Talk:David/Archive 7

EditSchmedit's edits
About your edits that I reverted:


 * 1) Why is the "no historical basis" incorrect?
 * 2) It is possible that I didn't understand the nature of this edit. But it is your job to explain it to me and others who are interested in this article.
 * 3) I guess we are in agreement here.
 * 4) Dito.
 * 5) In other words, Kalimi does not contradict the claim that Jerusalem was "sparsely inhabited."

Im The IP (talk) 08:11, 6 January 2021 (UTC)


 * 1. I don't see any reliable source saying that. Can you offer one?
 * 2. I explained it in my edit summary. The "whos who" is irrelevant. The previous version says "other scholars", my version says "some scholars". So both versions have these unnamed scholars AFAIK. The problem was the switch of "Other" to "Some" - which I did because "other" assumes a distinction between the scholars being represented in this sentence with those from the previous sentence. However, the topics are unrelated. It was a simple correction.
 * 5. A "village" is "sparsely inhabited", not a "city" with "notable building activity". Kalimi also says that there's no basis for the population estimates given at the time for Jerusalem - which is impossible to reconcile with someone who claims that it was sparsely inhabited. Imagine how comical this page would look if it read "Jerusalem was a sparsely inhabited village, but was also a city with notable building activity and we don't know what the population was". This is self-contradictory by the rules of grammar.Editshmedt (talk) 19:53, 6 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Actually, I was directly quoting the conclusions of a respected expert, published in a respected journal. You are sounding a little bit shrill now.


 * To help you with your confusion, I will reiterate the major points which you can't seem to hear:


 * Pg 15 of the Garfinkel paper says that "We assume that around 930 BCE a second expansion phase took place under King Rehoboam, in more or less the same territory as in the earlier phase. The fortified city of Level V was built at Lachish to replace Khirbet al-Ra’i."
 * Per Garfinkel, Lachish was a really important city, second only to Jerusalem;
 * Per Garfinkel, the "first expansion phase" which collapsed after a few decades was in fact the United Monarchy;
 * Per Garfinkel, under the United Monarchy there was no construction at the really important city of Tel Lachish, it consisted of the ruins of Canaanite structures;
 * Per Garfinkel, the "second expansion phase" was started under Rehoboam, not under the United Monarchy;
 * Per Garfinkel, the "second expansion phase" was in "around 930 BCE", long after the United Monarchy;
 * Per Garfinkel, the Level V construction was undertaken as part of the "second expansion phase" by Rehoboam, not under the United Monarchy;
 * Per Garfinkel's other 2019 paper, re Davidic Khirbet al-Ra'i: "In the early 10th century it was a small village."
 * I see you are now switching attention to Khirbet Qeiyafa. Yigal Levin of the respected Bar-Ilan University (ie NOT Tel Aviv University), published a paper on the subject, where he reports that the ethnic origins of Khirbet Qeiyafa are not yet agreed upon, with many authors still favouring a Canaanite origin. Levin's own view, which is supported by other respected authors too, is that the site was actually not a city, but a "small and short-lived site" and “a short-lived military outpost”. Levin thinks it may have been a camp used by King Saul and the Northern Israelite army.


 * Garfinkel's olive-pit carbon-dating gave wide date ranges, much wider than the 20-years accorded to this site, and most of the samples tested included dates way later than the United Monarchy. It required a bit of mathematical manipulation for Garfinkel to date it "conclusively" to the United Monarchy period.


 * Levin states as follows (my highlighting):
 * "To summarize, Khirbet Qeiyafa is a small, roughly circular site, surrounded by a 700 m wall constructed of “casemates” that are actually the back rooms of the adjoining structures. The center of the site, which is higher than the base of the wall, is virtually empty, except for a large structure of which little remains, due to erosion and damage caused by the Hellenistic-period construction. Other than the well-built gates, the site shows no other features of urbanization. In fact, despite the excavators’ constant reference to the site as a “fortified city” [Garfinkel], Adams seems closer to the mark in calling it “a short-lived military outpost”. The Iron Age occupation of the site was brief, around the late 11th to early 10th centuries b.c.e., whether the “twenty years” proposed by the excavators, or slightly longer, as preferred by Dagan (2009), SingerAvitz (2010), and Finkelstein and Piasetzky (2010), or whether one considers it to be “early Iron IIA” or “late Iron I.”


 * Per the photo's, the "well-built gate" was only a four-chambered gate, NOT the signature six-chambered Solomonic gate.


 * Garfinkel has now declared himself to hold a "third view", ie that "although the United Monarchy of the biblical tradition did not exist, a kingdom was established in Judah by King David". Few argue with that view-point.


 * These are recent papers by respected experts. You need to stop bleating about relevance, and accept the reliable sources. Wdford (talk) 10:50, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You should have listened to my advice and disentangle the lot of the biblical United Monarchy from Finkelstein's lot. Garfinkel is rejecting both. Tgeorgescu (talk) 13:49, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Seems like. The article is mostly clear about this. I think the David section should be tuned up a little further, but otherwise it is mostly fine as is. The bulk of the argument belongs at the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) article, which could use a bit of work. Wdford (talk) 14:29, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Bait-and-switch argument. With yet more silence, Wdford has given up all his previous points once again, and simply substituted them with another dozen new ones. Wdford thinks that because he can come up with fifty new points every time he responds, this therefore proves I must be wrong about the paper. Somehow. As I showed in my last response, Wdford has now in fact quote-mined me, claimed that Judah collapsed when in fact the first expansion phase collapsed (which is obvious given the fact that all the sites he says got destroyed are all recently built border cities/military outposts), and that the "small" point is irrelevant. I still want to know why it's giantly important to Wdford or how it somehow proves his position that Judah had not yet expanded into the Beersheba Valley. What does this prove?


 * As I noted earlier, Wdford thinks he automatically wins because he has a thousand new points, therefore I automatically lose. But factual mistakes aren't an argument. (1) Wdford says that I don't realize that the second expansion phase was in the same territory as in the first. When did I ever contradict that claim? More quote-mining to give the illusion of being right over the other. (2) Lachish actually only becomes a really important city, second to Jerusalem, later in the late 9th century (pg. 4) than the period we're describing. So this is simply factually false in the context of the fortification at 930 BC. (3) This is also factually false. The first expansion phase is not the United Monarchy. That isn't even grammatically coherent. The "expansion phase" is the "phase of expansion", i.e. the new fortifications built trying to expand the Kingdom of Judah beyond its previous output. Garfinkel et al. couldn't be more clear about this. They literally spell out the sites they're talking about that got destroyed - Khirbet Qeiyafa and Khirbet al-Ra'i. Are these two cities the United Monarchy? Wdford thinks so. (4) Wdford says that the second expansion phase happens under Rehoboam, as if I've ever contradicted that. Another strawman. (5) Wdford says that 930 BC is "long after" the United Monarchy. Actually, 930 BC is exactly the time that the United Monarchy is supposed to have come to an end. Wdford does not seem to know even the essential dates here. (6) Wdford says that, according to Garfinkel et al., Khirbet el-Ra'i was a "small village". Yet another blatant quote-mine. The phrase "small village", per a word search, only appears on pg. 2 in the context of what scholars have wrongly assumed about Lachish Stratum V. When will Wdford stop quote-mining? (7) The opinion of other scholars is irrelevant - I know fifty times more about the scholarship on the ethnicity of Judah than you do. We're talking about what GARFINKEL thinks right now. Garfinkel thinks that David constructed Khirbet Qeiyafa requiring a massive centralized effort. (8) Wdford is confused about the wall - Since no one is claiming that Khirbet Qeiyafa be identified with the constructions of Solomon in Hazor, Gezer, or Megiddo, Wdford's point that there's a double-wall instead of a six-chambered wall is of no importance. (9) Wdford ends by quoting Garfinkel saying that the United Monarchy of the Bible didn't exist. The problem is, Wdford doesn't mention where this quote comes from, and therefore it is impossible to evaluate what Garfinkel is talking about in-context. We can all know, from experience, that Wdford has quote-mined a half-dozen times now - no reason to blindly believe what he says at this point.Editshmedt (talk) 14:51, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22although+the+United+Monarchy+of+the+biblical+tradition+did+not+exist%22&oq=%22although+the+United+Monarchy+of+the+biblical+tradition+did+not+exist%22 Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:49, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Pre-empted you on that one. I saw him cite his 2011 paper, so I went and just finished reading that paper. As Tgeorg said earlier, Garfinkel appears to have an in-betweener position, between those of the Low Chronology and the United Monarchy concerning the extent and nature of Davidic rule. Nevertheless, I'm still quite concerned over Wdford's numerous quote-mines and false representations of the 2019 paper.Editshmedt (talk) 17:05, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Garfinkel rejects both (i.e. United Monarchy and Low Chronology). According to Garfinkel, the United Monarchy is fantasy. If you keep deforming Garfinkel's view you will lose all credibility and a topic ban would be to the point. Maintaing that Garfinkel defends the United Monarchy is a serious WP:CIR issue, serious enough for issuing a topic ban. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:37, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Silence. You've already lost all credibility after our earlier discussions, and your repeated infringements on basic Wikipedia policy and abuse of the fringeboard and administrators noticeboard systems, in my view, warrant your own topic ban. Your inability to correctly read the words of those who you hate is also an issue, given the fact that I just said that Garfinkel takes a view between the Low Chronology and United Monarchy. Furthermore, your naive viewpoint leads you to make absurd conclusions like "Garfinkel thinks the United Monarchy is fantasy". In fact, Garfinkel is very clear that he doesn't know which is right and that we cannot be certain about which school of thought we choose with the available data (2011, pg. 28). His in-betweener is a cautious conclusion based on what he thinks that the archaeological data currently indicates. Given your inability to distinguish degrees of confidence in scholarly research, I give the recommendation that you should only edit pages that do not require serious understanding of the literature.Editshmedt (talk) 19:00, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Am I missing something? Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:33, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * No. Now stop spamming me. I'm trying to study a 2001 paper by Fantalkin and that requires focus. BTW, you should take a look at my page on the United Monarchy debate. No matter how much we disagree, it is an extremely useful page for anyone at the moment. It is, of course, in development.Editshmedt (talk) 19:45, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * In 2001, Ayelet Gilboa and Ilan Sharon, who actually accept the Low Chronology, write: "Finkelstein’s low chronology has won some approval, but has failed to convince many" (pg. 1344 in this paper). This once again reiterates that most scholars have not found Finkelstein convincing.Editshmedt (talk) 22:14, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Forget about Finkelstein, this discussion no longer was about him. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:21, 9 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Please don't represent Coogan. He thinks that the United Monarchy is a bit exaggerated, but basically historical.Editshmedt (talk) 04:13, 10 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I see you have now added the accusation of "quote mining" to the accusation of "irrelevance". I'm not sure that this is really positive progress. You seem to be running out of arguments, and so you are sinking into false statements and ad hominem attacks – this is normal, but unprofessional.


 * The objective of a talk page is to improve the article in question, so as to build the encyclopaedia. The use of language such as "concede" and "win" and "lose" and "checkmate" raises concern about your motives.


 * My "silence" indicates that I have a real life, not that I "concede" on any point I have made. My points have been repeated several times, although you should note that "victory" does not belong to the editor who shouts the loudest or the most often.


 * I have never "claimed that Judah collapsed". I have, from the beginning, quoted Garfinkel accurately, who stated that "In the very late 11th and early 10th century BCE, under King David, Judah was a small territory in Jerusalem and the hill country, with the western Shephelah region being marked by Khirbet Qeiyafa and Khirbet al-Ra’i. This first stage, however, collapsed after a few decades, as indicated by the destruction of Khirbet Qeiyafa and Khirbet al-Ra’i at around 1020–970 BCE." I quoted that accurately in my post of 7 January 2021 at 11:05, and several times since. I also mentioned that Level V was built at Lachish to replace Khirbet al-Ra’I, under King Rehoboam, around 930 BCE as part of a second expansion phase. Your accusation is thus dishonest. Please retract your false statements and apologize.


 * I never said that you "don't realize that the second expansion phase was in the same territory as in the first". This may have been a pathetic attempt at a strawman diversion, but whichever, it is a dishonest accusation. Please retract your false statements and apologize.


 * I never said that "930 BC is "long after" the United Monarchy", I said that the "second expansion phase" was long after the United Monarchy. I seriously doubt that Rehoboam rebuilt Solomon's "colossal empire" in his first week in office.


 * Garfinkel's opinion about the construction Khirbet Qeiyafa is contradicted by other scholars, who all have strong grounds for their own opinions. Their opinions are NOT "irrelevant". Since there is zero actual evidence that David was involved at Khirbet Qeiyafa, this needn't be an issue in this particular article.


 * I joined this discussion in the first place because I want the article to continue to report that the United Monarchy as per the Bible never existed as such, and that the Israel and Judea of the time were small tribal polities with limited territory, which developed further over the subsequent centuries. Garfinkel is honest about this. Amihai Mazar seems honest about this, although I am not convinced about the assumption that the 'Stepped Structure' and 'Large Stone Structure' should be seen as one large and substantial architectural complex. However the interpretations from the 'Governor’s Residency' at Tel ‘Eton, as per Avraham Faust and Yair Sapir, are serious stretching. It originally seemed from the talk page discussion that a suggestion was being made to change the article to give more prominence to the maximalist hypotheses of Dever etc, but it now seems that the objective of the debate was different. Sorted. Wdford (talk) 14:11, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * there is a thread about this at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Tgeorgescu (talk) 14:31, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * About Coogan, it's more complicated, see:
 * "David also seems to have begun the process of transforming his chiefdom into a dynastic monarchy, which, consistent with other Near Eastern models, described itself as divinely chosen. With the establishment of the monarchy came social and religious innovation. The older structures of the decentralized premonarchic confederation were now co-opted by royal institutions. The ark of the covenant was enshrined in the Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon, providing in effect divine sanction for the monarchy. Priests became royal appointees, and there was a growing movement toward centralization of worship in the capital. Yet this centralized administration formed a kind of overlay, a veneer, on the social systems of the nation as a whole. Individuals still identified themselves as members of a family, clan, and tribe, and disputes between them were usually settled at the local level. Apart from the requirement of paying taxes and providing personnel for royal projects and for the army, life in the villages probably proceeded much as it had for centuries."

- Coogan


 * Quoted by Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:07, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Wdford. Obviously a discussion about the "historical David" can and should be had in the article. But that discussion is about the radius of David's presumptive kingdom - how far north and south did it extend? The biblical description, the empire hypothesis, has been discarded by historians. No historian that I know of has argued that David ruled over Samaria and thus his kingdom cannot have been the biblical United Monarchy. Many of EditSchmedit's edits seem to me to be designed to setup the description as a battle between two sides and then to undermine one of these sides. I object to that because it doesn't present a fair view of the science. Im The IP (talk) 15:12, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My impression is that is WP:MEAT or WP:Advocacy for Dever. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:37, 10 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Wdford seems to be extremely upset right now, despite having been unable to prove much. Apparently Wdford has too much going on in his life for these discussions - and so he started an entirely new one instead of finishing the last one. Most likely, this is because there wasn't much to survive from the last conversation after my last critique. Wdford's only real success with Garfinkel is showing that, at least Garfinkel doesn't accept a United Monarchy, but other than that, I don't think Wdford has done a very good job understanding the paper or scholarship to even simple degrees. 'Wdford genuinely thinks that William Dever is a maximalist, proving he hasn't read anything Dever has written and has no understanding of the field to any degree. The basic facts of the Lachish paper are this: Judah becomes a kingdom in the early 1st century. Garfinkel calls it "small" because, apparently, it has not yet expanded into the Beersheba Valley, per his view. The first expansion phase happens with two border cities - Khirbet Qeiyaf and Khirbet el-Ra'i, in the first half of the 10th century or so. Couple decades later, these two recently built border cities are destroyed. Thus, Garfinkel describes a collapse of the first expansion phase. Later, in 930 BC, a second expansion phase takes place, Lachish V being a part of it. This is not long after the United Monarchy - it is actually contemporary with the end of it (roughly 930 BC), something Wdford forgot. Wdford will not be getting apologies - what he refers to as a 'pathetic attempt at a strawman diversion' is actually really just a response to his extremely bad phrasing, summarizing bullet lists of points in an angry way as if he's proving something to me. Being bad at communicating isn't my fault.


 * The Yigal Levin paper is almost completely irrelevant. There hasn't been a single scholar to take up Levin's idiosyncratic identification of Khirbet Qeiyafa with some Saulide camp. As later scholarship pointed out, the magal is more likely to be a simple military camp rather than some fortified city. I don't think, Wdford, you know the scholarship at all on Qeiyafa. I've seen more scholars accept the Judahite ethnic interpretation than other identifications, and once that's out of the way, the Davidic connection is simply based on the fact that both come around at about the same time. I also don't think you get the scholarship on the stone structures. After the final excavations on it were published, the only scholar I've seen reject the linking between the two structures is Finkelstein. Given this fact, the rejection of the link is more likely than not to be ideological. To both Wdford and, we've already seen Mazar, Faust, Coogan, Dever, and others accept a United Monarchy - i.e. that the northern and southern tribes were briefly united during the 10th century BC. There's really no getting around that. The "United Monarchy as exactly described in the Bible" did not exist. But the northern and southern tribes are more likely than not to have been united at this time.Editshmedt (talk) 06:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * It's about time to end this conversation. The whole thing has dragged on for long enough. I'm clearly the only one with any relevant understanding of the literature here. Wdford seems to have only read Finkelstein and faithfully accepted all his claims, including that anyone that disagrees with him is a maximalist. He's also extremely agitated right now because he's just not able to convince me of what he says regarding his misunderstandings of Garfinkel and Faust & Sapir's paper. Tgeorg is now just trying to get me banned at all costs for so much as mentioning Dever's name. ImTheIP is the only one who has been respectful. I am currently in the process of performing a systematic review of the literature, all of which is being stored on one of my userpages. Once all that is complete, I will assemble a couple bibliographies and detailed summaries of everything in the scholarship and the conversation will more fruitfully proceed in the future.Editshmedt (talk) 07:37, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * In fact, I'm perfectly happy with mentioning both Dever and Finkelstein. What I oppose is the premature conclusion that Dever won the game against Finkelstein in respect to the United Monarchy. IMHO, nobody won that game yet. My view is that both scholars are unreliable when speaking of each other, not that only Dever is unreliable in that respect. Tgeorgescu (talk) 08:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Tgeorg, you are EXACTLY right! NO ONE has won the question on the existence of the United Monarchy. Wdford has only read Finkelstein, so of course he automatically assumes, contra the scholarship, that there is no debate. However, it is exactly as you put it: no one has yet won, the debate is still ongoing. In fact, there are numerous publications from the last 3 years alone on the topic. Aren Maeir summarizes it best, perhaps in a way that bursts Wdford's bubble: "The question of the existence of archeological evidence for the 'united monarchy' of David and Solomon is extensively debated in contemporary scholarship. Most scholars in the mid-to-Iate 20th c. CE believed that concrete evidence of the 'united monarchy' could be identified (such as the so-called "Solomonic gates" at Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo); at present, this is a highly contested topic, dependent on complex stratigraphic-chronological issues. Some scholars continue to believe that the united monarchy was a large and prosperous kingdom, mirroring to a large extent the image portrayed in the biblical text; others suggest that there was a kingdom of David and Solomon but of a minor scale; still others question the very existence of this early kingdom and see it instead as a literary creation of the later Judean kingdom, or even post-Iron Age times, after the 6th c. BCE" (Jewish Study Bible 2nd ed., pg. 2126). So, let's get this simple fact straight. There are well over 100 publications on these topics since Finkelstein's 1995 and 1996 papers. Not a single one of us know the literature in full, but we all know that this is an ongoing, hardcore debate with numerous credible scholars on all sides. There is, therefore, nothing more to discuss, until I am done my systematic review of the literature.Editshmedt (talk) 08:53, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * United Monarchy - i.e. that the northern and southern tribes were briefly united during the 10th century BC. I think you are jumping the gun a bit here! To claim that brief alliances between southern and northern tribes is the United monarchy is like claiming that someone spit in your hamburger because you found a bug in your salad. There were probably well over a dozen rulers, kings, chieftains, warlords, and clan leaders in the hill country in the 10th century. Of course, it is very possible that northern and southern Israeli tribes were at some point allies. Presumably, they were also at times allies with the Canaanite city-states and maybe even with the nomadic tribes in the east. After all these rulers were small potatoes and had to worry about the Egyptians, Assyrians and other empires. Im The IP  (talk) 11:51, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * And so, with a last few ad-hominem attacks, a parting false-accusation or two, and a final flourish of its' tail-feathers, off it goes to do its' homework. Let's see how long it stays away.
 * I am happy to add the Aren Maeir quote to the article - it is fairly recent, and gives a decent-ish summary.
 * The lead also needs to be improved - it is a bit light on the historicity issue. Comments please?
 * Wdford (talk) 13:29, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You can have the last slab of insults if you want it that badly, although the dehumanizing language ("it") was a bit surprising, even for you. If we're going to add in a lead, it should simply reiterate what Maeir says - I don't trust the collective knowledge very much of the present individuals to summarize any other issue. I mean, the historicity section itself is somewhat comical. It starts with Finkelstein & Silberman's 2001 popular book, rather than, you know, scholarship? Or any prior history of scholarship to the Finkelstein debate? And the other side is represented so sparsely as to be beyond words. It doesn't so much as even mention disagreement with the Low Chronology, the basis for Finkelstein's views, or even make it clear enough that Finkelstein is basing everything he says on his Low Chronology. A lot of work needs to go into the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) page first, and then, once a solid understanding is present there, we can simply extrapolate the basics to this page.Editshmedt (talk) 15:06, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The article isn't about the Low Chronology. The article is about David, a legendary biblical figure. The supposed point of the section in question, "Historicity," must be to present a) what evidence exists for this legendary figure and b) the scholarly consensus on what conclusions can be drawn from that evidence. I agree that the section is not very good, but I don't think your edits are improving it. I think the section should resemble the Historicity section in the article about King Arthur. In both cases are we dealing with legendary figures that may or may not have existed and whose deeds may or may not have been greatly exaggerated. Im The IP  (talk) 15:35, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I guess the bridge between the facts in the scholarship and the understandings of other editors are greater than I thought. No scholar discusses the possibility of David's non-existence anymore. That we are stuck in the mud on that in this talk page indicates something ideological going on. To state that the Low Chronology is off topic to the archaeology section is like saying the Bible is off topic to the literary criticism section. The Low Chronology is the very basis of ALMOST ALL the debate concerning the extent and historicity of the United Monarchy. ImTheIP, didn't I explain this countless times already? There has always been tons of large fortifications and mighty and monumental structures dated to the 10th century BC, which historians have always considered convincing evidence for the United Monarchy. This changes when Finkelstein proposes the Low Chronology in the 1990s, where he claims he can redate literally all of it to the 9th century. The entire acceptance of the United Monarchy pre-Finkelstein was based on the same data that Finkelstein claims that, only according to his Low Chronology, should be placed in the 9th century. The Arthur comparison is quite concocted and has been dismissed by numerous scholars as paltry and unfounded. Isaac Kalimi writes;


 * "Thompson makes the same claim regarding the United Monarchy, with different parallels: “To compare the Bible’s stories about David with early Iron Age Palestine is like comparing the story of Gilgamesh with Bronze Age Uruk, Achilles with ancient Mycenae or Arthur with early medieval England.” This will not do at all. Thompson and Davies have provided no detailed comparison that could demonstrate that the biblical texts concerning David or Hezekiah reflect a similar genre, a comparable dating relative to the events described, or an equivalent attitude towards their sources, as one finds in Shakespeare or in the myths concerning Gilgamesh, Achilles or King Arthur. Just because it is possible to write myth or historical fiction does not prove that this is what the biblical authors have done. Where is the evidence that the biblical authors were writing this kind of fiction? No such comparisons, nor any detailed arguments at all, are ever brought by Davies, Thompson, or the other minimalists. These anachronistic analogies are simply asserted, without concrete evidence or any real examination of the biblical texts, merely in order to justify the a priori dismissal of the biblical text as history" (Isaac Kalimi, Writing and Rewriting the Story of Solomon in Ancient Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pg. 53)


 * In other words, the Arthur comparisons are minimalist nonsense unacceptable to mainstream scholarship. And yet, the article states it like it is the position of mainstream scholarship. Notice the logical ditch-hole?Editshmedt (talk) 16:42, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * And none of the employed chronologies are falsifiable, meaning it's Dever's word against Finkelstein's word. Finklestein was right that the traditional chronology was arrived at by taking the Bible at face value and forcefully fitting archaeological evidence to the stories of the Bible. So, even if Finkelstein isn't right, he made a step in the right direction, namely aligning chronologies to the evidence, instead of forcefully aligning chronologies to the Bible. Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:12, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * No, chronologies are falsifiable. If you faithfully take Finkelstein's words at face value, then previous chronologies were based on nothing more than the Bible. If you actually read anything other than Finkelstein and his proponents, you'll realize that Finkelstein was, perhaps, not being honest. Finkelstein has one paper where he quotes Yigael Yadin saying that his dating is based on pottery, stratigraphy, and a correlation to 1 Kings 9, and then outright says Yadin was lying and he really only believed it because of the Bible. This is what passes for "rationality" and "reason" on the Low Chronology side of the aisle.Editshmedt (talk) 17:44, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * "To outsiders, the debate about biblical chronology looks like a neverending story, and in such cases, epistemology or—if you prefer—common sense suggest that the question has been wrongly put. Once a wrong path has been set and followed for too long, we are unable to get rid of it, even to realize that the direction is wrong, and even less to identify the correct way. We need a moment of rest and reflection."

