both Saul and David were, on occasion, sinners, why was Saul singled out and utterly rejected for kingship while David was given an unconditional divine promise of eternal rule?
    First, about his historical existence. Saul is not mentioned in any source outside the Bible, that is, in any ancient inscriptions or chronicles of neighboring countries. That absence of contemporary evidence is not surprising and should not lead us to conclude that Saul’s life story is entirely fictional. As we have already mentioned, writing was extremely rare in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel and their neighbors until the later Iron Age, and the exploits of an early local highlands ruler were unlikely to be recorded in public inscriptions or in the chronicles of Egypt or Mesopotamia, which are limited and fragmentary during the crucial centuries between the end of the Late Bronze Age and the ninth century BCE . The absence of contemporary confirmation outside the Bible is thus no reason to deny that an early Israelite leader named Saul could have existed. Indeed, as we will soon see, there are intriguing archaeological and historical indications that parallel the main points of Saul’s biblical biography.
    The question of when Saul would have ruled is, as we have seen, difficult to answer. It hangs on a single, garbled biblical verse describing Saul’s age at the time of his anointment and the length of his reign: “Saul was…years old when he began to reign; and he reigned…and two years over Israel” (1 Samuel 13:1). Most biblical scholars have come to the reasonable conclusion that the text is defective and he must certainly have ruled for more than just a couple of years. Considering the long sequence of events attributed to Saul’s reign, in particular his military exploits across the Jordan, against the Philistines, and against the Amalekites—and taking into account the number two, which does appear in the text—scholars have speculated that the original number might have been twenty-two. Calculating backward from the sequence of later monarchs, for whose reigns we have some external chronological confirmation—and accepting at face value the biblical testimony of a forty-year reign for both Solomon (1 Kings 11:42) and David (2 Samuel 5:4)—most biblical historians have traditionally placed the reign of Saul in the late eleventh century, around 1030–1010 BCE .
    But we have already noted that these dates are not as precise as they seem. Generations of historians and biblical scholars have become accustomed to accepting them quite literally; at best they should be taken as only a very rough approximation. The dating of Saul, David, and Solomon is based on the Bible’s own chronology, and the numbers of years given for the reigns of David and Solomon—a “generation” of forty years each—seem suspiciously round. The garbled chronological information given about Saul compounds the problem. If the reigns of David and Solomon were shorter (closer to that of most of the later kings of Israel and Judah) and Saul ruled less than the hypothesized twenty