Israel Finkelstein says that at the time of David and Solomon, Israel had far fewer than 100,000 population and was still too small, poor, backward, rural, and sparsely populated to support walled cities, far less an empire with armies and bureaucrats and ambassadors. A population of less than 100,000 impoverished rural people could not have provided a substantial royal income. And, far from being a world class city, archaeologists say that Jerusalem at the time ascribed to King Solomon was nothing more than a mudbrick village. The village of Jerusalem The Bible talks about the great and magnificent united monarchy of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE, which split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, because of the demand by Solomon's son, Rehoboam (Rehavam), for excessive tax payments from the tribes of the northern hills and Galilee, which thereupon angrily seceded from the united monarchy. The result was two centuries of strife, wars and fraternal hatred. The Scriptures treat Israel as a secondary kingdom of no importance, a place of incorrigible sinners, whereas Judah is considered the great and just kingdom whose capital is Jerusalem, where King Solomon established a splendid temple during the glorious era of the united monarchy. Finkelstein is dubious about the existence of this great united monarchy. "There is no archaeological evidence for it," he says. "This is something unexampled in history. I don't think there is any other place in the world where there was a city with such a wretched material infrastructure but which succeeded in creating such a sweeping movement in its favor as Jerusalem, which even in its time of greatness was a joke in comparison to the cities of Assyria, Babylon or Egypt. It was a typical mountain village. There is no magnificent finding, no gates of Nebuchadnezzar, no Assyrian reliefs, no Egyptian temples - nothing. Even the temple couldn't compete with the temples of Egypt and their splendor." Then why was it written? "For reasons of ideology. Because the authors of the Bible, people from Judah at the end of the seventh century BCE, in the period of King Josiah, had a long score to settle with the northern kingdom, with its splendor and richness. They despised the northerners and had not forgotten their dominance in forging the Israelite experience, in the competition for the sites of ritual. Contrary to what is usually thought, the Israelites did not go to pray in Jerusalem. They had a temple in Samaria (today's Sebastia) and at Beit El (Bethel). In our book we tried to show that as long as Israel was there, Judah was small and frightened, militarily and internationally. Judah and Jerusalem were on the fringes. A small tribe. There was nothing there. A small temple and that's all." And the kingdom of Israel? "The archaeological findings show that Israel was a large, prosperous state, and was the main story until its destruction in the eighth century. Its geographic location was excellent, on the coast, near Phoenicia, Assyria and Syria. It had a diverse demographic composition: foreign residents and workers, Canaanites, Phoenicians; there was an Aramean population in the Jordan Valley, and there were mixed marriages. It was only 150 years after Israel's destruction that Judah rose to greatness, becoming self-aware and developing the monotheistic approach: one state, one God, one capital, one temple, one king." What is the root of the tension between archaeology and the text, and what happened during Josiah's reign? "We think these ideas of Judah, that all the Israelites have to worship one God in one temple, and live under the rule of one king, sprang up in the seventh century BCE. If anyone had raised such ideas aloud before 720, he would have been beaten to a pulp by the northern monarchs. Everything started to come together after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, and it also had a territorial aspect: from 734 to 625 BCE the Assyrian Empire ruled here. Today's American empire is negligible in comparison, in terms of its power and its crushing strength. For example, if someone in Judah had talked about expansion into Assyrian-dominated territories in 720, that would have been the end of him. King Hezekiah tried, and we saw happened to him. Sennacherib, king of Assyria, arrived with a huge army and decimated him. "But a few years later, when Josiah was in power, something incredible happened. Assyria, the kingdom of evil, collapsed in front of his eyes. In the same way we saw the Berlin Wall collapse in 1989, that's what happened to Assyria. It fell apart and beat a hasty retreat from the Land of Israel. By this time the kingdom of Israel no longer existed, so Josiah woke up one morning, looked to his left and to his right, and there was neither an Assyrian nor an Israelite to be seen. And then his officials decided to put into practice their religious and territorial ideas." Still, why was the United Monarchy invented? "Because they wanted to seize control of the territories of the kingdom of Israel and annex them, because, they said, `These territories are actually ours and if you have a minute, we'll tell you how that's so. `Many years ago, one of our kings, David, reigned in Jerusalem and ruled them, and we are the only ones who have a historical claim to them' - and so the myth was created. `The kings of Israel were scoundrels,' the people of Judah said, `but as for the people there, we have no problem with them, they are all right.' They said about Israel what an ultra-Orthodox person would say about you or me: `Israel, though he has sinned, is still Israel.'" continued http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/grounds.htm
Nothing to conquer According to Finkelstein's theory, the legends about earlier periods were invented for the same purpose. "The people of Judah started to market the story of Joshua's conquest of the land, which was also written in that period, in order to give moral justification to their territorial longings, to the conquest of the territories of Israel. The story also contains a `laundering' of foreigners, which was exactly the problem Josiah faced when he conquered Israel. So they relate the story of the Gibeonites, who were terrified by the might of Joshua and his army and begged for their lives, and told Joshua that they were not indigenous Canaanites but foreigners who came from afar. Joshua made an alliance of peace with them, but when he found out they had cheated him, he did not expel them but made them hewers of wood and drawers of water - in other words, he laundered them. "That is the situation Josiah and his people faced with foreign deportees the Assyrians brought to the Land of Israel, and the biblical text comes and says, `Have no worry, this already happened before: there were strangers in the land then, too, and Joshua laundered them during the conquest. Our conquest is not really what it looks like, it is only the restoration of past glories.'