- Mario Liverani


 * From Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:21, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Not a relevant quote. Why do you think chronologies are unfalsifiable? No archaeologist I've read thinks that. Are you smarter than all of them? There are comments about specific limitations of certain methods (e.g. radiocarbon), but they're not unfalsifiable by any stretch of the imagination. In The Bible Unearthed, Finkelstein said that there was no states in the 10th century BC, it was all low level tribal stuff. Now Finkelstein does think that there was a Judahite state in the 10th century BC, but not to the extent that the United Monarchy posits. Why? Evidence. Here's another way to look at the Low Chronology: does it make sense of all the strata? One big problem with the Low Chronology is that downdating the Iron I period by a century would severely compress lower strata. For example, on the Low Chronology, six strata at Hazor would be compressed to 150 years, or about 25 years each on average - not paralleled at any other site, where the minimum average age of any strata at any site is at least 40 years. Even more extreme, it would require compressing two strata of the strata at Tel Rehov to an within 30 years, or an average of 15 years each. That is highly implausible, even if it doesn't outright prove it's impossible (which can't be done in archaeology for anything). So there are plenty of ways to falsify, or show that this or that model is very implausible or this or that model is plausible. So chronologies are falsifiable. Most archaeologists see that the Low Chronology depends on a ton of highly implausible claims, so they don't adopt it. It's as simple as that.Editshmedt (talk) 20:32, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The difference is that I don't put all my money on Finkelstein, as you seem to do with Dever. Tgeorgescu (talk) 20:44, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Wrong again. I know it's a form of wishful thinking that the non-Low Chronology perspective is represented by Dever, but it's not. If there's any "one" representative to it, it's Amihai Mazar. Another big contributor to the discussion is Avraham Faust, and Dever has written less than either of those on this particular debate. There is no one face of the conventional chronology viewpoint because it is represented by a wide number of scholars across numerous publications. On the other hand, and I kid you not, Finkelstein has written more of the Low Chronology papers than every other advocate of the Low Chronology combined. It's a one-man show. Chronologies are certainly falsifiable and most scholars believe that Finkelstein's Low Chronology is falsified enough. IMO, it is better called the 'Finkelstein Chronology' than the 'Low Chronology'.Editshmedt (talk) 20:57, 11 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hey, might want to take a look at this paper on top of some of the material I gave you earlier: F.C. Fensham, "The Numeral Seventy in the Old Testament and The Family of Jerubbaal, Arab, Panammuwa and Athirat", PEQ (1977), pp. 113-115. Turns out seventy is a vastly more widespread symbolic/fictional number than I previously imagined, although I could tell it was fiction.Editshmedt (talk) 23:09, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Summary:

The rejection of the United Monarchy is 100% synonymous with Finkelstein's chronology.

Finkelstein's chronology has been universally falsified.

Therefore: the United Monarchy is now universally accepted.

Oh, wait, that did not happen.

Your POV is that a one-man show is preventing all serious scholars from accepting the United Monarchy. Your reasoning is intricate and to some extent persuasive, but it fails to render the reality. And that is exactly the problem: your ratiocinations bear no resemblance to reality, at least if we speak of your final conclusion. All your learned eloquence has crashed into a big, nasty modus tollens.

And, I don't see how 70 kings being fantasy helps your case, since that would mean that bytdwd is a cock and bull story. Tgeorgescu (talk) 06:02, 13 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The first couple sentences suggest you haven't been paying attention. Your comment about the 70 is laughable but just what I'd expect from you. What connection is there between Hazael saying "I defeated a crap ton [which is basically what "70" means here] of enemies" and "Jehoram and Ahaziah are part of the Davidic dynasty"? Wdford and ImTheIP have already both expressed sympathies with the fringe nonsense of David not existing. What about you? You also trying really hard to look for something to justify that as well?Editshmedt (talk) 16:29, 13 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm perfectly happy with the idea that David existed; this being said, empirical (archaeological) evidence for it is rather scant. It is you who called the stele fiction, not me. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:02, 13 January 2021 (UTC)


 * There's a whole damn inscription mentioning David's dynasty that has convinced literally every archaeologist. Your way of thinking is also very odd. I mean, I don't know why I should have to walk you through all of these. 70 really just means "a crap ton" in these texts. So Hazael says "I killed a crap ton of my enemies. I even killed X and Y, who are part of the House of David!" Did I call the inscription fiction? No. Did I say it used a fictional number for the purpose of exaggeration? Absolutely. Did you know that? Probably. Did you pretend you didn't anyways? Seems so.Editshmedt (talk) 07:15, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * It's very simple: the part you don't like it's fiction, the part you like is not fiction. Tgeorgescu (talk) 07:57, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Wdford is happy that a David-person existed. Wdford finds most persuasive the view that this David was a minor warlord, not the mighty king of a mighty kingdom, and certainly not the person described in the Biblical texts.
 * When you write that "Wdford and ImTheIP have already both expressed sympathies with the fringe nonsense of David not existing," you are once again making a false statement about a fellow editor. In your own post of 10:25, 3 January 2021, you stated that "Wdford literally never denies that David ruled over the north there. Are your glasses on? He just says that it was in an early stage of complexity." That is risky stuff from an editor with your disciplinary record.
 * If Hazael was saying on the Tel Dan Stele that he defeated a "shipload" of enemy kings, rather than exactly 70 enemy kings, it doesn't change my point – that the House of David was just a very minor player among many very minor players. Since Hazael happened when the Kingdom of Judah was much bigger than was the case during the late 10th century, we can deduce that Judah during the "time of David" was really teeny tiny indeed. This supports the views of Garfinkel et al, namely that "In the very late 11th and early 10th century BCE, under King David, Judah was a small territory in Jerusalem and the hill country." Per Coogan, Jerusalem in David's time was "barely a city – by our standards, just a village", being a few thousand people living on about a dozen acres.
 * Wdford (talk) 12:24, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Uh, yeah, I said that earlier. But then you said David may not have existed. Am I wrong about that? In any case, it really doesn't help you. I think you missed my point entirely. Hazael is just exaggerating the hell out of his feats. In the same inscription, he claims to have seven kingdoms. Obviously, he had one kingdom. And Hazael is absolutely unambiguous concerning who he actually defeated in the inscription after he's done using his exaggerated, symbolic fiction: "[I killed Jeho]ram son [of Ahab] king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-]g of the House of David". In other words, the following is obvious: the first half of the inscription is historically meaningless, just mighty language: I have seven kingdoms, defeated seventy kings with trillions of horses and chariots! And the second half of the inscription describes what Hazael actually did: I defeated the leaders of the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, the latter of whom was a member of the House of David. If you think I'm wrong about this, when it is quite clear, please cite a single archaeologist who would agree with you. This is clearly your own weakly made hypothesis, formulated at a time when you thought that the "seventy kings" was a perfectly historically accurate and literal number.Editshmedt (talk) 17:45, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So, maybe they weren't 70, they were 69 or 72, what does this change? Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:54, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're reaching as hard as you can, but it just wont work. Sorry Tgeorg - the number is not an approximation. It's clear you didn't even read the paper I noted earlier, which is literally only 3 pages long. This reading is WP:OR and contradicts common sense. Nothing in the first part of the inscription can be taken as anything other than mighty language: I left the seven parts of my kingdom and destroyed seventy kings, whom had many thousands of chariots! As the original publishers of the Tel Dan Inscription noted, this former part of the inscription is simply a (symbolic) summary of their exploits. In the latter part of the inscription, as the excavators noted (and as I was able to deduce myself), the actual exploits they performed: Hazael defeated the two leaders of the northern and southern kingdoms. It looks like this WP:OR opinion flat out contradicts the inscription itself, which goes on to specify that there was one king of Israel and one king of Judah. So much for these absurdly funny reaches.Editshmedt (talk) 18:08, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe there were more kings named: you don't know because you don't have the whole stone. It's a broken piece of rock with some disputed readings. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:42, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So your whole argument relies on conjecture. Got it.Editshmedt (talk) 19:00, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, you are wrong about that. Actually, the whole argument relies on evidence, of which there is only this single shred that indirectly mentions a David-person, and which is so badly damaged that the Judean king mentioned is unreadable and is identified by conjecture. That is why Garfinkel, Finkelstein, Coogan etc etc hold the views they do. Science is based on evidence, not fairy tales and double standards. Wdford (talk) 20:15, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wdford, why are your responses always so angry when you're plainly shown to be wrong? There are so many errors in what you just said that I have no choice but to reprint it, amended with corrections:
 * "Yes, you are wrong about that. [Wrong about what?] Actually, the whole argument [which argument?] relies on evidence, of which there is only this single shred [that there is one Tel Dan Inscription doesn't change the fact that there is a Tel Dan Inscription which refutes your position] that indirectly mentions [who cares if it's indirect? why does it have to be direct? what? huh?] a David-person [what is a "David-person"? Is this the type of desperation one exercises when they have reluctance in admitting the fact that the Tel Dan Inscription is, yes, talking about David?], and which is so badly damaged [the part about David is not badly damaged] that the Judean king mentioned is unreadable and is identified by conjecture [I don't think it's based on conjecture]. That is why Garfinkel, Finkelstein, Coogan [actually, I've already shown Coogan agrees with the United Monarchy, and on the point of the Tel Dan Inscription, all three agree with me - certianly not Wdford] etc etc hold the views they do. Science [when did science come into this? we're talking about an ancient inscription. perhaps wdford is confused] is based on evidence, not fairy tales and double standards [yes, because this comment isn't clearly based on fairy tales and double standards - seriously?]."
 * Editshmedt (talk) 02:17, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I am not angry, and you have not shown me to be wrong. Gosh, this is a lot like dealing with a troll.

Herewith to correct your repetitive misunderstandings:


 * In your post of 17:45, 14 January 2021 you wrote: "But then you said David may not have existed. Am I wrong about that?" Answer – Yes, you are wrong about that.


 * The argument of this thread is about the historicity of the Bible's description of David, although you veer off at will.


 * The Tel Dan Inscription in no way refutes my position. The Tel Dan Inscription is apparently talking about a "House of David" (although this is also disputed). It says nothing about who this David was, and the "House of David" is not assigned an ethnicity – it could have been referring to David the Midianite or David the Philistine, etc. It is reasonable to assume that it refers to David of Judea, but this is conjecture. The names of the Davidian king and his father are so damaged that the identity thereof must also be conjectured – I assume based on the time-period of the author, and the assumption that Biblical kings are historical figures.


 * All three of Garfinkel, Finkelstein and Coogan agree that any Judean polity of the "conventional Davidian time-frame" would have been a small tribal faction, not the powerful empire of the Bible texts – which thus all directly supports my position on this element of the article. Everything else is your attempt at diversion.


 * Archaeology is a science – see eg and . Yes, seriously. Wdford (talk) 10:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree with the second sentence. The rest contains another slew of errors requiring correction. The Tel Dan Inscription is absolutely, without a question describing David, and this is not a disputed reading. This is not an assumption - this is an obvious fact. Who is "David the Midianite"? "David the Philistine"? I've never seen such blatant desperation, such fringe-ness being forced on fact and science to calm one down when their presuppositions crash with reality. The facts are this: everyone agrees that Judges, Samuel and Kings preserve solid sums of historical memory going as far back as the 13th century BC. For here and here for examples, which give special focus on memory going to the 10th century BC. Also, the description of these texts is as follows: David founded a kingdom. A few decades later, the kingdom split. The successors ruling the Kingdom of Israel were not actually descendants of David, but the successors ruling the Kingdom of Judah were all actually descendants. As it happens, Wikipedia offers a pretty convenient graphic to display that. And guess what the Tel Dan Inscription does - it does not call the king of Israel of the "House of David", but it does do so for the king in Judah. These are not "coincidences". There is not a shred of reasonable doubt concerning a single serious archaeologist that the inscription is both referring to the House of DAVID, not some Philistine shuckery you want to replace that with, and that this is the same David that Samuel and Kings want to speak of. Your interpretations are such an insult to evidence that I hardly can believe they were written down. They are only meant to serve a priori reasoning. You can't assign an ethnicity to a dynasty; "House of David the Judean". This is logically non-understandable. The Assyrian records speak of a "House of Omri" too. They don't mention the "House of Omri the Israelite". When the "House of Omri" phrase is used, it's just used like that. And there is clear reason and evidence behind the reconstruction of the names. Jehoram in Israel was Hazael's contemporary (scholars seem to agree that the biblical description of this period and Hazael's attacks are broadly accurate), and the contemporary of Jehoram was Ahaziah. Not only that, but get this impressive match: as it happens, the -yahu ending of the King of Judah is distinguishable, and the only king aroun the time of Jehoram with such a name ending is ... wait for it .. Ahaziah! So the reconstructions are based on an easily solved puzzle of evidence, not conjecture. This is very simple - I am explaining things in this conversation I didn't believe I would have to explain in my whole life. Finally, Garfinkel, Finkelstein, and Coogan. Not a single one of them could possibly agree that Judah was a "tribal faction". Once again, you have a weird assumption that people who reject your views actually accept your views. We've already seen Coogan accepts a somewhat exaggated united monarchy, but a united monarchy nonetheless - just like Mazar, Faust, and so forth. So Coogan thinks that the two kingdoms at the time, however big they were in reality, were actually one political unit. Garfinkel and Finkelstein are clear - both think Judah was a kingdom in the 10th century BC. Finkelstein hasn't always believed that, but he has made a dozen concessions since he started the whole debate to begin with. No tribal factions - kingdoms, in the 10th century at the very least. Epigraphy is not a science, and reading the Tel Dan Inscription is not a science. Archaeology is obviously not "just a science", it's a combination of humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences.Editshmedt (talk) 14:55, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * "Let me reinforce this claim in respect to my own work. The mainstream view of critical biblical scholarship accepts that Genesis-Joshua (perhaps Judges) is substantially devoid of reliable history and that it was in the Persian period that the bulk of Hebrew Bible literature was either composed or achieved its canonical shape. I thus find attempts to push me out onto the margin of scholarship laughable."

- Philip Davies


 * Quoted by Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:02, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * "Davies’ book, In Search of “Ancient Israel,” the entire index of biblical references (which appears to be comprehensive) barely fills a page and a half. Further, even where Davies refers to particular texts, there is no sustained engagement with their details, whether on philological, source-, redaction- or even historical-critical levels. Thus, one of Davies’s fullest discussions of a biblical text is a comparison of the biblical and Assyrian accounts of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 BCE, where he explicitly states that “I am not really interested in contrasting the biblical and Assyrian accounts.” But proper historical method demands that one perform just such a comparative analysis that Davies dismisses as uninteresting. How can one write a history of a period without dealing in detail with the surviving texts that describe that period, whether or not one accepts their historicity? He has presented a conclusion without offering any detailed analysis of the sources to back it up. Instead, he offers no more than a rough outline of each, before asserting that, while these accounts probably refer to “something that happened,” each is a “literary construct” that serves primarily ideological needs. Therefore, any reconstructions made on their basis are no more valid than attempting to reconstruct “what really happened” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ... This will not do at all. Thompson and Davies have provided no detailed comparison that could demonstrate that the biblical texts concerning David or Hezekiah reflect a similar genre, a comparable dating relative to the events described, or an equivalent attitude towards their sources, as one finds in Shakespeare or in the myths concerning Gilgamesh, Achilles or King Arthur. Just because it is possible to write myth or historical fiction does not prove that this is what the biblical authors have done. Where is the evidence that the biblical authors were writing this kind of fiction? No such comparisons, nor any detailed arguments at all, are ever brought by Davies, Thompson, or the other minimalists. These anachronistic analogies are simply asserted, without concrete evidence or any real examination of the biblical texts, merely in order to justify the a priori dismissal of the biblical text as history. (Isaac Kalimi, Writing and Rewriting, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 52-53"


 * Quoted by Editshmedt (talk) 18:54, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Nice, but Davies did not say what he himself thinks, he stated something about The mainstream view of critical biblical scholarship. Tgeorgescu (talk) 19:11, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * So why quote Davies, who gets everything wrong? You could've quoted Dever for that.Editshmedt (talk) 19:24, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wait a minute, Davies might not be acting honest here. Dever writes: "Their basic presupposition (for so it is) is that the ‘Deuteronomistic history’ (Joshua through Kings), our fundamental source for the history of ancient Israel from the settlement horizon to the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B C E, does not date as mainstream scholars hold to the Iron Age, or ca. 8th-7th centuries B C E . Rather, it is a strictly literary product of the Persian period, or increasingly the Hellenistic era in the 2nd century BCE" (The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating, pg. 415). What was that about Persian-time composition? Finkelstein himself rejects that. Finkelstein et al argue in 2016 based on new findings that the Deuteronomistic history is pre-Babylonian invasion. It gets harder and harder to trust these minimalists.Editshmedt (talk) 19:29, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The conclusion is that you have a lack of respect for WP:RS, when they happen to disagree with your POV. Tgeorgescu (talk) 20:37, 15 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The two "reliable sources" contradict each other. So if we want to choose which one is correct, we have to use our brains. Davies, who admits in that very quote that he is usually dismissed, makes a certain claim about what is mainstream. Dever, an actual mainstream archaeologist, says it is not mainstream. Finkelstein agrees with Dever on the point of dating. So we have Davies word versus Dever and Finkelstein. Who do we accept? I think it's obvious. Earlier, Wdford made flawed claims about the size and importance of the Stepped Stone Structure, based on nothing more than its ground surface area, which I refuted earlier by way of comparison to the size of Khirbet Qeiyafa. However, there is now more evidence, on top of the plenty given earlier, to show just how wrong he was. Mazar describes the SSS: "A building of these proportions is unparalleled in comparison with other architectural remains from Israel and its neighbors from the 12th to 10th centuries b.c.e. Only from the 9th century do monumental fortified enclosures appear in Israel and Judah at administrative centers such as Samaria, Jezreel, and Lachish. The distinctiveness and magnitude of the Stepped Stone Structure tell of Jerusalem’s unique status as an administrative center during the building’s use" (pg. 264, this paper).Editshmedt (talk) 21:10, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

The majority of modern biblical scholars believe that the Torah – the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – reached its present form in the post-Exilic period.
 * Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests.
 * Robert Gebelhoff, Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet, The Washington Post (19 October 2016)

The five books are drawn from four "sources" (distinct schools of writers rather than individuals): the Priestly source, the Yahwist and the Elohist (these two are often referred to collectively as the "non-Priestly" source), and the Deuteronomist. There is general agreement that the Priestly source is post-exilic, but there is no agreement over the non-Priestly source(s).


 * Genesis is a post-exilic work combining "Priestly" and "non-Priestly" material.
 * Exodus is an anthology drawn from nearly all periods of Israel's history.
 * Leviticus is entirely Priestly and dates from the exilic/post-exilic period.
 * Numbers is a Priestly redaction (i.e., editing) of a Yahwistic/non-Priestly original.
 * Deuteronomy, now the last book of the Torah, began as the set of religious laws (these make up the bulk of the book), was extended in the early part of the 6th century to serve as the introduction to the Deuteronomistic history, and later still was detached from that history, extended yet again, and edited to conclude the Torah.

This group of books, plus Deuteronomy, is called the "Deuteronomistic history" by scholars. The proposal that they made up a unified work was first advanced by Martin Noth in 1943, and has been widely accepted. Noth proposed that the entire history was the creation of a single individual working in the exilic period (6th century BCE); since then there has been wide recognition that the history appeared in two "editions", the first in the reign of Judah's King Josiah (late 7th century), the second during the exile (6th century). Noth's dating was based on the assumption that the history was completed very soon after its last recorded event, the release of King Jehoiachin in Babylon c. 560 BCE; but some scholars have termed his reasoning inadequate, and the history may have been further extended in the post-exilic period.

Copy/paste from Dating the Bible. Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:56, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You are getting shriller and shriller. You are also deviating down random footpaths to nowhere – not a good sign. Please stick to the topic.


 * It seems that where the Tel Dan inscription supports your POV it is super-reliable, and where it undermines your POV it is a literary construct or propaganda. It seems you have now also stooped to being the judge of which scholars are reliable and which are not – based purely on the extent to which each scholar supports your own POV. Needless to say, this is not how proper encyclopedias work.


 * The Tel Dan inscription does not refer to the Kingdom of Judah at all. It mentions Israel specifically, but the "House of David" (assuming that is a correct translation) is not ascribed to any kingdom as such. I suspect that omission is highly significant in this context.


 * There is zero information about "David the human" outside of the Biblical texts. Were it not for the Bible, he would be totally unheard of. The Tel Dan Inscription does not describe David in any way, other than to mention that one of his descendants was at that time a "king" of somewhere – whatever that meant in terms of the language of the stele. The rest is just Biblical.


 * I am not sure that "everyone agrees that Judges, Samuel and Kings preserve solid sums of historical memory going as far back as the 13th century BC." Some undoubtedly hold that view, but by no means "everyone". Maybe it depends on what is meant by "solid sums"?


 * Since the Israelites were actually just a sub-set of the Canaanite tribes, David was actually a Canaanite. This explains all the Canaanite features of the Governor's Residence which is ascribed to the time of David. It is also borne out by David being descended from Ruth, who was a Moabite, and David was willing to leave his aged parents in Moab for safety. Ruth married Boaz, son of Rahab of Jericho – also a Canaanite. Since the Biblical Israelites placed great emphasis on marrying inside the tribe, the fact that the Biblical authors stress these particular factoids re their big hero is very interesting indeed.


 * It is also borne out by David having served in the Philistine army, being a loyal subject of the Philistine king, and being granted a Philistine town of his own (Ziklag) for his services.


 * Mostly, it is borne out by there being zero evidence outside the Bible attesting to the man David, or his kingdom – even if it was just a little kingdom – other than the passing mention of a descendant in the Tel Dan inscription – which according to you is mostly unreliable propaganda anyway.


 * Archaeology is indeed a science, and science is based on evidence. I see you have now personally over-ruled Encyclopaedia Britannica as well.


 * Mazar may have been factually correct when he described the "distinctiveness and magnitude of the Stepped Stone Structure" as telling of Jerusalem’s "unique status as an administrative center during the building’s use", but this obviously depends on what he is comparing against? The Stepped Stone Structure (which he conflates with other ruins to magnify its magnitude) is minute compared to the administrative structures of Egypt, Troy, Hattusa, Assyria etc. What exactly is Mazar's definition of a "neighbour"?


 * Garfinkel, Finkelstein, and Coogan have all stated that Judea in the time of the 10th century BCE was teeny tiny. David may well have called himself a king, whatever that word actually meant in the 10th century BCE, and he may have described his territory as a kingdom, but that was seemingly self-aggrandizing propaganda – or to use your own phrase: "mighty language".


 * Wdford (talk) 20:03, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The first sentence is very ironic. I see you still don't understand the Tel Dan Inscription. In your narrow way of thinking, either it is all perfectly literally true to the faithful word, or it is all propaganda. This actually reminds me of a point Israel Finkelstein made. Some people accused him of being inconsistent as he takes some parts of the Bible seriously and not others. His response was this: that you must take some parts seriously and some not so much is the WHOLE CONCLUSION of two hundred years of scholarship! The same applies to everything else. This cartoonish world of thinking of yours, Wdford, where everything must be either perfectly absolutely literal or completely metaphorical/symbolic/fiction/propaganda may sound like honey to people relying on you to maintain their a priori worldview, but it is nothing short of intellectually irresponsible to the critical ear. The fact is as follows. The Tel Dan Inscription basically reads as follows, in Hazael's words: "I came out of the seven parts of my kingdom and slew seventy kings who had many thousands of chariots and horsemen. I killed Jehoram and Ahaziah of the House of David, burned their towns and turned their land into desolation." That's what can be reconstructed. Now, the critical reader will notice the obvious. For one, I've already cited a paper on the use of the number 70 as far back as F.C. Fensham which amply documents the symbolic use of the number 70. It isn't even an approximation, it's just completely symbolic. Consider this: per the Bible, the land of Elim has 70 palm trees (Ex. 15:27), the weight of the bronze used in the Tabernacle is 70 talents (Ex. 38:29), Jacob had seventy children (Ex. 1:5), Israel has seventy elders (Ex. 24:1) and on and on and on. Fensham documents 52 examples of this. He further documents many examples outside of the Bible, in the ancient near eastern context. For example, Baal is said to invite the seventy sons of Athirat for the feast for the inauguration of his house. Anat commemorates the death of Baal by slaughtering 70 wild oxen, 70 oxen, 70 sheep, and so forth. The Panamuwa inscription mentions the murder of 70 of the kinsmen of Barsur. And on and on. The Tel Dan Inscription is no more than another example of this. The critical eye will also notice that the "seventy" of the kings Hazael slew is paired with the "seven" districts of his kingdom. The critical eye will quickly note that Hazael's kingdom isn't actually divided into "seven" parts at all. It's just meant to parallel to seventy. Also notice this: though Hazael claims to have turned all of Israel into a land of desolation, we know that isn't even close to being true. It's like when Egypt claims in the Merneptah Stele to have literally annihilated Israel - in the 12th century. Maybe they won a fight or something, but that is total and utter exaggeration. In reality, it is fully possible that Hazael made up his victories against Jehoram and Ahaziah. I don't really know, but it could be the case. In that case, the whole thing would be more or less fiction. But no matter how fictional Hazael's military victory was, Hazael was well aware that Ahaziah was part of the "House of David". And here's the amazing thing about it: Not a single critical archaeologist or historian disagrees with me on this. Not one. This topic is, therefore, over.


 * Didn't say the Tel Dan Inscription mentions a Judahite kingdom, so I don't see why you brought that up. But it absolutely blows out of the water any WP:FRINGE suggestion that there was no David. Once again, stop talking to me about the Tel Dan Inscription. I already know your views are formed a priori here. I follow the scholarship, you follow your weird theories.


 * I don't really care if David's descendants were Canaanite. By the 10th century BC, archaeologists are well agreed that "Judahite" had developed as an ethincity, and Judahite ethnicity is associated with a number of features of material culture from the time that can be reconstructed. For example, pig consumption has been noted in both Philistia and the northern kingdom of Israel in the 10th century BC, but there is virtually none in the region of Judah. That can be considered one of the several distinctive features of material culture of a Judahite from the time, and there are many.


 * Britannica doesn't cancel what's in the peer-reviewed scholarship. Archaeology is a truly a multidisciplinary field to its core.


 * You ask for Mazar's definition of "neighbour". Mate, how on planet god damn Earth are "Egypt, Troy, Hattusa, Assyria" neighbours of the land of Israel? The neighbours are the Philistia (on the coastal plain), Moab, Aram-Damascus, and Edom. I may be forgetting one or two. Those are the regions that, you know, surround the borders of Israel?


 * Umm, no. Coogan said that Jerusalem is teeny tiny, which wouldn't really be relevant, since not even the Bible says it was big. Coogan affirms a United Monarchy, that much is clear. Finkelstein in the past has made comments about the size of Judah, but he now seems to think it ruled over the central highlands or something. That's not particularly "teeny tiny". Garfinkel would go a lot further than Finkelstein in terms of the size of Judah (just above the Beersheba Valley and extending to the borders of the Philistines in the west), and Faust argued last year that Judah extended into the Shephelah. In addition, a 2020 find in Tel Dan last year also raised the possibility, per the excavators, that the northern Israelite tribes extended as far up as Dan. I don't think you know anything about what these scholars think about the size of the kingdom. Quite frankly, I doubt you even understand the geography we're discussing. Do you know, for example, where the Judean Highlands are? The difference between the Shephelah and the Negev? These aren't trick questions - these are the easiest geography questions I can think of.Editshmedt (talk) 23:40, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * As I noted earlier, after the excavations at the SSS and LSS were complete, only Finkelstein has since objected to the 10th century dating, whereas Amihai Mazar, Avraham Faust, and Eilat Mazar have rejected his interpretations. As it happens, we can now add Nadav Na'aman (as per his 2014 BAR article The Case of Davids Palace) and William Dever (in his 2017 book Beyond the Texts where he calls Finkelstein's arguments convoluted). How amazing that Finkelstein just so happens to be the only one on the other side! Amazing coincidence!Editshmedt (talk) 00:07, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * What is really ironic is actually your new insult "a priori", which you have used seven times so far (literally seven times, not symbolically.) I am the editor who is focusing on the actual evidence (the little bit that actually exists) and you are the editor who clings to the conjecture of that portion of the scholars who support your POV – even disputing that archaeology is based on actual evidence.


 * I agree with Finkelstein that much of the Bible cannot be taken as history. I'm not sure that this necessarily applies to every other non-Biblical inscription as well, and I don't agree that you should be free to cherry-pick which bits of everything are "historic" and which bits are symbolic.


 * It seems YOU don't properly understand the Tel Dan Inscription. To clarify:
 * The Tel Dan Inscription DOES NOT say "I came out of the seven parts of my kingdom". The script is damaged on that line as well – what remains reads "and I departed from the seven [. . .] my kingdom." It could have meant seven cities or seven valleys or seven taverns etc etc. It doesn’t matter how many parts Hazael's kingdom was actually divided into, as this issue is not present in the text - although Hazael's kingdom was actually pretty big.
 * The Tel Dan Inscription DOES NOT say that Hazael "slew seventy kings". The script is damaged on that line as well – what remains reads "and I killed […]nty kings". It could have meant seventy kings, but it could have meant twenty or thirty etc as well, rendering your seventy-symbolism rant somewhat moot.
 * The Tel Dan Inscription DOES NOT say that Hazael's enemy kings "had many thousands of chariots". The script is damaged on that line as well – what remains reads "who harnessed [….]iots." Assuming it is indeed referring to chariots, the total number thereof is once again pure conjecture.
 * The Tel Dan Inscription DOES NOT say that Hazael "turned all of Israel into a land of desolation". The script is damaged on that line as well – what remains reads "And I made [….] their land into [. . .]". The rest of the "interpretation" is just pure conjecture. The original could quite likely have said "And I made their land into vassal states and they paid me tons of tribute".
 * In fact, it seems that all you DO accept from the Tel Dan Inscription is a passing reference to the "House of David", which you synthesize with Bible stories to support your POV.


 * I generally agree with the concept of "neighbours", but it is hard to accept that this is what Mazar actually meant. Aram-Damascus is obviously Assyria, and in the period from the 12th to 10th centuries BCE the rulers of this state included Tiglath-Pileser I, a famous builder, and his successors. They had cities like Ninevah, with huge civic buildings. Philisitia in this period included the great cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath, and Gaza, which all had huge buildings too. What do you suppose Mazar actually meant by this strange statement? Presumably he was actually comparing to "neighbours" much closer to home, such as the rural villages nearby to Jerusalem?


 * Coogan describes the Royal City of David as "barely a city – by our standards, just a village". Once again you cheerfully cherry-pick from the source – clinging to Coogan but happily dismissing Coogan's views on Jerusalem as "irrelevant". I believe this is called "quote-mining"? Of course Garfinkel et al state clearly that "In the very late 11th and early 10th century BCE, under King David, Judah was a small territory in Jerusalem and the hill country."  Judah sounds quiet tiny to me.


 * It seems you have no actual point worth adding to the article. Shall we move on to other things, or do you want to simply keep repeating your POV while thinking up fresh insults? Wdford (talk) 17:28, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry, pretending that your fringe opinions are somehow remotely related to evidence or scholarship is very unconvincing. We've already seen your uncritical methodology: either the whole Tel Dan Inscription is 100% propaganda or it's 100% absolutely literal and true. As Finkelstein points out, the fact that you must take one part of the same text reliably and another part not reliably is the WHOLE CONCLUSION of two centuries of scholarship! Your points about the Tel Dan Inscription are a grasp for survival at this point. Every single living scholar agrees with me about the Tel Dan Inscription. Whether it says districts (Biran's reconstruction) or cities doesn't matter, the "seven" is what's pertinent. You now are angry about the "seventy" reconstruction, even though you're the one who brought up the seventy thing in the first place. Your claim that it could equally say twenty/thirty/whatnot simply flies in the face of logic, as if the inscription was originally written in English and so you can sub in any number ending in the letters -nty. The 'seventy' reconstruction is actually based on the surviving grammar. If I wrote fift[ ]n, you can easily guess that the original number is 'fifteen'. See Biran (1995), pg. 16. The desolation language can be similarly confirmed, but is not needed anyways. And in the end of the day, Hazael still says there is one king of Judah and one king of Israel and claims to have defeated them. Assyrian inscriptions from the 9th century confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that the north was one single kingdom, the northern kingdom of Israel, and similarly, there is no living archaeologist that thinks 9th century Judah was politically fractured. In other words, this inscription gives you nothing.


 * You then write that Aram-Damascus is "obviously" Assyria. This once again proves that even the basics are beyond you. Right, and Egypt is "obviously" the same thing as China. I have never seen someone confuse Assyria with Aram-Damascus in my life. I mean ... HOW? LOL! I feel like I'm on a show. Mazar's statement is only "strange" for those who have a hard time bringing themselves to the facts. Read it again and meditate on it. Maybe you'll have an epiphany.


 * The idea that I've quote-mined Coogan is hilarious. I guess you don't know what quote-mining ... actually is! A quote-mine is quoting part of what someone thinks, when in fact they do not think that. It's like what you did with the Governor's Residency paper. Despite the fact that the authors identified Tel Eton in the Iron IIA period as a Judahite site, you totally obscured the entire discussion with Canaanite this and Canaanite that - as if the ethnicity that the individuals in the settlement had centuries ago was extremely relevant or important or something or that it had any relevance to the fact that we have here another example of a Judahite site being significantly expanded in the 10th century. But regardless of Coogan's views on Jerusalem, he does think there was a United Monarchy. Once again, we're back to a cartoonish world, where I either must believe EVERYTHING Coogan says or believe none of it. But the fact that one accepts one thing a scholar says and questions another thing is, again, the WHOLE EDIFICE of scholarship! As for what needs to be added to the article, plenty of things. We need to make it clear that Finkelstein's views on David are solely based on his Low Chronology, which most scholars reject. We need to note the abundance of scholars who accept the United Monarchy, the scholarship brought in forth of this view, and so forth. We need a better summary of the LSS and SSS. At this point, it just reads like there's an even-handed disagreement among scholars, when in fact Finkelstein has not very much support at all (as usual).Editshmedt (talk) 21:29, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * As we saw, Garfinkel rejects both Finkelstein's POV and your POV. Coogan is more nuanced than you seem to imply, I offered a quote from the same book you quoted and wonder of all wonders, it has the c-word inside it! Tgeorgescu (talk) 10:30, 18 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I don't have a horse in this race, I am merely agreeing with Finkelstein and the majority of others that the Bible is not literal history. However I also point out that you are cherry-picking which bits are "historical" and which are propaganda, of the Bible, of third-party inscriptions and of the work of scholars. That is standard practice for POV-pushers, but not really correct practice.


 * You are being a bit ridiculous to state that "Every single living scholar agrees with me about the Tel Dan Inscription." A number of scholars, some of them still living, dispute the interpretation and "reconstruction" of the text.


 * However we can deduce from this convoluted discussion that the Tel Dan Inscription actually tells us nothing about the King David of the Bible or anything about his kingdom, and the Tel Dan Inscription nowhere mentions Judah by name.


 * Per scholarship, the Israelites were a fractured fragment of the Canaanite population, and per the Bible stories Judah was a fractured fragment of the Israelite population. Since the entire United Monarchy segment of the Bible stories seems to have been "mighty language" and propaganda written centuries later by a specific vested interest, "reconstruction" of the Tel Dan Inscription based on Bible stories would be seriously prone to error.


 * Mazar's statement related to the time period of the 12th to 10th centuries BCE. During this time Assyria invaded Aram-Damascus, and several of their Assyrian rulers were notable for their construction projects. It's not rocket science. Cool your frothing please. That period also saw major developments in the great cities of Philisitia, which were also "neighbours" in a sense. Since Mazar is a competent scholar, we need to try a bit harder to understand the point being made here. Obviously your own POV drives you to interpret the statement using the borders of the Grand Davidic Empire as per the Bible stories, but clearly Mazar was referring to something much closer – and much smaller.


 * This does not surprise the rest of us, because Mazar does admit that the most impressive structures evidencing a central powerful authority in Jerusalem date to the Middle Bronze Age and are Canaanite, which "might have been retained in the local memory until the end of the second millennium BCE" and been inserted into the later Israelite historiographic narrative. Mazar supports a United Monarchy of sorts, but describes it as a state in an early stage of evolution, far from the rich and widely expanding state as was subsequently portrayed in the Biblical narrative.


 * Obviously we do have different understandings of quote-mining. Your understanding, as you have admitted here now, is that you are entitled to cherry-pick from the work of scholars to support your POV, but when other editors point out the "other" facts they are quote-mining. ("But the fact that one accepts one thing a scholar says and questions another thing is, again, the WHOLE EDIFICE of scholarship!"). Mmmm.


 * Re the Governor's Residency paper, the scholars who wrote the paper acknowledged the many Canaanite features of the site, and even went so far as to formulate the "old house" hypothesis to explain why this "typical Judahite" structure was also so typically Canaanite. You cited part of what they said, and I merely pointed out the other half of what they said, for balance. Other scholars have also pointed out that not every "four-roomed house" is at a Judahite site, and that not every Judahite site has four-roomed houses.


 * What you seem to be missing is that Finkelstein wants the United Monarchy to be true, and he is proposing the Low Chronology specifically to allow the "evidence" to support a Davidic empire – specifically because the evidence currently available does not support any significant statehood in the Conventional Chronology time period.


 * Do you have anything else, or do you want to simply keep repeating your POV while thinking up fresh insults? Wdford (talk) 22:00, 18 January 2021 (UTC)


 * People who go out of their way to claim they have no horse in the race/bias/POV tend to be the most biased people - something I've observed. You keep complaining about my POV when your POV shines like the morning sun. In any case, no legitimate scholar disagrees with me about the Tel Dan Inscription. I don't count the guy who cried forgery the moment it was discovered based on nothing but wishful thinking (Thompson). The facts are this: the Judahite dynasty of monarchs was founded by a certain David (per the Tel Dan Inscription). In the 9th century BC, there was two kingdoms and two kings, not twenty or seventy. Let's stop disputing the obvious and try to move on to something productive.


 * You seem to be still trying to survive when it comes to Mazar's plain and simple statement. No building in Philistia in the 12th-10th centuries was on the scale of the SSS, and Assyria was never on the border of Israel in the 12th-10th centuries. (They only had conflicts with a polity that was - i.e. Aram-Damascus, which you now suddenly realize ... isn't "obviously" the same as Assyria.) In the 12th-10th centuries, in all of Israel and its neighbours, the SSS was the biggest thing. Try to read these plain and simple words without jumping for an alternate explanation: "A building of these proportions is unparalleled in comparison with other architectural remains from Israel and its neighbors from the 12th to 10th centuries b.c.e. Only from the 9th century do monumental fortified enclosures appear in Israel and Judah at administrative centers such as Samaria, Jezreel, and Lachish. The distinctiveness and magnitude of the Stepped Stone Structure tell of Jerusalem’s unique status as an administrative center during the building’s use".


 * You continue to insist that the definition of quote-mining is "not believing everything or rejecting everything a scholar says". That's not what it means. Re the Governors Residency paper, the authors specifically wrote that it is a Judahite site. Can we stop obscuring what is clear now?


 * And now Wdford is claiming that Finkelstein wants the United Monarchy to be true and that the (widely rejected) Low Chronology puts more architectural remains than the alternatives. (Even though the alternative would place the SSS, six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, the two ashlar palaces at Megiddo, and a bunch of other things in the 10th century BC, compared to ... nothing on the Low Chronology.) This is clearly propaganda.Editshmedt (talk) 23:03, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

OK, so just more repetition, and a few fresh insults. Sad.

I see scholars who disagree with you about the Tel Dan inscription are now "not legitimate" in your eyes. Mmmm.

In the 9th century BC, there were lots of "kingdoms" and lots of "kings". Hazael stomped on quite a few of them, and Shoshenq stomped on quite a few more.

In the 12th-10th centuries Aram-Damascus was invaded by Assyria – they did not simply have "conflicts". In that period Assyria were known to be big builders. In the 12th-10th centuries the Philistines arrived and built huge cities. None of this is controversial. It is impossible to assume that for three hundred years Assyria ruled Aram-Damascus and Philistia was built from rubble into massive cities, but nobody ever built a wall 50 meters long? Seriously?

In addition, Jerusalem itself possessed massive Middle Bronze fortifications, much of which continued in use through the Iron Age. The SSS wasn't even a building as such, more of a simple terrace. It is thus nonsense to say the SSS was the biggest thing in Jerusalem, far less the biggest thing in the entire Near East.

Obviously Mazar must have meant something different. Let's analyze these plain and simple words, without inserting your POV: "A building of these proportions is unparalleled in comparison with other architectural remains from Israel and its neighbors from the 12th to 10th centuries b.c.e. Only from the 9th century do monumental fortified enclosures appear in Israel and Judah at administrative centers such as Samaria, Jezreel, and Lachish. The distinctiveness and magnitude of the Stepped Stone Structure tell of Jerusalem’s unique status as an administrative center during the building’s use".

Obviously the "neighbors" in question could not have included the huge cities of Philistia etc as per above, which had walls greater than 50 meters, so the Israel "borders" in Mazar's statement must have been much closer to Jerusalem. I grant the statement that the SSS was very "distinctive", but that would be a function of the unique topography. I accept the statement about "Jerusalem’s unique status as an administrative center", but that says nothing about the size of the Davidic Empire, only that there were no other administrative centers really close by. Easy, yes?

I certainly have never stated that quote-mining means "not believing everything or rejecting everything a scholar says". That is another lie from you. Per Wikipedia, Quote mining simply means "Quoting out of context" – which is something you do quite a lot.

Re the Governors Residency paper, there is no argument that it was a Judahite site at date of destruction. However the authors claim that the house was constructed hundreds of years earlier, as per their "old-house" hypothesis, projecting into maybe the 10th century BCE. Furthermore:

This is important CONTEXT, seeing as how the authors are claiming that the house was much older than the destruction date. There is no evidence – or discussion – of Israelite kings, Israelite authority, or any evidence of the size or power of the assumed community.
 * The authors admit that the site was occupied (by Canaanites) from the Early Bronze Age (mid-third millennium BCE), and that the settlement was still occupied into the Iron Age.
 * The authors admit that in the course of the Iron Age the older Canaanite centers experienced significant changes, probably resulting from alliances between the Canaanites in Tel ‘Eton and some expanding Israelites.
 * The authors admit that the construction of the classical four-room house involved traditional Canaanite conventions.
 * The authors admit that they discovered a "foundation deposit" which was typical of Canaanite sites during the 13th–11th centuries, "probably as a result of Egyptian influence", but which was rare in the Iron Age IIA.

Finkelstein's current view of the United Monarchy seems to be that a United Monarchy may have existed with Northern Israel in charge, ruling from Samaria, and with Judah as a minor vassal state. Per Finkelstein this would have happened in the 9th century BCE, and Finkelstein's view on the SSS, six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, the two ashlar palaces at Megiddo, etc etc, are that these were actually misdated by a few decades, and that they were part of the later expansion. In fact, he raises issues such as why Megiddo had fine stone-work but the purported "capital" at Jerusalem had poor quality stonework by comparison, among other things. Everyone who has read Finkelstein knows this.

In fact, Mazar in your very own quote states that "Only from the 9th century do monumental fortified enclosures appear in Israel and Judah at administrative centers such as Samaria, Jezreel, and Lachish." Most people would view the six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer etc as monumental fortified enclosures, at least by the standards of Israel, so even Mazar is agreeing that they could not have been Solomonic. Mmmmm.

Per Finkelstein and others, Judah (and Jerusalem) only became prosperous after Northern Israel was destroyed, partly because many Northern Israelite refugees moved to Judah. Then the much-later "historians" of Judah, free from any risk of contradiction, spun the histories to make Judah look like they had been the lead partner at the time, when actually it wasn't so.

Do you have any fresh suggestions, or are you reduced to merely repeating yourself? Wdford (talk) 13:16, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You seem to think that by simply repeating easily falsified claims endlessly, that somehow makes you win. I do not think it does.


 * I don't know when you'll just admit you're wrong on literally everything. (1) We've already discussed the Tel Dan Inscription. "Seventy" is fiction. And yes, the "seventy" reconstruction is well-established - see Biran (1995), pg. 16. (2) The Shoshenq inscription is from the 10th century, not the 9th, and gives no evidence of a ton of kingdoms or kings anyways. According to Amihai Mazar (2010), that Shoshenq/Shishak invaded Israel in the 10th century is a decent indication that there was a real polity to invade to begin with. Sometimes, you shouldn't deny facts like "9th century had two kingdoms with two kings". I can only imagine Israel Finkelstein himself laughing you out of the room when you tell him of this theory of yours. (3) Here is a quick map of the ancient world that can be used to find Assyria's exact border between the 12th-10th centuries BC: https://www.ancient.eu/map/. This can be used to easily verify that Assyria was never a neighbour of Israel in the 12th-10th centuries. It barely even reached the northern extent of the later Phoenician kingdom. So that didn't work. (4) You claim that structures greater than the SSS can be found in Iron Age Jerusalem that were reused from the Bronze Age and Philistia. But you don't actually mention these mysterious structures you're specifically talking about. The reason why is obvious. They don't exist. (5) The cities (plural) of Philistia were not "huge". Gath was huge. The others were not nearly as much. Another indication that I'm talking with someone who just doesn't know the topic at hand. (6) According to you, I quote mined Coogan because (a) I accept what he says about the United Monarchy and (b) I reject what he says about Jerusalem in a completely different publication. Clearly, your personal definition of quote-mining is not either believing everything or rejecting everything a scholar says. (7) Avraham Faust et al. think that Tel Eton was Judahite in the 10th century BC. They think Tel Eton is evidence for the expansion of the United Monarchy in that time. Don't know how you missed this. Ah, right - because you quickly skimmed it looking for things to "prove" yourself right. You also clearly entirely misunderstand their old house effect, which refers to why similar structures at sites other than at Tel Eton aren't easily found at other 10th century sites. (8) Finkelstein's current view is not that at all. What Finkelstein thought in 2001 doesn't count as his current view. Nadav Na'aman wrote a paper in 2013 arguing that Judah was strongly independent in the 9th century BC. (9) I know that Finkelstein thinks these structures were misdated. Almost no archaeologist thinks he's right. The Low Chronology is widely rejected among archaeologists. (10) I don't think you know what a monumental fortified enclosure is. Mazar has argued in print that all these structures, the SSS, the six-chambered gates and Megiddo palaces, etc, all date to the 10th century. Once again, a stunning clumsy error that shows you don't know the basics of Mazar's views.


 * When your giant response can be swiftly taken out in a single paragraph, that's a problem. Once again, this is what Mazar said. I like quoting it again and again because it cleans away your POV: "A building of these proportions is unparalleled in comparison with other architectural remains from Israel and its neighbors from the 12th to 10th centuries b.c.e. Only from the 9th century do monumental fortified enclosures appear in Israel and Judah at administrative centers such as Samaria, Jezreel, and Lachish. The distinctiveness and magnitude of the Stepped Stone Structure tell of Jerusalem’s unique status as an administrative center during the building’s use"


 * For just a second, don't resort to another thing you made up: that structures you don't know about must have paralleled the SSS in Philistia because this can't possibly be true and you can't possibly be wrong. Maybe you simply are wrong.Editshmedt (talk) 16:13, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * And around you go, like an old-timey vinyl record with a scratch. Still disregarding any scholar who doesn't support your POV, still cherry-picking from papers, still telling lies about other editors, still ignoring the FACT that all of Finkelstein, Garfinkel, Masar, Coogan and others have clearly stated that in the 10th century BCE Judah was a backwater and Jerusalem was a village, not the capital of an empire. Wdford (talk) 17:25, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * All of that has been refuted. Scholarly consensus rejects you on almost every point you make. You rely on the Low Chronology, which the vast majority of experts reject, and whenever a scholar disagrees with you, you simply reinterpret them like there's no tomorrow (e.g. Mazar's words on the SSS). Amihai Mazar, Avraham Faust, Eilat Mazar, William G. Dever, and Nadav Na'aman place the SSS in the 10th century BC in Jerusalem. So all of them think that Jerusalem was a small citadel at the time. To this, we can add plenty of other scholars like Isaac Kalimi and Jane Cahill. You simply cherry pick from Coogan. When he affirms the United Monarchy, we pretend he doesn't exist. When he says Jerusalem is not a city "by our [21st century] standards", then you win! Every scholar rejects your flimsy opinion on the Tel Dan Inscription, every scholar rejects your views on the multiplicity of kings in 9th century Israel, you rely on a heavily rejected Low Chronology, and so forth. The names you cite are sheer cherry-picking. Aren Maeir writes that the United Monarchy remains a mainstream view of archaeology. But we can simply pretend away when Mazar, Faust, Dever and others agree with me. And no, bucko, no scholar says that 10th century Judah was a backwater. Confusing 10th century BC with 1st century Galilee is not scholarship. (And even then, the idea of 1st century Galilee being a backwater is outdated.) Garfinkel and Finkelstein both think that 10th century Judah was a kingdom now. Kingdom, not a backwater. When will you stop acting like scholarship and even the names you cite would refute you on almost every step of the way?Editshmedt (talk) 21:31, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Oh boy, you're not going to like this. Nadav Na'aman writes: "The Egyptian topographical list [of Shoshenq I] indicates that the campaign was directed against the Kingdom of Israel and the settlements of the Beer-sheba Valley, the Negev Highlands and the lower Naúal Besor area. The campaign skipped over the territories of the Philistine kingdoms (the coast and most of the Shephelah) and avoided the difficulties and dangers involved with wide-scale operations in the central hill country. The conquest was conducted mainly in the lowlands, and the Egyptian troops penetrated the highlands only in one place: the area north of Jerusalem. The topographical list indicates that the troops reached the highlands through the Beth-horon pass and advanced as far as the southernmost hill country of Ephraim. Except for Jerusalem, no other important centre lies in the invaded highlands region. Hence, Shishak’s campaign confirms the biblical picture of Jerusalem’s importance in the late 10th century BCE (Na’aman 1998: 261‒262, 269‒270; Mazar 2007: 124)" (Na'aman, "The Kingdom of Judah in the 9th Century BCE: Text Analysis versus Archaeological Research", Tel Aviv (2013), pg. 265) Editshmedt (talk) 22:29, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * And around you go.


 * Some scholars place the SSS in the 10th century BCE, and others do not. You merely follow your POV, and ignore the powerful evidence-based arguments to the contrary. Any scholar who doesn't agree with you is automatically "refuted" by those who do agree with you. Do you ever consider that the reality might actually be the other way around?


 * A "small citadel" indeed – basically a village with a small defensive wall, built on much larger Bronze Ages ruins. Hardly evidence of a grand empire. On the other hand, Philistine cities like Gath were huge and heavily fortified. How do you construct and fortify a huge city without building walls? Duh.


 * Coogan did NOT say that "Jerusalem is not a city "by our [21st century] standards", Coogan actually said that Jerusalem was "by our standards, just a village. In David's time, its population was only a few thousand, who lived on about a dozen acres, roughly equal to two blocks in Midtown Manhattan." Hardly evidence of a grand empire.


 * I never said there were a "multiplicity of kings in 9th century Israel", I said there were a multiplicity of kings in the 9th century. The Tel Dan Inscription mentioned the author defeating a multiplicity thereof, including Israel and the "House of David" among many others. You have no shame about misrepresenting other editors, do you?


 * Yes, some scholars do say that 10th century Judah was a backwater. Any little backwater can call itself a kingdom, and any little chieftain can call himself a king. There are lots of kings in South Africa today – some recognised by the government, some not, and all largely powerless. Idi Amin called himself the King of Scotland, and see also Principality of Sealand and Leonard Casley. Duh again.


 * In fact Cahill writes that: "The Armana letters demonstrate that Late Bronze Age Canaan was divided into a network of kingdoms of various sizes and strengths lead by local rulers who were regarded by Pharaoh merely as municipal rulers like Egyptian mayors but were regarded both by their subjects and by the rulers of neighbouring cities as kings who ascended their thrones through the dynastic principle… ". (Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period edited by Andrew G. Vaughn, Ann E. Killebrew; Society of Biblical Lit, 2003; at page 33) This might give you a fresh insight into the "mighty language" of the kings of the region.


 * Oh boy, you're not going to like this. Silberman and Finkelstein write: "The conclusion seems clear: Sheshonq and his forces marched into the hill country and attacked the early north Israelite entity. He also conquered the most important lowland cities like Megiddo and regained control of the southern trade routes. But his triumphal inscription did not and would not have mentioned Jerusalem or Judah, an isolated chiefdom that posed no immediate threat – or was already resigned to the reality of Egyptian rule." (David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition; by Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman; Simon and Schuster, 2007; page 81).


 * The Bible on the other hand says, at 2 Chronicles 12, that "When Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, he carried off the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including the gold shields Solomon had made." It also says that the LORD told Shemaiah the prophet that he had decided to spare Jerusalem from destruction at the hands of Shishak, but that Jerusalem "will, however, become subject to him, so that they may learn the difference between serving me and serving the kings of other lands.” I'm not sure which "biblical picture of Jerusalem’s importance in the late 10th century BCE" Na’aman is referring to, but even Chronicles, that most Judahite of records, admits that Jerusalem groveled to Shishak. Mmmm.


 * Of course, Chronicles was written centuries later, but everyone still remembered that Jerusalem had groveled to Shishak, so the Judahite scribes had to find some acceptable "spin" to explain the debacle. In reality Shishak probably banged on the gate, said "become my vassal or I will sack you like all the other cities who thought they were powerful", and Jerusalem groveled.


 * Wdford (talk) 16:46, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I knew you couldn't resist responding. Finkelstein's dating of the SSS and LSS to the 9th century BC is solely dependent on his Low Chronology. You claim there are powerful arguments regarding all this, but I don't believe you really think that. I think you're just saying it. I have carefully studied the relevant papers on this topic. I don't think you have. I don't think you know the first thing about the SSS and LSS or the literature on them. If I asked you what architectural unit is proposed to link the SSS with the LSS, I don't think you'd be able to tell me. In any case, as I said, Finkelstein's dating of (part of) the SSS and the LSS to the 9th century is solely dependent on his Low Chronology. Let him tell you himself: "E. Mazar now accepts that this earth accumulation may include material from the early Iron Age IIA. It seems that A. Mazar' s demand, that in order to date the LSS to a post-Iron Age date we should expect to find "at least a few post-Iron I sherds in these layers" has now been fulfilled. This means, again, that the massive walls can hardly antedate ca. 900 BCE" (Finkelstein, "The "Large Stone Structure" in Jerusalem: Reality versus Yearning", ZDPV (2011), pp. 7-8). Let me elucidate this for you. The fill under the SSS and LSS has pottery that ranges all the way from the Middle Bronze Age and abruptly terminates at, per Finkelstein himself here, with the early Iron IIA. Initially, it was said that the latest pottery is Iron I pottery, but some very early Iron IIA sherds are now apparently known. This lead Mazar to making the point: we can't really date the structure that much after, then, because it wouldn't make sense for the region from which the fill was taken to go with centuries without a sherd from a single later layer finding its way in. Finkelstein appears convinced and so cites that in fact early Iron IIA pottery is known from the fill, and so he says that the structure cannot predate 900 BC. But this is only valid on Finkelstein's Low Chronology. On Mazar's modified conventional chronology, the Iron IIA begins 980 BC, and so "early" Iron IIA pottery would be from the first half to mid-10th century BC. Finkelstein however puts the beginning of the Iron IIA at around 900 BC, and so the finding of ~900 BC pottery under the LSS tells Finkelstein that it cannot predate 900 BC. If Finkelstein accepted the Modified Conventional Chronology that almost every other archaeologist accepts, he would have said that the structure cannot predate 980 BC, not 900 BC. This is his argument.


 * A small citadel is not "basically a village". It's a small citadel. Jerusalem is not "basically a village". Jerusalem, if it included the Temple Mount at the time, would be 12ha. That's not the biggest city in the world, but that is actually significant in size. In the Late Bronze Age at the very least, even 7ha was considered typical for a large city. But here, we're talking about 12ha. Granted that there are a number of cities at the time bigger than 12ha, but that does not diminish the fact that we have a decently sized city by any standard for the time. Keep in mind the fact that Jerusalem had no residential space in this time. It was solely chosen as an administrative capital, which goes a long way to explaining the population and size. You then repeat the error about the magnitude of Philistine cities. As I explained to you before, the only giant Philistine city was Gath. Not Ashdod, not any of the others. Just Gath. Your citation of Jane Cahill later in your comment backfires, because Cahill describes 10th century Jerusalem as a legitimate city with notable building activity. She also thinks the SSS dates to the 10th century. Finally, it is well accepted among a large number of scholars, if not the majority of scholars, that a Jerusalem of this size was in fact fine and perfect for the capital of a larger kingdom, even a United Monarchy. See: (1) Uziel & Itzhaq, "Iron Age Jerusalem: Temple-Palace, Capital City", Journal of the American Oriental Society (2007), pp. 161-170 (2) Nadav Na'aman, "The Contribution of the Amarna Letters to the Debate on Jerusalem's Political Position in the Tenth Century B. C. E.", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1996), pp. 17-27 (3) Amihai Mazar, "Jerusalem in the 10th Century b.c.e.: The Glass Half Full" (2006), pp. 255-272 (3) Isaac Kalimi, Writing and Rewriting the Story of Solomon in Ancient Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 76-81.


 * The conversation about the Tel Dan Inscription is over. No archaeologist would give an inkling of credibility to the claim that there were more than two kingdoms or kings in ancient Israel. (And I didn't misrepresent you when I said Israel. That is a fact. I meant the wider-encompassing term Israel which includes both the northern and southern kingdom.)


 * Who thinks Judah was a backwater? Citation needed. Don't just spit unverifiable names. Real citations needed. We already know that Garfinkel and Finkelstein think of it as a kingdom, so that wont do. In fact, Garfinkel thinks that it was responsible for the construction of Khirbet Qeiyafa, which required over 200,000 tons of stone. Give just one WP:RS source for this claim. Go on. Backwaters don't usually erect six-chambered gates, ashlar palaces, structures like the SSS and the LSS, and a small citadel like Khirbet Qeiyafa which required 200,000 tons of stone to construct, and so forth.


 * Your citation of Finkelstein & Silberman is simply things they've been claiming for years. What they don't address is Na'aman's sophisticated argument to the otherwise. Let me highlight it for you: "Except for Jerusalem, no other important centre lies in the invaded highlands region. Hence, Shishak’s campaign confirms the biblical picture of Jerusalem’s importance in the late 10th century BCE". Your citation of Chronicles, which comes far later, is meaningless. Furthermore, all it says is that Shishak gained control of Jerusalem. That proves literally nothing. You now apparently think that "United Monarchy" means the same thing as "invincible superpower that can defeat any empire on earth!" Please explain how you brilliantly came to the "conclusion" that Jerusalem must have been able to defeat Egypt. You really are willing to say anything, aren't you?


 * OUCH. Time for another quote you wont like, this one summarizing the scholarly consensus against the Low Chronology. Matthieu Richelle summarizes the topic: "On the other hand, the low chronology has never convinced the majority of archaeologists. In fact, Finkelstein’s hypothesis has perhaps been welcomed more among biblical scholars and the general public, and a few historians as well, than among his fellow archaeologists. In 2001, Ziony Zevit noted that 'practically all archaeologists, old and young, who are working on the Iron Age, have rejected his change of dates as being unfounded'. In 2005 Finkelstein felt obliged to respond to the criticism 'Finkelstein stands alone'. Five years later, William Dever wrote: 'the archaeological consensus today is still in favor of the conventional chronology'. Likewise, in 2014, James Hardin noted that 'most archaeologists still lean towards the more traditional chronology'. Finally, in 2017, Lester Grabbe noted that the rival chronology (the 'Modified Conventional Chronology,' on which see below) 'seems to have been fairly widely accepted'." (Matthieu Richelle (translated by Sarah Richelle), The Bible and Archaeology, Hendrickson Publishers, 2018, pp. 86-7). Given the fact that archaeologists have a consensus against Finkelstein's Low Chronology, I kindly ask you to explain why you think it is true. After all, he who opposes almost all experts is the one that has the explaining to do.Editshmedt (talk) 17:37, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Otherwise, what has this debate to do with the article? Nothing, guess, should be closed per WP:NOTFORUM. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:00, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * More squeaking and repeating from Editshmedt. On and on.


 * Re the Tel Dan Inscription: My post at 22:00 on 18 January 2021 stated: "In the 9th century BC, there were lots of "kingdoms" and lots of "kings". Hazael stomped on quite a few of them, and Shoshenq stomped on quite a few more." You did indeed misrepresent my statement.


 * A backwater can still be a kingdom, if the chieftain calls himself a king. It is still a backwater, regardless of the "mighty language". I have cited many authors who agree – from Coogan to Garfinkel to Finkelstein to even Mazar. All your semantics will not change that.


 * Oh yes, Jerusalem at that time was just a small village, with a small population, and Judah was a small bunch of tribesmen in the hills. Many scholars agree, as has been discussed extensively above. The Temple Mount was allegedly built by Solomon, if he really existed, if it was built in this period at all, so it was not an issue in Davidic times. You are also being ridiculous to say that "Jerusalem had no residential space in this time". It had a population, so where did those people live? Did they commute in from the surrounding rural villages every morning on the bus?


 * Re the Low Chronology: The difference is less than 100 years. Simplistically, ancient dating is based vaguely on eclipses and calculations based on years of reign-lengths etc, which are all not very certain. In the case of David and Solomon (assuming he was even real), the reign-lengths and other dates are based solely on the Bible stories, and are highly doubtful indeed. These uncertain dates are then used to date strata, which are identified by pottery. However pottery styles didn't change overnight across entire regions, the new styles were phased in gradually, which could take many decades, especially in far-flung places like Judea. The existing old pottery would still be used until it broke – poor people especially would not simultaneously smash all their existing pottery because it was suddenly out of fashion. According to Lowell K. Handy in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, in the Forward at page xix, "the current set of diagnostics cannot be limited to the 10th century alone; it is not distinguishable from 9th century forms in most instances."  Since the pottery styles are quite unreliable for establishing hard dates with any precision, and since the ancient records and reign-lengths are quite unreliable for establishing hard dates with any precision, to fight like hamsters over a few decades of dating based on a shard or two of pottery is utterly ridiculous. However that is what happens here. Add in some religious fundamentalism about Biblical historicity, and a sprinkle of academic ego, and you get a flock of Editshmedts counting heads.


 * So you finally admit that Gath was a huge city with huge constructions. So what of your "unique" Jerusalem structures now? The LSS and the SSS – even if they are assumed to be a single structure – are only worth about 0.2 hectare. Every fortified Philistine city built in Mazar's period of 12th-10th BCE was much larger than that. Your quote from Amihai Mazar came from "Jerusalem in the 10th Century BCE; The Glass Half Full", by Amihai Mazar, pp 255-270. Mazar states at page 268 that "It should be noted that several cities in Iron Age I–IIA Israel were either similar to Jerusalem in size or were much larger, and some of them were fortiﬁed. This was true of the major cities of the Philistines—Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron (the latter decreasing in size during the 10th century)." You knew this, but pretended otherwise. That is quote-mining.


 * Various people who actually excavated in Jerusalem, including Kenyon, Macalister, Steiner, Duncan and Shiloh, have variously dated the LSS and the SSS from the Jebusites to the Hasmoneans. Not everyone agrees that the LSS and the SSS were built as a single structure, or even that each component was itself built in a single phase. However your POV drives you to fixate on those scholars whose conclusions happen to support your own. A Mazar himself states at Pg 265 "Can the Stepped Structure and the missing building retained by it be identiﬁed with the “Fortress of Zion”? To me the identiﬁcation is plausible in light of the chronological considerations and the nature of the structure as detailed above." The Fortress of Zion was of course a Jebusite citadel, which was taken over by David.


 * Since all your hypotheses are essentially based on the Bible, including the very existence of Solomon and the United Monarchy, it is strange to see you writing off the Bible stories as "meaningless". Obviously I never suggested that "United Monarchy" means the same thing as "invincible superpower that can defeat any empire on earth!" Your frothing and hyperbole is of course entirely to be expected.


 * Wdford (talk) 16:48, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I've already discredited all your points, Wdford. There's no need to act as if this discussion is competitive.


 * As I said over, the discussion on the Tel Dan Inscription is over. I've fully refuted your points on it, and no scholar takes seriously that there was anything less than two kingdoms with one king each. This is just desperation based on nothing. Give up.


 * You've finished yourself off when it comes to the Philistine cities. I don't think you just understood what happened. At first, you came around claiming that there were tons of really large Philistine cities. I said no, that's completely wrong, there's only one really big Philistine city - Gath. So, you were wrong there. However, you then made another confusion. You claimed that because I said Gath was a really really big city at the time, that must mean it had structures on the scale of the SSS. I don't know how your brain gets away with these non-sequiturs. Africa is a much bigger place than the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom has far more monumental architecture than what currently is found anywhere in Africa. Your idea that Gath being big must prove that it had architecture on the scale of the SSS, despite the fact that no such architecture has ever been found, is fanciful. I don't know when you'll come to grips with the fact that there was no structure on the scale of the SSS in the 12th-10th centuries, either in Israel or the neighbors of Israel. Yes, Mazar is a careful scholar. He knows what he's talking about - if there was anything in Gath to suggest otherwise, he wouldn't have said this. But there isn't. And you can't point to any. Because they don't exist. There is no architecture from the 12th-10th centuries in Gath on the scale of the SSS. I don't think you have any idea how massive the SSS is, anyways, as your confusion indicates that it wasn't very impressive - despite being extraordinarily so.


 * We've already seen that Finkelstein's dating of the SSS/LSS is solely based on the Low Chronology, which in turn is dismissed by almost all archaeologists. I've straight up quoted Finkelstein saying that. You claim I'm focusing only on the people who agree with me, but there is literally not a single scholar besides Finkelstein to argue for a post-10th century date after the completion of Eilat Mazar's excavations. Not one. And the reason why is obvious: he himself says that his dating is based on his Low Chronology. A. Mazar, E. Mazar, Faust, Na'aman, Dever, Cahill, etc and the eventual conclusion that Jerusalem was, though small, clearly an administrative center. Ancient sites don't need a residential area for the small population. As I noted earlier, there simply was no residential area in 10th Jerusalem. This is just a fact, I don't know why you have a consistent problem with facts. This is not to say that there were no homes. But it certainly is to say that there was no "general population" in 10th century Jerusalem. The inhabitants were all individuals there were largely part of the administrative apparatus or connected to those who were. I can't see how you missed this. Administrative centers in antiquity, just like I'm telling you we know is true for Jerusalem here, are common. This isn't rare. This isn't unknown. But as usual, you don't know the basics when it comes to ancient times and so made another basic error.


 * Your discussion on the chronology is so confused that I barely know when to start. Israel's Bronze/Ironze chronologies has literally nothing to do with the regnal years in the Bible or eclipses. Where did that confusion come from? A 60-80 year difference between the chronologies is significant enough to tell that the Low Chronology fails in numerous ways. The Low Chronology results in extreme compression of lower strata (temporally), completely incoherent strata synchronizations, completely butchered views on pottery chronology, and so forth. You quote Lowell Handy, not realizing that what he says is blatantly incompatible with the Low Chronology. You really know nothing about this, do you? Per the Low Chronology, Iron IIA pottery begins around the turn of the 9th century and lasts for the rest of the century. In this case, Iron IIA pottery would not belong to the 10th century BC at all. However, Handy is saying that, in terms of the fact of the matter, Iron IIA pottery is largely continuous from the 10th to 9th centuries BC. This is in fact a specific prediction of the Modified Conventional Chronology, which posits that Iron IIA pottery starts around 980 BC and lasts until 840 BC. Therefore, Jezreel has 9th century pottery that looks very similar to 10th century pottery at Megiddo. All that shows, of course, is that the pottery in both the 10th and 9th centuries were largely contiguous. You quoted a clear affirmation of the Modified Conventional Chronology, confusedly thinking it helps you out. It in fact refutes the Low Chronology.


 * There is nothing you can do to change the fact that the overwhelming majority of archaeologists have rejected the Low Chronology. The Low Chronology, in turn, is the only basis on which you can disentangle the SSS, LSS, and all the other structures we've discussed from the 10th century. But please keep telling me about how William Dever and Amihai Mazar are maximalist religious fundamentalists in order to preserve your precious, if fragile views.Editshmedt (talk) 17:43, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * OK, except for your obsession with the Low Chronology, do you have WP:RS-based edits to make in the article David? None of the editors who disagree with you put all their money on either the Low Chronology or Finkelstein. You behave like this article is about the Low Chronology, while that is at best WP:COATRACK and WP:TE at worst. Tgeorgescu (talk) 07:04, 23 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You have insulted some of my points, evaded some of them and twisted some of them, but I don't think that "discredited" is the correct term.


 * Re the Tel Dan Inscription – I have never suggested that there were less than two "kingdoms", I stated that there were probably scores of "kingdoms". There might not have been exactly precisely seventy kings in this region at any given moment, but both Hazael and Sheshonq defeated a large number of kings, and there would surely have been other kings they never fought with at all. This is yet another strawman diversion.


 * Re the Philistine cities – obviously they had structures larger than the SSS. The SSS is just a retaining wall, of very limited length. The Philistine cities were big fortified cities with fortification walls all around, thus those fortifications would naturally be much more extensive than the SSS by far. Mazar specifically lists Ashdod, Gath and Ekron in this category, thus not just Gath. Mazar also notes other fortified cities in the region that were bigger than Jerusalem in that period. Your cherry-picked quote is thus convincingly contradicted by the very same author in the very same paper.


 * Mazar also noted that there is no evidence that Jerusalem itself even had a city wall during this period, and various authors (including Mazar) have suggested that the SSS could actually have been an earlier Jebusite structure to begin with. Mazar at page 270 states that: "The evidence for dating the newly discovered monumental building is almost identical to that of the Stepped Structure: the terminus post quem is the early Iron Age I pottery in the earth layer below the foundations. However, because this layer also abutted the lower courses of the stones of this building and there are no later sherds, it seems plausible that the building was founded around the date of this pottery, that is, during Iron Age I (12th–11th centuries BCE). The Iron IIA pottery (10th–9th centuries BCE) dates the repairs or period of use of this building."  Clear enough?


 * Your understanding of a "residential area" and a "general population" are also a bit strange. At a time when most people lived a rural lifestyle and had rural jobs, virtually all towns existed only as places of religious congregation and trade, and thus taxation. However various authors accept that Jerusalem had a "resident" population of around 4,000. Less than 1,000 of these would have been adult males, and accepting that they would have needed some tradesmen and some cooks and some soldiers and some priests etc, that leaves about the correct number of bureaucrats needed to "govern" a small tribal "empire" of about 20,000 people. Presumably your "definitions" will change over time as editors continue to demonstrate your errors.


 * You really do have an obsession with the Low Chronology. As I have stated repeatedly, I don't support or reject the Low Chronology, I seriously question the relevance of this debate at all, seeing as how it is generally recognised that dating cannot be that precise to begin with.


 * Furthermore, since the purported dating of the purported United Monarchy is based on hypothesised calculations based on unreliable Bible stories, I don't share your anguish over potential compression of lower strata by a few decades, wobbly strata synchronizations, and the impact on the acknowledged-unreliability of pottery chronology etc.


 * I would of course also point to your specious statement that "Jezreel has 9th century pottery that looks very similar to 10th century pottery at Megiddo." If we put aside the desperate need to manufacture a slot for David and Solomon, and if we instead review the actual evidence objectively, it could also be interpreted that "Jezreel has 9th century pottery that looks very similar to 9th century pottery at Megiddo." Not so?


 * Wdford (talk) 16:32, 23 January 2021 (UTC)


 * OUCH. So I've already proven that the "seventy" in the Tel Dan Inscription is symbolic and does not refer to anything more than what Hazael claims elsewhere to have done in the inscription. Nevertheless, my drive to understand the scholarship has lead me to reading more of the literature on the Tel Dan Inscription beyond Biran's 1995 paper. It turns out that the "seventy" reading is under heavy fire from scholarly circles. Andre Lemaire, "The Tel Dan Stele as a Piece of Royal Historiography", JSOT (1998) says that "the reading ’seventy’ is based only on a very small fragment of a letter which is interpreted as part of an ’ayin but could also be part of another letter". Hadi Ghantous also argues against the "seventy" reading on pg. 61 of his book The Elisha-Hazael Paradigm and the Kingdom of Israel, which you can find on Google Books. Matthew Suriano, however, has defended the "seventy" reading in a 2007 paper. However, he's brought attention to a fact that I am utterly amazed has been right under our noses the whole time. Suriano writes: "Several Northwest Semitic sources contain the motif of “killing seventy persons,” and as the initial publication states, the number seventy is symbolic, expressing “totality, all inclusiveness.” Nevertheless, the significance of the phrase is much more specific. All of the examples cited by Biran and Naveh involve a political coup: Abimelek killed the seventy sons of Gideon (Judg. 9:5),32 Jehu killed the seventy sons of Ahab (2 Kings 10:6–7; cf. v. 1), and the unnamed usurper of Samªal killed Bir-Sar and his seventy brothers (or “kinsmen”) (KAI 215:3). The literary motif of killing seventy individuals metaphorically represents the elimination of all other claimants to power" (pp. 167-168). It's amazing how the one time I blindly believed what you said, i.e. that Hazael is talking about defeating kings in Israel/Judah, it turned out to be utterly wrong. First of all, the seventy reading is heavily rejected by many scholars. And for those who accept it, it has a very specific meaning. Hazael was a usurper, and it has been shown that the seventy military motif symbolically refers to defeating all other claimants to power. In other words, on this reading, defeating "seventy kings" is a reference to Hazael defeating his rivals in ancient Syria on the way to his succession to the throne of Aram-Damascus. This has nothing to do with any dispute in Israel/Judah. This is why one does not blindly deny the absolute consensus of all archaeologists regarding the fact that the 9th century involved two kings and two kingdoms based on a spurious reading of one inscription. Your claim that Shishak mentions multiple kings is equally wishful. No such reference in Shishak can be found.


 * You can keep saying that Philistia had structures on the scale of the SSS, but you don't have any evidence, so I know it's not true. You just have conjecture, whereas I have architectural fact on my side. Guess which one is more likely to be reliable.


 * I don't even know the relevance of your quoting Mazar on the structure being an earlier Jebusite fortress. That was in 2007. As I quoted Finkelstein pointing out in his 2011 paper, we now know that there is early Iron IIA pottery in the fill under the SSS/LSS. Thus, William Dever accepts a 10th century date in his Beyond the Texts. Nadav Na'aman, in 2014, proposed that the SSS be identified with the Millo that Solomon was said to have constructed. As it happens, Eilat Mazar also agrees with the Millo interpretation. The problem in having conversations with those who are shockingly ignorant is that you have to walk them through ... everything.


 * Just like any other administrative center, 10th century Jerusalem had no residential population. Hate to keep repeating facts to you. Your discussion on ancient towns/cities is once again so confused that it's hard to know where to start. The idea that "virtually all towns existed only as places of religious congregation and trade" is straight up nonsense. Which "authors" think Jerusalem had a residential population of 4,000 or that the number can magically be divided into normal demographics as if we were not talking about an administrative center where almost everyone would be involved in the administrative apparatus or connected to those who were? An "administrative center", like 10th century Megiddo, is a site where most of the constructions are public buildings. The simple fact of the matter is that Jerusalem was an administrative center and citadel, and the inhabitants there were not part of a residential general population but in fact were tied to the administrative apparatus.


 * The Low Chronology is the only basis on which the six-chambered gates, ashlar palaces at Megiddo, fortification of Beersheba, construction of the SSS and the LSS, and so forth can be placed in the 9th century rather than the 10th. Unless you defend the Low Chronology, I'm simply going to assume that they're all 10th century.


 * You write "I don't share your anguish over potential compression of lower strata by a few decades, wobbly strata synchronizations". Why isn't that a problem? Because it destroys the Low Chronology which is the unacknowledged basis of all you write? Almost every living archaeologist thinks its a problem. OOops. Strata compression is a giant problem. Downdating upper strata by a century would force so many lower strata into such a short period of time at several sites that it's a wonder that this can even be proposed. The implausibility is through the roof. Per synchronization, the Low Chronology would require strata with Philistine pottery to be contemporary with strata that have pre-Philistine pottery. That's like dating a city that uses cars alongside another city that uses horses for transportation. Archaeologists often outright dismiss the Low Chronology on that fact alone. And the problems don't stop there.


 * Sorry, wait, what do you mean by the "acknowledged unreliability of pottery chronology"? Unreliable according to what, exactly? You are aware that Finkelstein's Jezreel pottery argument ... is based on pottery chronology, right?


 * Re Jezreel pottery. Sorry, this "specious statement" is actually what you just quoted Lowell Handy saying - i.e. that Iron IIA pottery is continuous from the 10th to 9th centuries BC. It seems that the Modified Conventional Chronology is so widely accepted that you don't even realize when you quote from it. The continuity of the pottery has been noted by numerous archaeologists going back to the 1950's (all of whom Finkelstein ignored) and was actually proven by Amihai Mazar himself who demonstrated such pottery at Jezreel and Megiddo is also found at Tel Rehov in the 10th century BC. Even Finkelstein admitted a 10th century date for these Tel Rehov strata. Per Finkelstein's own papers, he puts the strata between 925-900 BC - 80 years before Jezreel's destruction. Of course, even a 920-900 BC dating is considered specious and too low by all other archaeologists, who note that this involves force-fitting two of Tel Rehov's strata in a 25-year period (whereas two strata are no less than 80 years in any other site). Mazar places the beginning of these strata at 960 BC, which seems to be the consensus. Even then, scholars have basically stopped debating this argument of Finkelstein's ever since he conceded the 10th century date for these Tel Rehov strata. It's amazing how Finkelstein has conceded this all the way back in 2003, and yet you continue repeating the specious argument. Once again, I have to walk you through everything.Editshmedt (talk) 18:04, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

You're the only one here arguing that the Low Chronology is of enormous importance. If you don't produce WP:RS about David, this discussion should be closed according to WP:NOTFORUM. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:10, 23 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You are really starting to babble now. Never a good sign.


 * It is common cause that the Tel Dan Inscription is badly damaged and seriously incomplete. We will probably never know what else it said. However your frothing about the "symbolic-seventy-seven" is getting comical. After typing oceans of text lecturing us on how the word "seventy" could be deduced with total confidence from the remaining evidence, you now cite a source saying that "the reading ’seventy’ is based only on a very small fragment of a letter which is interpreted as part of an ’ayin but could also be part of another letter". Are you really trying to build the encyclopaedia here, or do you argue on these pages just to pass the time?


 * According to other non-Biblical evidence, Hazael campaigned much further afield, including Philistia, so there is no justification to assume that the kings of the Tel Dan Inscription originally were limited to just Israel and Judah. Also, the non-Biblical sources re the campaigns of Sheshonq also indicate that he invaded other Canaanite kingdoms, and did not limit himself to Israel. This is well known fact. I think your strawman has run his course, yes?


 * Here is a website with many modern photos of the Stepped Stone Structure etc, so that you can see exactly how small it really is.


 * Numerous experts have written that the Philistine cities were huge, and were fortified. Huge fortifications around huge cities will be huge, unlike the SSS. Assaf Yasur-Landau writes in "The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age" at page 285 that Ekron "reached an area of about 20 hectares". He also wrote that during the "late eleventh century", Gath grew to "cover an area of 23 hectares". Per Yasur-Landau, before the eleventh century Ashdod and Ashkelon were only "about six to eight hectares each", but that they also grew bigger in the "late eleventh century" and were fortified etc. Lily Singer-Avitz suggests that Ashkelon might have reached as large as 60 hectares. At Ashdod, Lily Singer-Avitz describes a wall dating to "late 11th-early 10th" century as "a massive city wall 4.5 meters wide", and that the remaining ruins of this wall were found to extend quite a distance. Since early Jerusalem was only about 4 hectares, and the SSS did not encompass even a small percentage of early Jerusalem, fortifications surrounding cities of 20-23 hectares would have been comparatively very large indeed. Your pretending to the contrary is pitiful.


 * Numerous experts have stated that the SSS was part of the original Jebusite fortress, not just Mazar. Even the Bible stories tell that David took over the existing Jebusite fortress/citadel, and made it his own. Numerous experts have stated that the Millo was part of this same original Jebusite fortress, ie that the SSS is part of the original Jebusite Millo. Your POV drives you to home in on the authors who support your POV, but that is only a part of the bigger picture.


 * It is also comical how you continue to insist that nobody lived in Jerusalem except for all the people who lived in Jerusalem. What are you actually trying to achieve down this particular rabbit-hole please?


 * I have no problem with the Modified Conventional Chronology, or any other Chronology – it's not important to this article. I fully accept that "Iron IIA pottery is continuous from the 10th to 9th centuries BCE". I'm sure this problem is not limited to Iron IIA pottery either. It is only your determination to perpetuate the Low Chronology strawman that hinders progress here. I found it interesting how you tried to trick me into "defending" the Low Chronology. Mmmmmmm.


 * Finally, you put huge emphasis on the "Solomonic" six-chambered gates, but you neglect to mention that other six-chambered gates existed outside of Solomon's territory – including a six-chambered gate in Ashdod, where Solomon would never have ventured. How did all these cities have near-identical gates, when Solomon (assuming he existed at all) never built things in Ashdod? Who did control both Ashdod and Megiddo in this time period, along with many other places, and came from a monumental-building culture? Who could it possibly have been? Oh wait, was it perhaps Sheshonq? Could it maybe have been him? He did erect a stela at Megiddo ... I wonder if ….. Wdford (talk) 17:06, 24 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Biran's reconstruction was wrong, so what. Tel Dan inscrip says "two kings" or "mighty kings". You later claim Hazael campaigned in Philistia, which I'm pretty sure is a factual error, and then make assertions I've never heard of regarding the Shishak campaigns without citations. Yawn, that tends to indicate it is fictitious. You keep forgetting that you need to prove that Philistia had SSS-sized buildings, not big borders. The simply reality of the matter is that Mazar said that there is no Philistine construction from the 12th-10th centuries on the scale of the SSS. P.S. The images you gave of the SSS show it is gigantic. Put on your glasses. Do you not see the size of those rocks?


 * You then bloop again on Jerusalem. I feel no need to repeat my education of you from last time. We now know there is Iron IIA pottery in the construction fill of the SSS now (information not available to Mazar in 2007 before the reports were finalized in 2012), which means it dates to the 10th, not the 12th-11th centuries, per Mazar (2007). More recently, Mazar has admitted that the most likely dating is 10th century, as has everyone else (except Finkelstein of course, because his Low Chronology would give the structure a 9th century date instead). Given a 10th century dating, identification with the Millo that Solomon constructed (per 1 Kings 9:15, 24) is most probable. You also blatantly misrepresent my words on Jerusalem's population, somehow getting the fanciful idea that I said Jerusalem had a population but it didn't. Only a Wdford could read that into my statements. Wdford also repeats his claim that Jerusalem was 4ha, which means he dogmatically excludes the possibility, which archaeologists have not validated or discounted, that Jerusalem included the Temple Mount - making it 12ha. FYI, if it was 12ha, it would be a medium sized city rather than a small city. If Solomon did build the Temple as stated, then the 12ha size would be correct. Keep in mind that a large number of scholars have been shifting to accepting that Solomon did in fact build the Temple because of architectural finds being made in the last few decades. Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu make a pretty damn good case for Solomon constructing the temple in this paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/3/198. I found it pretty convincing, although I had no thoughts on the topic prior to reading this. Give me your thoughts when you read it yourself.


 * It seems you have no problem with the Modified Conventional Chronology and you admit that Iron IIA pottery is continuous from the 10th-9th centuries per all scholars now. Per this statement, you also have no problem with a 10th century date for all the aforementioned structures.


 * You then come up with another weird fringe theory that SHOSHENQ! was the one to construct six-chambered gates in both Ashdod in Philistine territory and the ones in Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. This is despite the fact that Shishak never even stepped into Philistia. Nadav Na'aman briefly describes the geography of the campaign: "The Egyptian topographical list indicates that the campaign was directed against the Kingdom of Israel and the settlements of the Beer-sheba Valley, the Negev Highlands and the lower Naúal Besor area. The campaign skipped over the territories of the Philistine kingdoms (the coast and most of the Shephelah) and avoided the difficulties and dangers involved with wide-scale operations in the central hill country" (Na'aman, "The Kingdom of Judah in the 9th Century BCE: Text Analysis versus Archaeological Research", Tel Aviv (2013), pg. 265). That was an unfortunate goof.Editshmedt (talk) 20:41, 24 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The Tel Dan inscription DOES NOT say "two kings" or "mighty kings". Even the Bible stories say that Hazael campaigned successfully in Philistia. If you are so knowledgeable about all these things, you should be aware of this basic fact. (2 Kings 12:17 – "About this time Hazael king of Aram went up and attacked Gath and captured it. Then he turned to attack Jerusalem.") We also have confirmation from archaeologists such as Bar-Ilan University Professor Aren Maeir, the expert on Gath – see eg . It's really time for you to retire this sad strawman.


 * The photos I linked show that the SSS is much less than "gigantic". See those people at the top? They are adult humans – kindly providing you with some scale. The individual rocks are not what Mazar was talking about, but they are not particularly impressive either, and they are quite possibly Jebusite to begin with. Mmmm?


 * Meanwhile, over at Gath, Maeir has been finding properly massive buildings. Herewith some quotes from Maeir, in :
 *  "They show that the buildings and the fortifications were very large, built with extremely large stones."
 * "The monumental architecture is of much larger dimensions than almost anything found in the Levant during this era."
 * I particularly like this paragraph, on the potential origins of the Goliath story: "Perhaps the authors of the Bible saw the remains of the outsized 11th century building on the ground, speculated Maeir, and thought to themselves, “Enormous stones? Who could move such things? Only giants could move it.” Similar mythological narratives have developed at other ancient wonders, including Stonehenge and Easter Island, he said." Mmmmm?


 * And yet again - more of your tired ranting about the Low Chronology. The Temple (of which there is zero actual evidence) was purportedly built by Solomon (assuming he really existed) and not by David, so it is not relevant to this article.


 * Re the campaign of Shoshenq into Palestine, he recorded his feats on the Bubastite Portal at Karnak. The toponym list names approximately 180 places he captured or destroyed, of which only about 25 can still be read today. Much of the inscriptions have been eroded over time, but Megiddo is still legible, as are Beit She'an and Gibeon and Socoh, and Aijalon, which is in the Shephelah. In a summation written by GW Ahlström ["Pharaoh Shoshenq's Campaign to Palestine", by GW Ahlström, on pages 1-14 of "History and Traditions of Early Israel: Studies Presented to Eduard Nielsen, edited by André Lemaire & Benedikt Otzen] Ahlström notes that both K Kitchen and B Mazar believe that the Shoshenq army used Gaza as one of their base camps (pages 5;7;12;13). Coastal Gaza was a major Philistine city, and may have already been under Egyptian control or allegiance before the campaign started. Na'aman is entitled to an opinion, but other scholars have other opinions.


 * PS: So who do you suppose built the gate at Ashdod that is exactly like the Megiddo gate, seeing as how Solomon could not and did not?


 * An interesting insight on Pg 13: Ahlström writes that pharaohs "customarily did not penetrate the hills of Judah because of the sparse settlement and the lack of large cities".


 * Shoshenq also set up a stela bearing his cartouche at Megiddo to commemorate his victory. See also How come you have never heard of this?


 * Ahlström believes (pg 13) that Shoshenq’s motive for the war was to “build his own trade network in Palestine. Since most trade routes bypassed the mountains of Judah, Rehoboam’s Judah would not have been as big a concern as a campaign target. Nothing would really have been gained in conquering the hill country of Judah, with its sparse population." However Ahlström notes that the Bible story at 1 Kings 14 mentions "Shishak" actually attacking Jerusalem, and acknowledges the possibility that Jerusalem may indeed have been included in the campaign, and that this name may have been on that part of the list which has not survived.


 * Re the "case" made by Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu for Solomon constructing the temple, the article was an interesting read. The descriptions and models look exactly like Egyptian temples. According to the text there were also similar temples in Turkey and Syria etc – far away from Solomon's territory. Comparing against the temple at Motza confirms the historicity of the biblical tradition, but it DOES NOT confirm the historicity of the Solomonic temple in Jerusalem. Garfinkel is really stretching a bit here. I also found it interesting that the only "actual temple building" of this general description, namely at Motza, was from the 9th century BCE. I suspect that the Motza temple may actually have been the "Solomonic" temple which the later Jehudite Bible scribes decided to describe as being in Jerusalem - and Solomonic. As you say, it’s a very short walk to Jerusalem from Motza, and why would they maintain two temples so close together? Mmmmmm.


 * Wdford (talk) 20:47, 25 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Facts I pointed out that you gleefully evaded: (1) The Tel Dan Inscription, per tons of scholars, in fact says "two kings" (Lemaire) or "mighty kings" (Na'aman). Most reject seventy; the one scholar after Biran's initial report I found that accepts the 'seventy' reading is Suriano, and Suriano thinks it refers to opponents in Syria and simply means, not seventy actual kings, but non-kings who were simply competing with Hazael for the throne of Aram-Damascus. (2) You once again bargled again that the SSS is a Jebusite fortress, i.e. that it is pre-Iron IIA, despite the fact that as I've pointed out now, and as Finkelstein pointed out in 2011, and as Eilat Mazar published in 2012, the construction fill of the SSS has early Iron IIA pottery. By definition, a structure post-dates the construction fill its built over.


 * I saw the humans for scale in the SSS photo - the SSS is huge. Per your Maeir quote: the building at Gath is bigger than "almost" anything else found in the Levant at the time. Seems like Maier is aware there's something bigger. So this desperate googling attempt totally backfired. Tell you what. Why don't you actually find the paper of that structure, take a look at its measurements, and get back to me on whether you think it's on the scale of the SSS or not. I also find this quite comical. You found a structure in Gath that's smaller than the SSS and are proclaiming that it is gigantic. But the SSS, which is bigger, you proclaim to be small. Please explain that to me.


 * So you have no evidence that Sheshonq campaigned in Philistia (obviously the Bubasite portal, apparently you just learned the name of it, doesn't mention any such thing). You also don't seem to realize that the Ashdod gate may well be 9th century, and that there's a 9th century six-chambered gate at Lachish as well. Don't even get me started when it comes to the similarity between these five gates. The three gates at Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo are all significantly closer to each other than the ones at Lachish or Ashdod.


 * Solomon Temple. Oh boy. You suddenly develop a weird obsession with the Motza date, even coming up with the nonsensical theory that it is the real Temple that the Bible describes, and ... totally forgetting the fact that the Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu paper also mention a similar temple is known in 10th century Khirbet Qeiyafa. Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu essentially demonstrate the historicity of the Solomonic Temple in one sentence: “The presence of a large, stone-built temple in the 9th century BCE at Motza, one hour’s walk from Jerusalem, completely changes the picture of cult in the Kingdom of Judah. If there was a temple at a secondary administrative site, there would certainly have been a central temple in the kingdom’s capital.” That is a BRUTALLY powerful argument, enough to settle this whole conversation. Jerusalem in the 10th century included the Temple Mount and so was a medium-sized, 12ha administrative site. It turns out that this is also the majority opinion of archaeologists: "Most scholars basically accept that Solomon erected a temple, though it may certainly be debated to what extent the biblical descriptions of its dimensions, decorations, and wealth reflect the realities of Solomon’s period" (Isaac Kalimi, Writing and Rewriting the Story of Solomon in Ancient Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pg. 73).


 * Every time you say "Mmmmmm", I imagine a greasy old man licking his lips.Editshmedt (talk) 00:26, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * EditSchmedit, while it is not up to me to advise others how they are spending the time, Lord knows I'm not making the best use of mine, why don't you focus your attention on other articles? Even if you are 99% right, almost nothing in all these wall-of-texts are even slightly related to David, the legendary Judahite leader. You seem to know a lot about archaeology and there are a lot of articles that are bad and needs to be improved. For example, your recent edits at Tel Dan Stele were constructive and I didn't revert them (only reworded them slightly because it's not true that the "70 kings" rendering has been "dropped"). Im The IP  (talk) 05:12, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

More insults, and more rabbit holes. On 17 January you stated that the reconstruction of the Tel Dan Inscription was solid, that "the 'seventy' reconstruction is actually based on the surviving grammar", and that my suggestion that the original text might have included some other number "simply flies in the face of logic". Now suddenly, "per tons of scholars", one person suggests it could have actually said "two kings" and one other person suggests it could have actually said "mighty kings". This is starting to look like one of those kiddy-games where you fill in the words of your choice on a template and you make up your own story. And this is the ONLY "evidence" that King David ever actually existed? Nice.

Even the Bible stories agree that pre-Davidic Jerusalem was a Canaanite settlement with a fortress, which David took over and adopted for himself. There was zero time delay between the two owners. We know that there is a lot of uncertainty about when exactly David reigned, or when he came to Jerusalem to begin with, as there is zero evidence in Jerusalem that he even existed at all. We are also told that David built further alongside those existing fortifications, and that subsequent Judean kings made holes in the walls, as well as repairs and extensions of their own, at various subsequent "Iron Age" dates. We know that the dating of Iron Age II is NOT precise, with a lot of blurred lines and continuity at the start and end with the "neighbouring" Iron Ages. We know that there is disagreement about the identification and the time periods of "early Iron IIA pottery" to begin with. Ergo, some authors are confident that the SSS is Davidic, some attribute it to Solomon, and some think it is Canaanite/Jebusite. Like the Tel Dan Inscription, the evidence is vague enough to allow all POV's to prosper.

The SSS is actually quite small. On top of this, the SSS is not actually a building, it is just a wall of stones stacked up against the hillside, and buttressed for support.

Maeir is comparing the temple at Gath against "anything found in the Levant during this era." The definition of the Levant varies, but even the "smaller" definition includes all of Phoenicia and Syria, as well as a chunk of Turkey. If the temple at Gath is larger than almost anything built in Phoenicia, Syria or Turkey, then it was immense. It is a huge stretch to assume that the "almost anything" referred to the SSS – which isn't even a building.

So we do have actual evidence that Shoshenq campaigned in Philistia. Not only does the Karnak list include Laban and Rafia, but experts including Kitchen, B Mazar, Ahlström etc agree. Twist away, troll.

There is a lot of scholarly contention about the so-called "Solomonic" gates. Apart from the usual problems of confused strata and the precise assignment of pottery styles, there are many similar gates (none of them identical), and some of them could not possibly have been built by Solomon (assuming he even existed). The Bible stories don't mention these gates, and the arguments fr dating all of the gates to a post-Solomon period are strong.

The temple at Motza was small, it had evidence of worshiping "false gods", and the floor plan copied those of the "neighbouring" peoples. Per the Bible stories, the main Jerusalem temple also copied the pagan temples. Khirbet Qeiyafa did not have a temple, merely a couple of rooms that may have been used for "cultic purposes". Garfinkel's subsequent deduction is that there would "certainly have been a central temple in the kingdom’s capital". There probably would have been a temple in Jerusalem, to provide for the needs of all those RESIDENTS. However nothing discovered at Motza gives any indication of when this Jerusalem temple may have been built, how large it may have been, or who may have built it. It therefore settles absolutely nothing.

If a King Solomon really existed (despite the utter absence of evidence thereof), then it is likely that he would have built a temple of some sort. It may have been a huge structure (despite the utter absence of evidence thereof), or it may have been a smaller and more humble structure. Even Kalimi admits to significant uncertainty. Other scholars are more outspoken on the issue. You, as usual, are cherry-picking. Wdford (talk) 14:23, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yup, I agree with both: Edtishmedt has read a lot of archaeological papers, but he has an axe to grind against the Low Chronology and generally speaking, he often cannot make heads or tails of what he has read. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:02, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The first paragraph is just something else. My statements were based on a reading of the 1995 report publishing additional fragments of the Tel Dan Inscription. If that paper is all one knows, then that is certainly the impression one gets. Sudden shifts of understanding are simply part of the process once you bother widening your horizon. Remember when you thought that Aram-Damascus was "obviously" Assyria? Remember when you thought it was "specious" that Iron IIA pottery in Jezreel was also part of the 10th century, not just the 9th? Now these are obvious to you. The simple fact of the matter is that you've had fifty opinion shifts over the course of this conversation. Criticizing me for updating my opinion in light of the evidence is, apparently, all you've got now.


 * Once again, a 10th century date is not reconcilable, unless you can prove otherwise, with a Jebusite identification. I myself followed Mazar on the Jebusite identification until I learned of this updated evidence. When you learn new evidence, you don't try to force-fit it with your views (in this case, 10th century + Jebusite construction). If it's incompatible with the evidence, just find a better view.


 * The SSS is quite gigantic. I find this absolutely amazing. You post a finding by Maeir of this absolutely gigantic, megalithic 11th century architecture at Gath ... which is actually smaller than the SSS. But the SSS is small and what you found is gigantic. How does that make any sense? Now, this structure at Gath was only excavated in the 2018-2019 seasons. It is not actually fully published yet, and perhaps we can expect it to be published in the next few years. At Gath, fortifications typically have walls of the size of about 2m in width (Welch et al., "The Limits of the~ Ancient City: The Fortifications of Tell es-Safi/Gath 115 Years after Bliss and l\llacalister" in Exploring the Holy Land, Equinox, 2019). From what we know so far in this recently excavated monumental architecture at Gath, the authors consider it seriously significant because this Iron IB fortification appears to have walls that are actually up to 4m in width. Maeir writes: "In the most recent seasons of excavations (2018–2019), additional megalithic-like architecture was discovered. In several areas in the lower city (Areas K, B, and D East; figs. 5–6), evidence of massive fortifications dating to the Iron IB were revealed. These fortifications, which appear to be ca. four meters wide, are substantially more massive than those used in the Iron IIA city, the city destroyed by Hazael (ca. 830 BCE)" (Maeir, Aren. "Memories, Myths, and Megalithics: Reconsidering the Giants of Gath", Journal of Biblical Literature (2020), pg. 679). So, we know these crucial facts: Iron IIA fortifications at Gath are substantially smaller than what they just found from the Iron IB period, which has walls up to 4 meters wide. Let's look back at the SSS/LSS then. The main wall of this complex is known as Wall 20. Want to know how wide Wall 20 is? 5 meters. Good game.


 * Nadav Na'aman said that Shishak never mentions any Philistine sites. You make a series of claims: (1) the Shishak inscription mentions cities called 'Rafia' and 'Laban' (2) these are to be identified with Philistine sites. What's the evidence for this? Nadav Na'aman's scholarship is a priority over your assertions. Even the scholars you quote for your position are admittedly conjecturing. This conversation is of no importance. A six-chambered gate in 9th century Lachish is known. We don't need Shishak to build six-chambered gates. Also, the six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer are again much closer to each other than the 9th century one at Lachish or the one at Ashdod (which may itself be 9th century). You overlooked all of this. You also rewrite history: Shishak is no longer some invader who attacks a bunch of sites per the Bubasite Portal and biblical sources, but in fact (according to you) completely conquered the region, reigned there for years, and began erecting tons of six-chambered gates (but apparently nothing else?) without leaving behind any biblical traditions of this happening, any Egyptian pottery, any distinctive Egyptian styles of construction. This is crackpottery.


 * For some reason, you kind of obsess over the fact that the Jerusalem Temple was built with similar architecture to other sites all over the Levant and Mesopotamia - this is "PAGAN!" architecture! No one has ever told me how architecture could be pagan, but you do you, LOL. You've seemed to calm down with the Motza temple and dropped the crackpot claim that it is the real biblical temple. Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu make an excellent point: if a little secondary administrative site like Motza had a temple, then the capital of the whole kingdom, Jerusalem, would CERTAINLY have one. So there must have been one in 9th century Jerusalem at the latest. I don't understand your claim that there is no evidence for Solomon. The fact that Solomon's Temple building so strongly resembles the known architecture of temples from that period is surely evidence. Finkelstein himself, when he was still on his full on Low Chronology crusade, says that archaeologically we can say Solomon existed: "Archaeologically, we can say no more about David and Solomon except that they existed" (Bible Unearthed, pg. 143). And Isaac Kalimi says that this 10th century Solomonic Temple is the majority opinion of archaeologists. I'm not cherry picking Kalimi at ALL. Granted there is a discussion over the size of Solomon's Temple (and I never indicated there wasn't) - but that he BUILT it means that Jerusalem included the Temple Mount, making it a medium-sized 12ha city. Ultimately, you did not do your homework. You simply believed what you read online without doing the hard work of reading the scholarship. Given the fact that half the people debating this on the internet are flat out mythicists, you should've been wary of the fact that what you'd learn on the internet is blatant indoctrination rather than education. You should've read the literature. And no, the Temple would NOT be needed for a non-administrative population. Khirbet Qeiyafa was a temporary military fortification-city and it clearly had cultic buildings. Editshmedt (talk) 17:06, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm going to add a lengthy quote by Kalimi: "Gershon Galil examines the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple in Kings in the light of ancient Near Eastern building stories, and concludes that it is reasonable that the “Temple was built in the days of Solomon, and the building story was composed by Solomon’s scribes: no king in the ancient Near East caused his scribes to compose a building story or inscription in honor of another king ... it is even less conceivable that a king would build a temple or a palace and attribute it to one of his predecessors.” In contrast, Galil provides numerous examples of ancient Near Eastern kings who denigrate the temple-building activities of their predecessors in order to exalt their own. Therefore, the idea that a later king of Judah actually built the Jerusalem Temple, and attributed it to Solomon, is not only unsupported by any biblical text, but also unparalleled in the ancient Near Eastern building accounts. One could also ask why, if a later king of Judah wished to attribute the Temple to a predecessor, would they not have attributed it to David, rather than Solomon? Instead, the emphasis in both the early and late biblical historiographies that David was unable to build the Temple, while Solomon did so, parallels many other ancient Near Eastern temple-building accounts that contrast the Temple builder with his predecessors" (pp. 74-75). Now that is ALSO quite strong.Editshmedt (talk) 17:42, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Well, well, so the original Temple in Jerusalem was monotheistic?
 * "Between the 10th century and the beginning of their exile in 586 there was polytheism as normal religion all throughout Israel; only afterwards things begin to change and very slowly they begin to change. I would say it is only correct for the last centuries, maybe only from the period of the Maccabees, that means the second century BC, so in the time of Jesus of Nazareth it is true, but for the time before it, it is not true."

- Prof. Dr. Herbert Niehr, Tübingen University


 * So, it is quite weird a claim that the Jews were having a monotheistic Temple in the 10th or 9th century BCE.
 * There is absolutely no archaeological evidence that David and Solomon weren't polytheists. And the Temple described in the Bible is most definitely not aniconist. So, if we define Judaism as "faith in only One God + aniconism", the Temple of Solomon wasn't a temple of Judaism. Judaic aniconism could have developed only after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon, so much later after the Temple got built. If any aniconists would have been around when the Temple got built, the Israelites would have just killed the aniconists. Any aniconist trying to mess with the building would have been killed as a traitor or blasphemer.
 * The irony is that the Temple of Solomon was the greatest stumbling block for the development of Judaic aniconism, and maybe, just maybe, greatest stumbling block for the development of monotheism. The Judaism witnessed by Jesus would have not been viable if the Temple of Solomon were still around. Tgeorgescu (talk) 12:52, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Granted there is a discussion over the size of Solomon's Temple (and I never indicated there wasn't) - but that he BUILT it means that Jerusalem included the Temple Mount, making it a medium-sized 12ha city. Ultimately, you did not do your homework. So the argument is that because the Temple Mount, that was built in the first decades of the first millenia, is 15 hectares, 10th century BCE Jerusalem must have been 12 hectares. I don't think that flies. Im The IP  (talk) 13:08, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Looks like you didn't do your homework either. The Temple Mount was originally 7 hectares and was expanded to todays 14 hectares by Herod the Great. But thanks for telling me that my argument doesn't "fly" based on a 2 second google search.Editshmedt (talk) 16:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I must not have done my homework, since I had no idea that excavations were conducted on the Temple Mount. Nor that these excavations had produced evidence for a 7 hectare platform dating to the 10th century. Im The IP  (talk) 06:15, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * So wait, you're telling me I need to debate yet another well-known fact here because your 2 second google search went awry and didn't take into account the possibility that the Temple Mount today may not necessarily have been the same size as it was 3,000 years ago? I now need to debate the fact, as found in hundreds of publications, that Herod doubled the size of the Temple Mount or that a Jerusalem including the Temple Mount would be 12 hectares? And I need to do this based on your misconception that you need to excavate a site to know how big it is? How many "facts" stop counting when it comes to these topics?Editshmedt (talk) 16:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Maybe he did. Anyway, you're begging the question that 7 ha from 1st century BCE mean 7 ha from 10th century BCE. I mean inhabited hectares. Coogan said that all Jerusalem had then 12 acres. That is 4.856 hectares. Tgeorgescu (talk) 03:03, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

And yet more insults and yet more repetition.

To objective persons, the obvious problem lies in your assertion about "yet another well-known fact". The Temple Mount that exists today was largely a creation of Herod, plus maybe some subsequent repairs and modifications. There is ZERO evidence that Solomon built anything at all, and to the extent that a Temple existed in pre-exile times, it was probably quite small and conservative. However, based purely on Bible stories and CONJECTURE, it is supposed that Solomon built a huge temple on a huge mount. As has been the case throughout this long and tiresome discussion, the argument is about EVIDENCE vs CONJECTURE. There is still ZERO evidence for Solomon or his temple, and the millions of scholars who CONJECTURE a Solomon and a Temple based on Bible stories alone, does not change that FACT.

I have not had "fifty opinion shifts" – my opinion has always been that there is ZERO evidence for the United Monarchy, and that scholarly opinions in support of the United Monarchy are based on CONJECTURE not evidence. The Tel Dan Inscription says zero about Saul or Solomon, and it says zero about David or Judah. It merely mentions that one of the author's enemies was a king descended from the "House of David". It says zero about what a "king" means in that context, it says zero about what the "House of David" means, and it says zero about Jerusalem or Judah – although it clearly mentions the Kingdom of Israel. We accept that the inscription is badly damaged, and that even what we have left is open to quite varied interpretation, but thus far no scholar has attempted to suggest that any of the many blank spaces mentioned a huge kingdom of Judah based in Jerusalem, or that David's successor was a wise and wealthy chap named Solomon.

In the time period mentioned by A Mazar, Aram-Damascus was possessed by the kings of Assyria – that is accepted fact. The Assyrians were major builders – that is also a fact. Your snide little dig is meaningless here.

I never ever said that "Iron IIA pottery in Jezreel was also part of the 10th century, not just the 9th." That is a lie. I actually wrote, on 23 January: "It could also be interpreted that "Jezreel has 9th century pottery that looks very similar to 9th century pottery at Megiddo.""

The SSS is NOT "quite gigantic", it’s merely a retaining wall consisting of stones stacked against a hillside. It's not even a proper building. The Pyramids of Giza are "quite gigantic" – if you look at it objectively, the SSS barely registers as "quite large".

Kenyon interpreted most of the SSS structures to be Jebusite. Using pottery found in the fills in the buttressing "compartments", both Shiloh and Kenyon dated the construction of the complex to the "transitional period between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age I (13th–12th centuries BCE)." This falls into the Jebusite period. They deduced that this structure was built onto the old Jebusite structures.

Steiner thought that some of the terraces may have been built by the Egyptians, who controlled Canaan at the end of the 13th century BCE.

A Mazar notes that pottery from Iron I was found in the constructional fills of the SSS, and abutting the foundations of the LSS, but nothing more recent. A Mazar is of the opinion that "the Iron I pottery is as close as it can be to the construction date of the large architectural complex". Iron Age I starts in around 1300 BCE, i.e. much earlier than the Davidic period, i.e. in the Jebusite period, so A Mazar suggests that the complex should be identified with the Jebusite "Fortress of Zion" – which is itself attested in the Bible stories as pre-existing David. Clear enough?

E Mazar desperately wanted to find the palace of King David, so she looked at the Large Stone Structure and declared it to be the palace built by the Phoenicians for King David, based on no evidence at all. E Mazar admits that the terraces seemed to have incorporated the remains of earlier construction in the area, such as Late Bronze Age walls. She declares this to be "one of the most sophisticated structures known from the Iron Age in all the Land of Israel" – wisely refraining from including the structures of Philistia and Assyria in that comparison. She concludes with the statement that: "This extraordinary complex no doubt belonged to a centralized, economically strong regime, which would have been led by only the most visionary of rulers." Quite how she deduces that the ruler was "most visionary" is unclear – it reads more like a fangirl than a scientist.

Finkelstein subsequently criticised E Mazar quite severely. He noted that structures from the Hellenistic, Roman and later periods penetrated down to bedrock in places, destroying earlier remains and sometimes built onto earlier walls, such that "in many cases it was difficult to distinguish by sight the Herodian walls from the Iron Age ones". He also noted that "In many places Late Hellenistic and early Roman pottery was found as deep as the massive walls interpreted as belonging to the LSS. In one spot a complete Herodian cooking pot was found among the large boulders; in another place a late Iron II bulla was found between the stones." Finkelstein notes that in some places the area was extensively excavated in the early 20th century and then backfilled, so the strata and potsherds are not necessarily in their original strata anymore.

Significantly, Finkelstein rejects the assertion that the SSS and the LSS are a single structure, pointing out that the so-called junction of the two is complicated by Hellenistic construction and modern restoration work. This was confirmed by A. Mazar.

Here is a great quote form Finkelstein: "Whoever claims that the "magnitude and uniqueness of the combined 'Stepped Structure' and the 'Large Stone Structure' are unparalleled anywhere in the Levant between the 12th and early 9th centuries BCE"; or that "[t]he combined building was the main structure in Iron Age I Jerusalem [. . .] and is indeed the most impressive building from this period throughout the region" speaks about a structure that cannot be seen today and that may have never existed."

He ends with: "Based on solid archaeological arguments alone, that is, without relying on the biblical text, no seasoned archaeologist would have associated the remains in question with monumental architecture of the 10th century B.C." Satisfied?

A lot of construction in Israel is distinctively Egyptian in style, including also the temple at Motza. However I agree that we don’t need Shishak to build six-chambered gates – other parties might easily have done so, including Canaanite or Phoenician builders. My point, before you went down the rabbit hole again, was that there is ZERO evidence that these gates were built by Solomon. The fact that the six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer are closely grouped is meaningless – they are far from Jerusalem, which was supposedly Solomon's capital city, and there are no gates (or even proper walls) in Jerusalem dating to the purported period of Solomon. As usual, this is a case of EVIDENCE vs CONJECTURE.

You state that "The fact that Solomon's Temple building so strongly resembles the known architecture of temples from that period is surely evidence." However there is no sign of "Solomon's Temple", so what are you comparing with? Oh yes, just more Bible stories. CONJECTURE. There is ZERO evidence that Solomon built a Temple Mount of any size at all – his temple may not have needed such a thing.

I agree that "it is even less conceivable that a king would build a temple or a palace and attribute it to one of his predecessors.” I am not suggesting that a later king of Judah actually built the Jerusalem Temple and attributed it to Solomon – this is merely your latest strawman. I am suggesting that Solomon's Temple was very modest, but that much later the scribes were trying to create a myth of past glory, and grossly exaggerated the size of Solomon's efforts.

I also agree that the people of the time of David and Solomon were polytheist's, as we have ample evidence of pagan worship practices in places like Motza, and the Bible stories also tell that Solomon built pagan temples to please his many foreign wives. Maybe Motza itself was a temple which Solomon built for a pagan god to please a pagan princess, as per 1 Kings 11? Maybe that is why a second temple was built so close to Jerusalem – it is for a different god, but close enough that the princess in question could commute?

I summary, there is ZERO EVIDENCE that Solomon existed, there is ZERO EVIDENCE for Solomon's temple or temple mount, there is ZERO EVIDENCE that David was a king of a large kingdom, there is ZERO EVIDENCE that David or Solomon built the LSS or the SSS, and there is ZERO EVIDENCE that the United Monarchy was ever more than a handful of hill-tribes working together against more powerful opponents. All the scholarly theories to the contrary are CONJECTURE based on Bible stories rather than evidence.

Are we done now, or do you want to repeat yourself yet again? Wdford (talk) 13:07, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Looks like Wdford is floundering after being completely refuted.


 * There's plenty of evidence for Solomon. The verifiability of the Solomon Temple traditions in Samuel and Kings, according to the majority of scholars and the evidence, implies that there was a Solomon and that this Solomon built a Temple on the Temple Mount. We already know there was a 9th century temple in Motza, there were cultic sites in 10th century Khirbet Qeiyafa, and that the architecture of the Temple in Kings is highly analogous to the temple architecture of the general region in that time. As Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu note, if there was a temple in a secondary site like Motza in the 9th century BC, there hardly couldn't have been one on in the capital of the kingdom. And as Galil notes, there's no possible way that this temple would have been built by a king after Solomon who then attributed it one of his predecessors, Solomon, rather than himself. We don't know the extent of Solomon's temple, but the evidence unanimously verifies that there was a Solomon who built a temple of some sort on the mount in 10th century BC Jerusalem. If David existed, it could hardly be wishfully supposed that Solomon didn't exist. It clearly doesn't make sense. And we know David was around because of the Tel Dan Inscription. Wdford reaches by desperately trying to convince everyone that we don't know what "House of David" means ... despite the fact that "House of X" is a well-known ancient near eastern formula to denote a line of kings (a dynasty) that goes back to a specific founder of the dynasty, i.e. the X in "House of X". For example, the Assyrian records speak of a "House of Omri". The meaning is clear to someone who isn't Wdford.


 * The points about the SSS are even more desperate than before. Earlier, Wdford summoned up the wishful thinking that Aram-Damascus was "obviously" Assyria. Why did Wdford think this was obvious? Did he have evidence? Did he even know what Aram-Damascus was? No. He just saw that both territories started with an 'A' and so thought "Huh! Must be the same!" So we know Wdford makes wild assertions that he has fully convinced himself of based on nothing more than a hunch. After I noted that this is gibberish, Wdford now has a new wishful thinking: that Assyria somehow conquered Aram-Damascus in the 12th-10th centuries. What is Wdford even talking about? This is an event that ... never happened. It's like saying that China conquered Atlantis. What? Who? When? Where does this suggestion even come from? I don't know. I can take a look at a perfectly good professional map of the ancient near east between the 12th-10th centuries BC here: https://www.ancient.eu/map/. According to this map, Assyria never controlled the region that was Aram-Damascus in the 12th-10th centuries BC. So why would I believe Wdford? So why does Wdford think this is so? No one knows. Seriously, no one. Can anyone here figure out why Wdford thinks Assyria controlled Aram-Damascus in the 12th-10th centuries BC? I've dug up a paper a read and saved a few weeks ago that should educate Wdford. Wdford needs to know he can't make up entire histories based on a hunch. He can learn, but only by being educated. The following is an extended summary of the history of the conflicts between Assyria and Aram-Damascus in the late 2nd millennium BC, as described by Wayne Pitard, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois' Classics Department:


 * "Our knowledge of the Aramean tribes and states of this region comes substantially from non-Aramaic sources, particularly from Assyrian annal texts, which describe the conflicts between the Assyrians and various Aramean groups between the 12th and 8th centuries BCE. The inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser I and Ashur-belkala (1073–1056 BCE) describe persistent Assyrian conflicts with the Arameans. Tiglath-Pileser states in one of his inscriptions: “I have crossed the Euphrates twenty-eight times, twice in one year, in pursuit of the Ahlamu-Arameans.” Although the Assyrian texts do not discuss the strategic reasons for their conflicts here, presumably the primary problem Tiglath-Pileser faced was the practice of Aramean tribes raiding caravans along the principle trade routes. Thus the attacks on the Arameans were almost certainly to stabilize the security of the region. However, it is evident, in view of the number of campaigns described in Tiglath-Pileser’s inscriptions, that the sending of troops annually to clear out the raiding parties proved quite ineffective. A fragmentary section of a Middle Assyrian chronicle has been interpreted as describing a large-scale invasion of Aramean tribes into the center of Assyria during the final years of Tiglath-Pileser I, a period in which a serious drought brought about substantial chaos in the region. Some scholars have reconstructed the text to say that the Arameans actually captured Nineveh during this time. However, the understanding of this text remains uncertain, and the role of the Arameans in the events described is unclear The Aramean tribes continued to cause problems during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser’s son and second successor, Ashur-bel-kala (1073–1056 BCE), who fought with the same tribes in largely the same regions as his father had. In the “Broken Obelisk” inscription, Ashur-bel-kala lists battle after battle with Arameans in the vicinity of various cities along the Habur and Euphrates valleys, and in one case even near a town on the Tigris. It seems clear from the wording of these passages that the Arameans were not the inhabitants of the towns mentioned, but rather had been creating problems in those regions. The inscriptions of Ashur-bel-kala cease after the king’s 5th or 6th year, and for about a century afterward, Assyria falls into eclipse. Whether this decline occurred primarily because of Aramean assaults or whether the tribes simply took advantage of a situation brought about by other circumstances cannot be determined from the surviving sources. It is clear, however, that during this period of weakness, Aramean tribes began to settle into regions that had previously belonged to Assyria." (Pitard, Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception Vol. 2, pg. 638)


 * (Interestingly, this encyclopedic summary of Assyria was an assigned reading I had for an online course on EdX I took hosted by Aren Maeir that talks about these sorts of things.) To be honest, not even I expected the facts to backfire on Wdford like this. I kind of feel bad about how bad it is, actually. According to Wdford, Assyria had nicely conquered Aram-Damascus in this time. According to planet reality, not only were the Assyrians involved in desperate, long-sustained and completely ineffective military endeavours to bring down the Arameans (the people of Aram-Damascus), but in the end of it, Assyria ended up entering a period of serious decline (which may or may not have been caused by the Arameans themselves) and Aram-Damascus ended up seriously expanding into Assyria, not the other way around. Wow.


 * So what else do we have about the SSS? Ah yes, Wdford insists it is not gigantic. That cannot be taken seriously anymore. In Wdford's previous comments, Wdford was extensively and ineffectively appealing to Gath as a source of greater architecture than the SSS. This entirely backfired, enormously. Turns out, in the Iron IIA period, the monumental architecture at Gath usually involved walls that were up to 2 meters wide. Don't get me wrong, that is admittedly pretty big. Then, Wdford found some media article that noted that in the 2018-2019 Gath excavations, an Iron IB (11th century) piece of monumental architecture was found where the walls were twice as wide: 4 meters. This was Wdford's evidence of truly giant stuff happening at Gath compared to whatever was in Judah. And yet, the walls of the SSS are 5 meters wide, edging out the most recently biggest discovered monumental architecture at Gath itself - the biggest Philistine site in Philistine history. This is why Amihai Mazar said that it was the biggest in Israel/Judah and its neighbours in the 12th-10th centuries. So I have now extensively, and directly proven Mazar's claim. In the end, all Wdford can due is spam-quote Israel Finkelstein. It's really weird because Wdford, an amateur, accuses Eilat Mazar of desperation. And yet he quotes Israel Finkelstein - the most desperate man alive when it comes to interpreting away the SSS and LSS. As I noted, since the completion of Eilat Mazar's excavations, the following scholars have commented: Finkelstein, Amihai Mazar, Avraham Faust, Eilat Mazar, Nadav Na'aman, and William Dever. Finkelstein is, drumroll please, ... the only one to deny the findings. Finkelstein is absolutely desperate to get the SSS and LSS out of sight. Dever even noted that Finkelstein's views about the SSS are desperation to save his Low Chronology. Amihai Mazar and Avraham Faust have fully refuted Finkelstein's claims about the SSS and LSS. And once again, Wdford keeps spamming Jebusite gibberish. Wdford's spamming of Jebusite identification is odd, given the fact that a Jebusite identification of the SSS would contradict everything that Finkelstein has ever worked for when it comes to understanding the SSS. So Wdford is entangled in self-contradiction. Also, Wdford says that the Bible on the (highly verifiable) Temple traditions is "conjecture", but when it comes to a Jebusite identification with pre-Davidic Jerusalem, it is perfectly reliable and faithful and true. But the facts are the facts. The SSS and LSS were constructed in the 10th century (per the early Iron IIA pottery in their construction fill, meaning they cannot predate 980 BC and likely come a few years later) and so are part of the Judahite kingdom.


 * Wdford, you completely backtracked on the Megiddo pottery. Stop contradicting yourself. You can only date the Megiddo pottery as 9th century due to a correspondence with the 9th century Jezreel if that is strictly 9th century pottery style. Since it's actually 10th-9th century pottery, the no 9th century date can be assigned. Weird how this "9th century pottery" is found at 10th century Tel Rehov. So odd. Backtrack. You also had to admit that your Shishak conjecture was nonsense. For someone who likes to pretend to hate conjecture so much, every word you've said about Shishak is nonsense conjecture. The six-chambered gate at Ashdod is quite dissimilar from the ones in Israel. And it might be 9th century, like the 9th century six-chambered gate at Lachish. And the Bubasite portal, which was commissioned by the Egyptians themselves under Shishak, says Shishak performed a campaign in Israel/Judah, not that he annexed the region and started spending years constructing things there. No Egyptian evidence for such annexing exists, not to mention it contradicts the Bubasite portal. Yeah, you SURE have a thing against conjecture. Please. The whole edifice of your reasoning is conjecture. Given the fact that three six-chambered gates, two ashlar palaces, the SSS and LSS were constructed in the 10th century, as well as a fortification at Beersheba, construction of Khirbet Qeiyafa, and so forth, there is plenty of evidence behind a United Monarchy which is why Aren Maeir said it is a mainstream view of contemporary archaeologists.


 * Stop trying. You'll simply prove you know little and contradict yourself more.Editshmedt (talk) 21:16, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * What Schliemann did for Troy, nobody did for the United Monarchy. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Have you heard of Yigael Yadin? A lot of people tried to dispute Yadin but his work seems to be holding up mighty well, especially with the defeat of the Low Chronology. P.S. I'm sorry for being mean when refuting your claims about the size of the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, all scholars say that a 10th century Jerusalem including the Temple Mount caps at 12 hectares (=30 acres), not 12 acres, like you incorrectly quoted. Editshmedt (talk) 21:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm not Coogan, ask him why he wrote that. It's a verbatim quote from a book from October 2010 (i.e. many months after Eilat Mazar's discovery). And I know that nobody did that for the United Monarchy, since schoolchildren from every country would already know his name. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:34, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Coogan accepts the United Monarchy. And the figure is 12 hectares. You're not quoting him so I don't know if he made the typo you claimed he made. You can see here for Lester Grabbe clearly saying "12 hectares". Also, just do some simple math with me here. Herod "doubled" the Temple mount to 144000m^2 = 14.4 hectares. If that is "double", then the original (half) is something above 7 but less than 8 hectares. Right? Also, Yadin single handedly excavated the three six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. I am not absolutely sure, but he may have also excavated the two ashlar palaces at Megiddo. Most excavators at these sites still date these structures to the 10th century BC. Yadin was definitely an unprecedented influence on those who today accept the United Monarchy. I don't think the schoolchildren excuse works here.Editshmedt (talk) 22:00, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * So I see you decided to repeat yourself again – complete with ad hominin attacks and strawmen.


 * No, there is ZERO actual evidence for Solomon. Absolutely ZERO. The Bible stories have been verified in some aspects, such as that Jerusalem really did exist, and the Kingdom of Israel really did exist, but there is ZERO evidence for Solomon. Just because David existed (at least in some sense) doesn’t automatically mean that Solomon existed too, or that all Bible stories are now factual. If you continue to carry this "rationale" through you will start to believe that Noah built a huge ark, with two kangaroo's shacked up between two tigers and two anacondas.


 * Obviously David had a successor, who might (or might not) have been named Solomon, and I would think that there was indeed a temple of some sort in Jerusalem at all times – whether a Jebusite temple or an Israelite temple or whatever. Since the Israelites were themselves Canaanites, they might easily have all used the same temple building. David was purportedly from Bethlehem, which is close to Jerusalem, so David may well have been a Jebusite himself. If the Bible stories about Solomon are vaguely correct, there were probably many temples to many different deities. The 9th century temple in Motza certainly shows every sign of having been pagan at some point.


 * Per the Bible story at Genesis 14:18, when Abram meets Melchizedek king of Salem. Melchizedek is described as a "priest of God Most High". It would seem that the Jerusalem Canaanites were of the same religion as Abram and the later Israelites, so it would not be surprising if the great Temple of Jerusalem was originally a Jebusite structure itself.


 * The fact that the architecture of the Temple in Kings is analogous to the temple architecture of the general region in that time, does not prove that the Temple in Kings actually existed as described, merely that the post-exile scribes were familiar with the general temple architecture of the time, and spun their tales on that basis. The architecture in Game of Thrones is "analogous" to the architecture of the early Middle Ages in Europe, but that doesn't prove that the Game of Thrones stories are historical fact.


 * Once again, you repeat your strawman about a temple being built by a later king who might have magnanimously attributed it to Solomon. We can all see through this pathetic strawman effort, but by all means keep on embarrassing yourself.


 * You have also produced a new strawman, claiming that I don’t know what "House of David" means. I know exactly what it means. I also know that the Tel Dan Inscription does not mention the Kingdom of Judah, although it does mention the Kingdom of Israel, creating the strong possibility that the House of David was a small dynasty ruling a small hill-tribe, rather than a kingdom comparable to Israel.


 * And then you serve up even more juvenile frothing about Aram-Damascus. Where did I possibly hear about Assyria conquering Aram-Damascus? Go read Middle Assyrian Empire and Aram (region) and Tiglath-Pileser I to get you started.


 * Finally you admit that sites cannot be confidently dated to the 10th century, because the 10th century pottery is the same as the 9th century pottery. Furthermore, Tel Rehov was inhabited continuously from the 13th -9th century BCE, and seeing as how strata are dated by pottery finds, it is meaningless to talk about "10th century Tel Rehov". This is another of your rabbit-holes.


 * Since you now admit that the six-chambered gates cannot be dated accurately anyway, and since there is solid proof that some of the six-chambered gates could not possibly have been built by Solomon, and since there is ZERO actual EVIDENCE linking any of these gates to Solomon, any attempt to use the gates as "proof" of a United Monarchy is based on Bible stories and CONJECTURE. On the other hand, totally unlike Solomon, Shoshenq did leave a stela at Megiddo, which he would not have done unless the Egyptians had re-established a long-term presence there. Job done. I think.


 * Re your perpetual little hobby-horse of the Stepped Stone Structure:
 * NO, it's not gigantic. It really isn't.
 * Maeir was talking about an actual building at Gath, which had walls and a roof. The SSS was never a building, just a retaining wall leaning against a hillside. It didn't even stand up on its own.
 * The Wall 20 was not a building either, it was a platform built to level the uneven terrain. Maeir wasn't talking about platforms at Gath, of which there would have been many, but of buildings.
 * Platforms are not hard to build, especially when they are largely backfill. The part that was 5-meters wide was only a few meters long, so again – really not gigantic at all.
 * It is clear from many excavations that the SSS in particular was built in phases over centuries, and various authors have stated that the LSS is a separate and later construction. Finkelstein describes Wall 20 as Hasmonean. E Mazar has presented no solid evidence to the contrary, and Mazar/Faust agree that the LSS was built in phases – although there is disagreement over when each phase took place.
 * The pottery found beneath the SSS is dated to the 12th-11th centuries BCE, and pottery found in the backfill could have come from the many subsequent repairs and additions, as well as the replacement of churned debris by previous modern excavations, so therefore many experts do not accept the dating of E Mazar. See for a full refutation of the Mazar/Faust conclusions.
 * The Jebusite-citadel identification is not my imagination, it comes from numerous reliable sources - as you well know.


 * Here is that great quote again from Finkelstein, as it obviously didn’t sink in the first time: "Whoever claims that the "magnitude and uniqueness of the combined 'Stepped Structure' and the 'Large Stone Structure' are unparalleled anywhere in the Levant between the 12th and early 9th centuries BCE"; or that "[t]he combined building was the main structure in Iron Age I Jerusalem [. . .] and is indeed the most impressive building from this period throughout the region" speaks about a structure that cannot be seen today and that may have never existed."


 * Your citing of Grabbe was interesting. On page 79 Steiner was cited as saying Jerusalem did not exceed 12 hectares. This is a very generous estimate, considering that most authors place the size as being much smaller, that Steiner called it "a small town" and that Steiner has herself written that Jerusalem was no larger than Megiddo or Hazor at that time. Perhaps she meant acres and was misprinted by an editor – who can say? However Steiner was talking about the Jerusalem of the "tenth and ninth centuries", so perhaps she was also including the expansions undertaken in the 9th century BCE?


 * On that same page Steiner states that Jerusalem had no fortifications until the mid-8th century BCE, and even then the fortifications were based on Bronze-Age structures. Steiner thereby directly contradicts E Mazar, as have many other authors.


 * On page 77 of Grabbe, just two pages further up, Grabbe states that "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 …" You are therefore seriously misrepresenting when you write: "Unfortunately, all scholars say that a 10th century Jerusalem including the Temple Mount caps at 12 hectares". That mendacity does unfortunately fit your trend.


 * Wdford (talk) 14:28, 31 January 2021 (UTC)


 * You now identify not only the SSS, but also the Temple and even David as Jebusite - all without any evidence. I'm sure that's enough to settle that. I'll arbitrarily accept the Jebusite identification of the SSS. This identification refutes all your appeals to Finkelstein on the SSS because his views are wholly incompatible with a Jebusite identification. Glad to have cleared that up.


 * Kalimi said that the majority of scholars accept that Solomon built the Temple and Finkelstein in the height of his Low Chronology bonanza admits "Archaeologically, we can say no more about David and Solomon except that they existed" (Bible Unearthed, pg. 143). I will try to explain this to you again. Solomon is mentioned in the Deuteronomistic history, which, whenever we can check, nails all the kings in Israel/Judah in their exact sequence all the way back to David. I think it's wishful thinking to posit Solomon as an exception. The high verifiability of the Temple traditions also makes it pretty obvious. When traditions are highly verifiable, we don't a priori wishfully conclude that they're fiction anyways. The way the data converges is pretty hard to miss. The Deuteronomistic history itself is 8th-7th century BC in date. The architecture can be cross-verified from Khirbet Qeiyafa, Tel Motza, numerous other sites in the Levant, in Syria, and many other places even into Mesopotamia. I don't see why a pure literary writer would go through all the trouble to deeply study all this architecture to make up a temple. Also consider the fact that there is a temple in a secondary site in 9th century Judah, which makes it all but obvious that there must have been one in the capital of the kingdom, Jerusalem, and if it was built by anyone other than Solomon, it is inexplicable that it is attributed to Solomon rather than that other king. There is also more lines of evidence, but it takes a steady dose of trying really hard to deny all this. Sometimes, Wdford, the experts are right and it's better to trust in expert opinion rather than your own opinion.


 * Listen dude, I’m trying to prevent you from embarrassing yourself on Assyria here. No ill will. I gave you a map. You don’t get to dismiss a map because you confused the Aramean city states tthat the Middle Assyrian Empire was fighting with in Upper Mesopotamia with the Arameans in Aram-Damascus. Those are entirely different groups of Arameans. A quick google search will show that it wasn’t until Tiglath Pileser III in 732 BC until Assyria reached an annexed Aram Damascus. Better luck next time.


 * I’m glad you admit you were wrong about the pottery dates. By the way, you blundered on Tel Rehov. Its strata is radiocarbon dated, not pottery dated. Amateur mistake you made, I know, but it is fine. Both Mazar and Finkelstein agree that the radiocarbon dates put the pertinent Tel Rehov strata in the 10th century, so this is a clear archaeological consensus that we will both accept from here on out. You should also double check your facts on the dating of the six chambered gates. Radiocarbon is also enough to help us all out with a 10th century date for Megiddo’s date, and putting the Hazor strata in the 9th century would require absurd strata compression. So I’m still comfortable with the evidence putting all three gates in the 10th century BC. I find it weird that you actually thought pottery is the only possible way we can know a date at a site.


 * Shishak leaving behind a victory stela at Megiddo isn’t evidence he annexed the region. Can you show me real evidence and some Egyptologists to back you up on this one? I get the feeling I’ talking to a crackpot.


 * Everything you write about the SSS is solely dependent on Finkelstein's work on it, which Dever calls a "convoluted" attempt to defend his Low Chronology. I think that settles much of that. If you want to understand the SSS, you need to read anyone but Finkelstein. Consider his completely misleading and widely rejected redating of Wall 20 (the upper part of the SSS) as a later construction phase, which rests on two points: Wall 20 stones have a different orientation than the lower part of the SSS and the stones are bigger in it then in the bottom which Finkelstein simply asserts doesn't make sense, but without much evidence. Amihai Mazar takes these arguments out:


 * "Finkelstein et al. suggest that the ‘Stepped Structure’ had two building phases. Its lower part is a later addition, since it was constructed of smaller stones.21 The stones in the lower 17 courses are indeed 0.20–0.35 m in size while those in the upper 35 courses are 0.35–0.7 m long (a few are up to 1 m long), yet this difference is just a technical matter; the lowest course of large stones was constructed just above the highest course of smaller stones and thus the former could not predate the latter. There is no evidence for two construction phases, and both parts are superimposed by Iron Age II dwellings. The reason for the change in stone size is perhaps related to the challenge faced by the builders when they approached the steep vertical rock scarp behind the upper part of the structure.22 The purpose of the ‘Stepped Structure’ was probably to support the foundations of a large building constructed on top of the hill by covering the vertical natural scarp with its inner cavities and karstic features and extending the area to the east. The change in orientation between the lower and upper parts is mentioned by Finkelstein et al. as additional evidence for two construction phases. Yet, this change is gradual: The lower courses of large stones follow the same orientation as the courses of the smaller lower stones, and as we proceed upwards the courses start to turn to the northwest, in accordance with the topography. Thus, the suggestion for two construction phases is intangible."


 * Given Mazar's rebuttal, which Finklstein pretended didn't exist in his 2011 response, how do you defend the redating of Wall 20?


 * P.S. I said that if Jerusalem includes the Temple Mount, it is 12 hectares in size. Not a word in the quote you give in the end contradicts this fact. Editshmedt (talk) 16:42, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

The Deuteronomistic history is not historically reliable. It was written in exile times, and even those authors who believe that the first draft was compiled slightly before the exile agree that the texts were "redacted" (i.e. altered and deleted and replaced) during the exile – and probably even subsequently as well. The exile editors had a certain POV, and accurate history was not their main priority.

The fact that SOME details in the Deuteronomistic history can be verified, does not mean that the entire story was historically accurate. A lot of details in Shakespearean works can also be verified, such as names and places and events, but that does not mean the entire story as told by Shakespeare was historically true. All fraudsters – pious and otherwise – are aware that incorporating some verifiable facts into a story makes the rest of the detail more believable as well. They seem to have caught you quite well.

The Deuteronomistic redactors did not have to "deeply study all this architecture to make up a temple" – they simply used the temples around them as models. As you admit, the Biblical descriptions of the "Solomonic" super-temple closely follow the template of the Mesopotamian (Babylonian) and other temples. I would be more impressed if the Solomonic template was vastly different to the pagan temples all around the exile scribes, but no – they copied the pagan templates almost exactly.

A majority of scholars probably do accept that Solomon built a temple at Jerusalem, or perhaps maintained or expanded an existing temple. However they do so based on Bible stories and CONJECTURE, not evidence, because there is zero evidence. I'm sure there was a temple in every town, before the post-exile leadership forced centralised worship in Jerusalem – it would be strange if there were none. I'm sure Jerusalem had temples to various gods, going back to David and before. This is simply yet another transparent strawman. But there is still zero EVIDENCE of this Solomonic temple.

In addition, I have never stated that any temple builder attributed his own work to Solomon, but rather that the "redacting" was done by the scribes long after. This is just one more transparent strawman. You have created a veritable straw army of the things.

Some of those Judean and Israelite kings have indeed been verified by third-party EVIDENCE, but not all – and specifically not Solomon. No inscriptions, no pottery, no scrolls, no clay tablets, nada. This is quite significant, seeing as how Solomon was supposedly the greatest, wealthiest, most powerful, most glorious of all Judean kings ever. However somehow he qualified to marry a pharaoh's daughter, he attracted visitations and donations from the Queen of Sheba, and yet he never left behind any inscriptions of his own, or got mentioned in the third party histories at all – even though some of his less-significant descendants were mentioned. Strange, yes?

Re Assyria, I will go with the experts rather than your interpretations. Furthermore, this point is only relevant to demonstrate yet another neighbour who also built huge structures, far larger than the SSS, but you have been striving heroically to make another rabbit-hole out of it. However your maps do clarify for you that Egypt was a neighbour too, having control of Philistia during part of the 12th-10th century period mentioned, and they certainly built big stuff too. I mean, proper big stuff.

Please don’t claim admissions that didn’t happen. Re Tel Rehov, its strata are pottery-dated as always, and then an attempt was made to date some of the strata using C14 dating as well. The strata were from many centuries, including from the Bronze Age, and the C14 dating delivered a spread of dates – as would be expected. Just another one of your many rabbit-holes. Radiocarbon dating would indeed help us all out with a solid date for Megiddo’s gate, if they could find carbon deposits that are conclusively attributable to the construction period of the gates in question. Since that is exactly what is in dispute, the issue is still undecided. You cannot carbon-date stone itself - everyone knows that – there is nothing weird about it, just simple science. And there is still ZERO evidence linking these gates to Solomon.

Per Kevin Wilson, Yohanan Aharoni believed that the aim of Shoshenq's campaign was "strengthening the Egyptian domination of Philistia, while gaining control of the important trade routes that pass across Palestine". Per Kevin Wilson, Kenneth Kitchen views the reason for the campaign as part of a foreign policy to renew Egyptian domination of foreign lands. Building walls and gates in key cities would be a logical part of this process.

My views about the SSS etc ARE NOT "solely dependent on Finkelstein's work on it" – this is merely your favourite go-to strawman. Lots of experts attribute the SSS to the Jebusites. Even A Mazar and A Faust held that view, based on the EVIDENCE. However A Mazar and A Faust have since accepted E Mazar's dating based on a few potsherds that might be intrusive, and many other experts have not accepted her dating. The origin of Wall 20 (which is not part of any building or any fortification) is still disputed. Some follow E Mazar, and others do not. Your go-to strawman of the Low Chronology is wearing desperately thin. And there is still ZERO evidence linking either the SSS or the LSS to David or Solomon.

Since there is ZERO evidence that a Temple Mount existed in Solomon's time as it does now, and since various experts hold that Jerusalem was much smaller than 12 hectares in those days, your parting remark is as meaningless as all your other strawmen.

Wdford (talk) 16:18, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Your desperation is amazing. As I noted, the Deuteronomistic history is impeccable when it comes to the existence of the kings and their sequence. "Solomon as exception" is wishful thinking. Your claim that only later redactors later attributed the Temple to Solomon is conjecture, and that only you but no redactional scholar has ever discovered this, is hilarious. You might as well say "I am really emotional about all this so I claim it is all doctored and forgery!!" Are you a mythicist, by any chance? Since no redaction is going on (unless you have some sort of evidence that all scholars have ignored), we're left with the fact that no king would have attributed his own construction project to a predecessor. Therefore, the temple in Jerusalem that must have been around in the 9th century must go back to Solomon himself.You also come short when it comes to the architectural parallels again, because the Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu paper easily notes that the Iron II temples are much less close to the Solomonic Temple then the earlier ones, from Tel Motza in the 9th century BC and earlier. For example, the Solomonic temple has side chambers. These are completely lacking from later temples, but are found in the one at Tel Motza and earlier temples. Nothing more needs to be said on that. Your "Solomon didn't leave behind inscriptions and wasn't mentioned by Egypt" has already been answered by Na'aman & Finkelstein, as I quoted earlier, but you left unmentioned. I think I can tell why.


 * Re Assyria. I'm still waiting for you to list these scholars who think Assyria controlled Damascus before 732 BC under Tiglath-Pileser III. If I recall correctly, Hazael was actually a full independent king over Damascus in the 9th century BC, as was his father, according to Assyrian records. OOOPS. Wait, what's THIS? "On three occasions between 841 and 837, Assyrian troops laid siege on Damascus, now ruled by a new king, Hazael, but did not manage to conquer the city" (A Companion to Assyria, pg. 171). OUCH! Wait a minute, there's MORE you ask? "The first occurrence of the word ar(a)māyu in the Assyrian records is to be found in the inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 B.C.), who gives an account of his confrontation with the “Aramaean Aḫlamaeans” (aḫlamû armāya) along the Middle Euphrates; however, the presence of the Aramaean tribes in this area is considerably older. The Assyrians had governed the Khabur Valley in the 13th century already, but the movement of the Aramaean tribes from the west presented a constant threat to the Assyrian supremacy in the area. Tiglath-Pileser I and his follower, Aššur-bēl-kala (1073–1056 B.C.), fought successfully against the Aramaeans, but in the long run, the Assyrians were not able to maintain control over the Lower Khabur Middle Euphrates region. Assur-dān (934–912 B.C.) and Adad-nirari II (911–891 B.C.) managed to regain the area between the Tigris and the Khabur occupied by the Aramaeans, but the Khabur Valley was never under one ruler, and even the campaigns of Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) did not consolidate the Assyrian dominion. Under Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) the area east of the Euphrates came under Assyrian control, but it was not until the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 B.C.) that the area was incorporated into the Assyrian provincial system." (Marti Nissinen, "Assyria" in (ed. Herbet Niehr) The Arameans in Ancient Syria (Brill, 2014, pp. 273-274). As usual, I'm right. Why? Because I read the scholarship for my info and you read blogs or come up with your own crazy crackpot theories. Assyria didn't even move east of the EUPHRATES before Shalmaneser, let alone freaking Damascus! And before this, the ASSYRIANS were the ones being attacked by the Arameans, not the other way around, and in fact the Arameans were WINNING! (in the 12th-11th centuries BC). Comical.


 * Mazar is obviously not talking about Egypt. The Egyptian presence in Canaan utterly collapsed in the early 12th century due to the onslaught of the Sea Peoples/Philsitines and only vestiges remained until the mid-12th century, after which Egyptian presence disappeared: "We have already noted in chapter 2 (fig. 2.9) several Egyptian residencies and forts at Canaanite sites that survived the onslaught of the Sea Peoples and persevered until the mid-twelfth century or so (figs. 3.1 and 3.2). Among them are Beth-Shean VI, Tel Aphek X12, Tel Mor VIII–VII, Tell el-Ḥesi IV, Tell Jemmeh J–K, Tell el-Farʿah (South) Building YR, Tel Seraʿ IX, and Deir el-Balaḥ VII. Despite this “twilight” of Egyptian presence in the southern Levant, the Asiatic empire had been lost, in large part due to the invasions of the Sea Peoples whom Ramesses III claims to have defeated. Before we discuss the end of all these Egyptian residencies circa 1175–1140, we need to look closely at contemporary peoples who may have been a factor" (William Dever, Beyond the Texts, pp. 131-132). When Mazar refers to Israel's neighbours in the 12th-10th centuries BC, I don't think anyone could claim that these collapsing Egyptian remnants qualified as a "neighbour" of any sorts. Mazar is obviously referrring to, well ... Israel's neighbours. And none of the vestigial Egyptian forts in Canaan in the early 12th century were on the scale of the SSS. So it's hard to even know the relevance of this. If you want to absolutely insist that you hate Mazar's use of the word "neighbour" and that it must include the main main power of the overseas vestigial vassal sites, then no one really cares and everyone knows what Mazar is talking about.


 * The Tel Rehov strata going back to the Bronze Age are irrelevant. I don't know why you thought that was worth bringing up, unless you somehow think the existence of other strata from other time periods makes stratigraphic dating in general impossible, which I wouldn't be surprised if you believe. The only relevant strata at Tel Rehov are the ones that contain the pottery assemblages we know from Jezreel. As for the studies radiocarbon dating those strata, see here, here, and here. There are also several more essays publishing more radiocarbon dates from Tel Rehov in the volume The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating (2005). Mazar et al. put the beginning of the strata at 960 BC and terminating around the end of the century, whereas Finkelstein's analysis, incompetent as usual, force-fits the two relevant strata between 925-900 BC. Nevertheless, the spread clearly can only be located in the 10th century BC. Do you have evidence otherwise?


 * The six-chambered gates are from the 10th century. Finkelstein admitted that the radiocarbon dates for the strata below the gate-containing strata proves the modified conventional chronology is true. However, while he accepted a massive dating back of this Megiddo strata, the one right below the strata containing the six-chambered gates, he refuses to concurrently update his own chronology on the beginning of the gate strata. He does this by basically doubling or tripling the length of the Megiddo strata he agreed to downdate in order to keep the gate strata in the 9th century BC. That is obviously insane and requires no further comment, as other archaeologists have pointed out. As I noted, you would also need to perform a complete assault on the Hazor strata to put its gate in the 9th century. For these reasons, all these six-chambered gates, plus the one in Gezer, can be placed in the 10th century. Obviously, the only candidate for their construction is Solomon.


 * What Ahlstrom actually wrote: "Both K.A. Kitchen and B. Mazar have Shoshenq heading north to Gaza and then going north through the Shephelah to Aijalon" (pg. 5). In other words, you lied about what Kitchen and Mazar claimed. I checked another of Kitchen's publications to make sure of what was being meant here. Kitchen writes: "Any Egyptian army that marched by the customary route into the Levant (along the Sinai Mediterranean coast road) always came first to Gaza, then into the very region that had become Philistia in the twelfth century" (On the Reliability of the Old Testament, pg. 110). In other words, Kitchen and Mazar are referring to nothing more than that Gaza was the entrypoint of the Egyptian incursions into the rest of the Levant. Reading more of Kitchen's publications, I found that you were utterly dishonest in your claim that any of these people think Shishak or anyone annexed the region. In fact, they assert nothing more than temporarily holding Gaza so that the campaign could be carried out. Once the campaign was complete, they simply left.


 * Everything you say about the SSS is dependent on Finkelstein, plain and simple. You did not comment on Mazar's response to Finkelstein's convoluted redating of Wall 20, so I'll assume you realized you were wrong but really don't want to admit it.Editshmedt (talk) 18:57, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * UPDATE: I decided to read the rest of Ahlstrom's paper and was disgusted by the sheer dishonesty of your claims. There is clearly no limit to what you will manipulate in order to establish your sheer and utter propaganda. Ahlstrom continues: "Whatever his specific political excuse, is attack along the major trade arteries indicates that he intended to re-establish Egyptian economic dominion in the area, whether or not he set out with the deliberate intention of resubjugating Palestine politically and making it once more an Egyptian province. Although Shoshenq may have devastated some sites in Palestine, his campaign does not appear to have established a long term Egyptian political presence in the region. Judah may have temporarily lost control over the Negeb and other parts of the hill country proper, but these setbacks do not appear to have outlasted Shoshenq's reign. There is no known indication, textual or archaeological, that his son, Osorkon I, ruled over any part of Palestine. Thus, under Shoshenq, Egypt was only able to regain its former might during a brief interlude. In light of the absence of any longterm Egyptian control, we can suspect that the campaign was carried out hastily and that no garrison troops were stationed in the country to keep it firmly under Egyptian rule. Such an inability to maintain control of Palestine after the campaign may have been symptomatic of Shoshenq's failure to have established firmly his rule at home over Egypt." (pp. 14-15). In other words, you lied about the whole thing. There is nothing here. Nothing to see. Shishak tried to revive Egyptian dominion, but it utterly failed, according to your source. But you refused to tell me that this is what your source says. Pure manipulation. Editshmedt (talk) 23:32, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * It's interesting that you accuse me of "desperation" – that is a clear-cut case of emotional transference.


 * It is common cause that the Deuteronomistic history is the only source of info about Solomon – nobody else mentioned him ever. Other Judean kings were mentioned here and there, but never Solomon. The apology that the Egyptians at the time (and all other kingdoms?) were too sad to bother writing about the mighty Judean Empire is pathetic – if Solomon was powerful enough to rule the entire territory "from Tiphsah to Gaza" or "from the Euphrates to Eilat", and was important enough to marry an Egyptian pharaoh's daughter, then he was certainly notable enough to feature in a record somewhere – but there is no such record. None at all. Among any of their "neighbours". Anywhere at all. Precisely what you would expect regarding a minor tribal chieftain.


 * I have never suggested that "later redactors transposed the entire construction of the Temple from a later king to the period of Solomon" – that is just your transparent attempt at another strawman. I have said, very clearly, that the later redactors seemingly invented a glorious temple and attributed it to Solomon in the purported Golden Age, whereas in reality there was only a small and humble temple, much like the many pagan temples of the era. Please stop twisting my words.


 * Re the architectural parallels with pagan temples of the era, the temple at Ain Dara in northern Syria was a very close parallel to the described plan of the Solomonic temple – including having side chambers. See "Zion, City of Our God", edited by Richard S. Hess, Gordon J. Wenham, at page 19.


 * In fact, even the Garfinkel & Mumcuoglu paper states, in the Summary section: "From a literary point of view, the biblical description of the plan of Solomon’s Temple, which describes two columns in the front (Jachin and Boaz), Forecourt, Outer Sanctum, Holy of Holies, and side chamber, conforms in all of its components to the temples at Motza and Ain Dara." The temple at Ain Dara also had many carvings of winged creatures, lions and other things, whereas the description of Solomon's temple in the Bible stories describes winged cherubim and lions and various other things. Ain Dara predated the so-called Solomonic period, and it was still in use during the exile period. Seems like the Judean scribes had a very close model to emulate when they spun up their Golden Age. The "similarities" of the Bible description with the actual real temples at Motza and elsewhere thus prove nothing about any purported works of Solomon, although Garfinkel was clearly anxious to find a straw to clutch at.


 * I note with some boredom your continued strawman on the Assyria comparison. The Assyrian territory waxed and waned over centuries, so the fact that they were fighting against Hazael in 841 BCE has no bearing on what happened three hundred years earlier, in the period to which Mazar referred. Damascus is not east of the Euphrates, and is not in the Khabur River valley either. Tiglath-Pileser III achieved a lot, but so did Tiglath-Pileser I – as you well know. This is a ridiculous strawman, even by your standards. You are becoming desperate indeed.


 * So, per you, Egypt is a neighbour, but not a neighbour. Mazar included the 12th century in his comment, and the Egyptian presence in Canaan was still present in the 12th century, but per you they were not present? Yet another of your strawmen.


 * On to your next strawman - Tel Rehov. In your cited Mazar paper, Mazar admits the following:
 * The average Rehovot carbon date was 2699 years before present, ie about 750 BCE;
 * The average Arizona carbon date was 2749 years before present, ie about 800 BCE;
 * The average of the Groningen carbon dates was 2788 years before present, ie about 840 BCE.
 * From all this scientific EVIDENCE pointing clearly to the late 9th and early 8th centuries, Mazar calmly adds on a random 140-230 extra years, and deduces that "All these results support a Revised Traditional Chronology for the Iron Age IIA in the southern Levant, covering a time span of about 980 to 840 B.C.E." Fascinating, how the science gets "adjusted" when it suits.
 * Finkelstein, however, reads the evidence at face value, and deduces that radiocarbon dates in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE indicate occupation dates in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE – an approach which you describe as "incompetent as usual". As I said, fascinating stuff. Please observe WP:BLP.


 * I did not comment on Mazar's response to Finkelstein's redating of Wall 20 because he adds nothing new – just some more of the "he-said-she-said" that has characterised your favourite strawman. Mazar's modified conventional chronology only works because it is very broad and very vague, so artefacts from 10th – 8th centuries can all be accommodated in a single "phase". It does not supplant the CC or the LC, it merely encompasses both. Valuable politically, but not scientifically. Please stop pretending to assume that I am conceding things – that's just more wishful thinking on your part.


 * It's also fascinating how you happily rule anything that contradicts your POV to be "insane", even though it is supported by numbers of experts far more knowledgeable than you. I note also your confident POV assertion re the six-chambered gates that "Obviously, the only candidate for their construction is Solomon." Assuming that the gates were indeed all built in the 10th century, which is far from proven, there certainly were candidates other than Solomon. Apart from the Egyptians and the Philistines and the Phoenicians and the Northern Israelites, what about the Canaanites who had been living there for millennia already, including in the major cities of the Bronze Age on those very sites? They were no longer as wealthy or cohesive as before, but they had not evaporated either. The dressed stones from the Bronze Age structures were all lying around in profusion, and with the chaos of the "collapse era" all around them, it is easy to envisage some local chieftains putting up some walls to protect their people and their wealth – and walls need gates. Seeing as how some of those gates were in areas where even the Judahite scribes never reported Solomon going, there are much more "obvious candidates" than Solomon.


 * If you really want to compare gates with each other, then you need to consider that at Megiddo there is a four-chambered gate on top of the six-chambered gate. There is a four-chambered gate at Khirbet Qeiyafa dating (apparently) to the 10th century – does that not mean the four-chambered gate at Megiddo is also 10th century? And since the six-chambered gate at Megiddo is beneath the four-chambered gate, does that not mean that the six-chambered gate at Megiddo is 11th century or earlier – probably Philistine, possibly Canaanite, or potentially even Egyptian?


 * So you accept now that Ahlstrom actually wrote that Shoshenq had "intended to re-establish Egyptian economic dominion in the area, whether or not he set out with the deliberate intention of resubjugating Palestine politically and making it once more an Egyptian province." Thanks – it took you long enough. You have also conceded that Kitchen mentioned that the Egyptian army marched "into the very region that had become Philistia in the twelfth century", rather than "skipping over" Philistia as per Na'aman. Nice.


 * Putting aside your near-hysterical ranting and ad hominem attacks, nobody claimed that Shoshenq established a "long term" Egyptian political presence in the region, least of all me. I certainly never mentioned Osorkon either. This is just another of your strawmen. The presence of the Shoshenq stela at Megiddo does indicate that he did stay a while, even though his time perhaps ran out faster than he had anticipated. The length of his "brief interlude" is unknown, but considering that Megiddo was for a while his base camp in enemy territory, and considering that huge quantities of Bronze Age dressed stone were lying around already, it would not have taken an entire Egyptian army very long to put up some walls around their camp and some six-chambered gates – these gates were not particularly big, especially by Egyptian standards. PS: There were ZERO Solomon Stelas at Megiddo – or anywhere else. Interesting.


 * Finkelstein and Ussishkin are among those who note that the victory stele of Shoshenq I at Megiddo indicated Sheshonq’s original intention was to create a “foothold” in Canaan and use Megiddo as a base.


 * PPS: From Kevin Wilson, "The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine" –
 * Page 9: "The aim of Shoshenq's campaign, according to Aharoni, was for the purpose of "strengthening the Egyptian domination of Philistia, while gaining control of the important trade routes that pass across Palestine."
 * Page 10: "Kitchen views the reason for the campaign as part of a wish by Shoshenq to renew Egyptian domination of foreign lands. The Palestinian campaign was not an isolated occurrence, but part of a foreign policy that probably also included an attempt to recapture Nubia by military force."


 * In other words, while you falsely accuse me of lying, I actually reported accurately – although I did not regurgitate every word of every line, I certainly reported an accurate gist. Everyone knows Shoshenq failed to maintain a long-term presence – that was no secret. I therefore can't imagine why you are getting so shrill about it – unless of course you are desperately digging a new rabbit hole to hide in?


 * "There is nothing here. Nothing to see." Does that sound like a desperate editor protesting too much? Wdford (talk) 12:52, 5 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry but this is just desperation. There really is nothing to see besides you desperately manipulating scholarship.


 * The first thing to take care of is, again, Solomon. Your arguments about Solomon are again, desperation en masse. Your claim that the United Monarchy needs to be as big as the Euphrates for Solomon to exist is shocking nonsense. The Bible, as you obviously wouldn't know, it a bit contradictory regarding the extent of the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms. However, the most consistent reference throughout the Bible is that the land of Israel encompassed the region "from Dan to Beersheba" (1 Sam. 3:20; 2 Sam. 3:10; 17:11; 24:2, 15; 1 Kings 4:25, etc). For example, a simple quote of the last one will be sufficient: "During Solomon’s lifetime Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, everyone under their own vine and under their own fig tree" (1 Kings 4:25). Logically, it makes most sense that the least exaggerated description of the size of the kingdom is most accurate. As for why Solomon isn't mentioned - David wasn't mentioned from any known place until 1993. There are two or three surviving 10th century inscriptions and they are literally just a name, a calendar, and a couple letters. The only international inscription in the whole ANE during the 10th century, as pointed out by Na'aman, is the Shoshenq inscription. It's a null argument.


 * The Deuteronomistic history was composed in the 8th-7th centuries BC and is impeccable whenever we can check of the kings over Israel and Judah and their sequence as far back as the time of David. "Solomon as exception" is clearly special pleading. Your attempted retort on the Temple fails once again, pretty much evading my point. The Ain Dara temple was built in the late 2nd millennium BC and stopped existing in the 8th century BC. The authors of the Deuteronomistic history obviously weren't talking about 8th century temples from Syria. Desperate. Out of the several temple models that Garfinkel discusses from Israel, the only ones with side chambers and other features of the Solomonic Temple are the cultic structure in Khirbet Qeiyafa in the 10th century BC and the 9th century Tel Motza temple. Nothing else. Desperate. If the architecture only fits from this time period in Israel, then it's from that time period. Basic protocol. It doesn't matter how big Solomon's initial construction project was on the Temple Mount because if he built anything there then he (i) existed (ii) Jerusalem included the Temple Mount. Inescapable conclusions. There ar eother verifiable, 10th century Solomonic traditions such as described in Keimer 2020. Interestingly, Keimer's study concerns the geography in the northern extent of the region that would later be the Kingdom of Israel, implying Solomonic rule extended to the north. I think it's blatantly obvious why Finkelstein can clearly say Solomon existed per the archaeology and why Kalimi says most scholars accept that the Temple Mount in the 10th century. There was a Temple in Jerusalem in the 9th century BC at the latest and there's no way a different king who built it attributed it to someone else and there's not a shred of evidence that later redactors attributed it to Solomon. We should have evidence of that. Redactional evidence. Scribal evidence. Something. It doesn't matter if the Temple was as big as stated or not. If Solomon built anything than Solomon existed. Once again, when data says something, you don't try to desperately shut the blinders off it all.


 * No one really cares about your boredom regarding Assyria. Hazael totally repelled Assyrian attacks in the 9th century BC. Assyrian records show that his father, Hadadezer did as well. Where is this magical Assyrian domination? In fact, my very long quote shows that Assyria in the time of Tiglath-Pileser I was located to the east of the Euphrates (just as the map shows), and did not get past it, pretty much in the region of Mesopotamia (between the two rivers). In fact, what my quote shows is that the ASSYRIANS were the ones getting attacked by the Arameans and that they eventually SUCCUMBED to it. Assyria was fishing for air in Upper Mesopotamia turing the Middle Assyrian period. Chip chop, your arguments head goes off the block. The more you try to desperately hold on to this, the more you embarass yourself. I have no issue with that.


 * LOOOOL, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. Jesus Christ, you took my quotation of Ahlstrom as confirmation of your claims. Desperation isn't strong enough of a word here. You LIED about what Ahlstrom said. ALL Mazar and Kitchen said (per Ahlstrom) is that Gaza was the entrypoint of Shoshenq's incursion, and she says, despite your desperate appeal to the reference of Shoshenq's intention of dominion, that it FAILED. That there IS NO EVIDENCE of continuing occupation after the initial campaign. That there is NO evidence that Shoshenq's successor, who took over very soon after this campaign, continued holding the region. That there is NO evidence of continuing stationed Egyptian garrisons. That there is NO evidence of long term presence. There is NO evidence of Egyptian construction, which would require presupposing all the rest. It is OVER. This is from YOUR SOURCE WHICH YOU CLAIMED SAID THE OPPOSITE! Once again, I have no problem if you wish to continue the discussion on Shoshenq. This is now pure entertainment to me. You LIED.


 * What you say about Tel Rehov is just fascinating. You quoted the uncalibrated BP dates rather than the calibrated BCE dates. I wont even begin to get into how desperate that is. The authors write: "Placing our dating results of Stratum V on the calibration curve (Fig. 3), also with respect to Strata IV and VI, leaves no reasonable alternative but the period 940 to 900 calendar years B.C.E. Therefore, we attribute the destruction of Stratum at Tel Rehov to Shoshenq I, as there seems to be no other historical candidate that would fit the available radiocarbon time window." And you really claim you're not desperate?


 * You then write "Finkelstein, however, reads the evidence at face value". Finkelstein himself would laugh out loud to see this dishonest claim about him. Finkelstein literally reconstructed a whole radiocarbon model before arriving at his own conclusions. Whereas Mazar et al. place throughout the second half of the 10th century BC, Finkelstein's model force-fits the strata to the last few years of the 10th century BC. Obviously, that's ridiculous, and so scholars accept Mazar et al.'s model.


 * No, you didn't comment on Mazar's response because it's game-over for you. How come Finkelstein offered a whole paper in response to Mazar in particular and yet failed to even respond to Mazar on that crucial point - the dating of the most important component of the entire SSS!?!? It's because he got it wrong. Plain and simple. Nothing surprising about that - William Dever outright called Finkelstein's work on the SSS "convoluted". That speaks volumes. You clearly can't explain why you believe Finkelstein's argument since Finkelstein hasn't written out an escape for you to take. All you can do is faithfully trust that Finkelstein knows something that would save his "convoluted" argument but, for some reason, feels no need to publish it!


 * Your rant about the modified conventional chronology is patently ridiculous. You get everything wrong, and nothing you say makes even the slightest iota of sense. These are pottery chronologies. They represent the usage of pottery, not phases. You humorously call the MCC "political" rather than "scientific", even though you have blatantly admitted the fact that this pottery was used in both the 10th and 9th centuries BC. You are an adherent of the Modified Conventional Chronology. Almost all modern archaeologists are adherents of the MCC. It is almost universally accepted. Why? Because it is simply an observation of fact - a certain form of pottery lasted roughly between early 10th and mid 9th centuries BC. This completely disards the Low Chronology because its upper dating is 60-80 years too high for it and its lower dating is 40 years too high for it. Mazar did not invent the MCC, he merely proved it with his excavations at Tel Rehov (based on calibrated dates, LOL) and his work on other sites. In fact, Mazar has forced Finkelstein into numerous concessions. Finkelstein has outright admitted that the radiocarbon dates show that Iron IIA pottery begins around 1000-980 BC at Megiddo, but confusingly, he patently refuses to extrapolate that the same is therefore true about other sites. He treats Megiddo as its own special case. Do you not see how desperate that is? Do you not see that it is clearly the Low Chronology which is patently political? Mazar has never written a populist book in his life. However, almost at the outset, Finkelstein published The Bible Unearthed constructing a whole system on his Low Chronology and made tons of money. Since then, Mazar has forced Finkelstein into numerous concessions which I can list out. It's game over for the LC. Once Finkelstein retires, it will be forgotten.


 * The only candidate for a 10th century construction of these six-chambered gates in Megiddo, Gezer, or Hazor is Solomon. All the relevant strata are Israelite in their material culture. Got any more escape hatchets?Editshmedt (talk) 23:47, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

See Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents: according to an admin it is okay to call Finkelstein incompetent and insane. So much for WP:BLP: as long as you comment upon a WP:RS, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Forget that that is patently unchristian: the end of evangelizing justifies the means. See. In so far is evangelizing by deed: this is what makes honest Christians leave the faith and makes the rest of society feel contempt for Christians. It's almost as they are a strawman sockpuppet. On the altar of Christian theology they sacrifice goodness, kindness, empathy. 1 Cor. 13:1. Tgeorgescu (talk) 07:47, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I have encountered enough pious Christians that were authoritarians, avaricious, or bigots, to learn not to trust in Christian morality. But Tgeorgescu your message seems as a personal attack on Editshmedt. You are implying that Editshmedt lacks in kidness and empathy, just because you disagree on your assessment of a source? You are the one that always reminds others of Wikipedia's rules, but keeping discussions on a civil level is one of them. Dimadick (talk) 10:09, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Same editor wrote I decided to read the rest of Ahlstrom's paper and was disgusted by the sheer dishonesty of your claims. There is clearly no limit to what you will manipulate in order to establish your sheer and utter propaganda. . Also wrote There really is nothing to see besides you desperately manipulating scholarship. [...] You LIED. Also called Finkelstein incompetent and insane. Not exactly an example of Christian behavior. They also called me names, but they paid for it by getting blocked for a while.
 * Do you see my point now? Tgeorgescu (talk) 11:44, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Gee whiz, I called Finkelstein incompetent which makes me a Christian authoritarian doing paid editing! But Tgeorg is surely not an authoritarian, clearly his excessive behaviour attempting to get me banned over literally months on baseless charges every single time (even though not a single other Wikipedia user has opened a single noticeboard discussion on me) is not authoritarian at all. It appears, my friends, that we are dealing with a little something called "projection".Editshmedt (talk) 16:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I only address violations of the norms and values of the Wikipedia Community. I don't hate you and neither am I a Christian. I simply remarked you stated something which we consider not done and I have reported it to admins. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:30, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm the authoritarian and yet you're the one who invented a fake charge of paid editing to get me banned. Got it.Editshmedt (talk) 18:51, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I asked if you do paid editing, you answered no and that settled the matter. How else could I show that you get paid? I don't have access to your bank account. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:22, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm sure you'd love to take a peek just to be extra sure I'm not doing any paid editing, right? 01:11, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm sure you'd love to take a peek just to be extra sure I'm not doing any paid editing, right? 01:11, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Let's get back to the article, shall we?

Despite Editschmedt's many forays down a wide range of rabbit holes, the only relevant argument is about EVIDENCE vs CONJECTURE. There is still ZERO evidence for Solomon or his temple, and there is also ZERO evidence for David, apart from a passing mention that a House of David of an unknown size apparently existed somewhere at some time. The millions of people who CONJECTURE a United Monarchy do so based on Bible stories alone.

As admitted by Miller and Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 203–4: "On the other hand, 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."

Kalimi himself writes (2018, page 32): "Almost all that one can say about King Solomon and his time is unavoidably based on the biblical texts. Nevertheless, here also one cannot always offer conclusive proof that a certain biblical passage reflects the actual historical situation in the tenth century BCE, beyond arguing that it is plausible to this or that degree." In your own words: "But you refused to tell me that this is what your source says. Pure manipulation."

I have all along been suggesting that the temple of Solomon's time was very modest, but that much later the scribes were trying to create a myth of past glory in a Golden Age, and they grossly exaggerated the size of Solomon's efforts. All of your many attempts to twist my words are just transparent strawmen.

Amazingly, you choose to quote from the Bible that: "During Solomon’s lifetime Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, everyone under their own vine and under their own fig tree" (1 Kings 4:25)." Since we know that many people lived in crowded towns like Megiddo and Hazor and Jerusalem and Gezer, it is obvious that not everyone lived under his own vine and fig tree. Clearly, the Bible is blatantly romanticizing the Solomonic Golden Age here, as it does in many other places too. Therefore the reliability of this verse is deeply suspect. However you seem to live on a different planet.

You are correct that Saul and Solomon are never mentioned anywhere at all, that David gets only a sideways mention, and that Shoshenq alone left behind a surviving stela. Since Shoshenq was a temporary occupier while Saul/David/Solomon were the supposedly mighty kings of the supposedly mighty home-team, this omission is highly suspect.

Fact Check - the Deuteronomistic history of today was composed later than "the 8th-7th centuries BC". Fact Check – "Solomon as exception" is simple fact – he probably did exist in some form, but there is ZERO EVIDENCE of his reign, from anywhere in his purported massive empire, and the Deuteronomistic history is unreliable on most of these fantastical details. Fact Check - the Ain Dara temple continued to exist much later than the 8th century BC. Fact Check – it is far from clear what the Deuteronomistic history used as templates for their Golden Age super-temple. However considering the very strong correlation with the actual dimensions and decorations of the Ain Dara temple, it is far-fetched to assume this is merely just a simple coincidence.

Interesting fact - Na'aman agrees that Khirbet Qeiyafa was not a Judahite site, so by Garfinkel claiming Khirbet Qeiyafa as evidence in support of the Jerusalem Temple, he is adding further evidence of Canaanite involvement.

The size of the Solomonic Temple obviously does matter, in the context of the stories about the so-called United Monarchy. The Temple Mount of today is Herodian, and we know it is much larger than the pre-Herodian site. How much larger is unknown, but the original site was smaller than the present platform, and it probably contained a combination of both the palace and the temple, so the temple was clearly quite small – as one would expect from a minor tribal polity.

Further on your beloved SSS strawman, Finkelstein made the strong case that millennia of later construction at the City of David has cut through older layers, including down to the bedrock in places, and that earlier modern excavations have disturbed and back-filled the site to the extent that the original stratification is all churned up. Why did you fail to respond to that? Dever is one man, with a known POV – other scholars hold other opinions, and unlike Dever, they have evidence to support it.

The Middle Assyrian Empire is well documented. The SSS was small compared to the major temples and palaces of the neighbouring nations. QED.

All I quoted from Ahlström was: I thus reported Ahlström honestly, and your accusations of me lying about it are thus patently false.
 * both K Kitchen and B Mazar believe that the Shoshenq army used Gaza as one of their base camps;
 * Ahlström believes (pg 13) that Shoshenq’s motive for the war was to "build his own trade network in Palestine. Since most trade routes bypassed the mountains of Judah, Rehoboam’s Judah would not have been as big a concern as a campaign target. Nothing would really have been gained in conquering the hill country of Judah, with its sparse population."

The further quotes I gave citing Mazar and Kitchen actually came from Kevin Wilson – as I clearly and unambiguously reported above. They both cite Shoshenq's intention of dominion, as did Finkelstein and Ussishkin. Shoshenq failed to established perpetual dominion, but clearly Shoshenq conquered the area easily, and held onto it for a period – of unknown duration, but obviously long enough to create and erect a Stela. The Egyptian army camped for a period at Megiddo, and would have fortified their camp – probably with walls and gates. The actual date of the invasion is uncertain, so the period of occupation is uncertain too. Considering that Hazael spent years besieging Gath, so Shoshenq might have been camped at Megiddo for a long period – although his large army probably needed only a month or so to put up those gates and a defensive wall to match. The rest of this shrill rant is just you desperately trying to manufacture another strawman, mixed with your usual heavy sprinkling of insults and ad hominem attacks.

I have discussed the gates at length, and Solomon is the least likely builder thereof, on all bases except the Bible stories. Read my posts above to refresh yourself on all the EVIDENCE. Per Finkelstein, the most likely builders were the Omrides, who were indeed Israelites although not of the 10th century. There is ZERO evidence that Solomon actually built them.

Re Tel Rehov: I know how radiocarbon dating works. So does Finkelstein, who made it clear that he employed the calibration curve as well. But you already knew that, didn't you – and you tried to sweep that under the carpet. It is clear from Mazar's graph that he is really stretching to anchor both Strata V and VI on the tiny point of the "wiggle" at around 970 BCE – without that stretching, the radiocarbon dating would put both Stratum V and Stratum VI at around 925 BCE at the earliest. Considering how tentative that wiggle actually is, and how tenuous the connection is, it is understandable that other experts would be inclined to dismiss it as over-reach. It is also notable that both Stratum V and Stratum VI overlap so closely. Finkelstein et al also reject Mazar's conclusion that only Shoshenq could have destroyed Tel Rehov at Stratum V, and offered a viable alternative explanation – but you already knew that as well. However you continue to cherry-pick details which support your POV, and ignore the evidence (and the scholarship) that contradicts your POV.

The Modified Conventional Chronology is broad enough to overlap the LC, and vague enough to allow a slot for Solomon while still absorbing all the evidence against Solomon. Just saying. It is also a fact that archaeologists don't even agree among themselves on exactly when the Iron I transitioned into the Iron IIA, so the pottery "strata" associated with these phases is highly ambiguous as well.

Are you upset with Finkelstein because he made "tons of money" from a book? Is that what this long and tiresome crusade has been all about?

Wdford (talk) 13:22, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Agreed, the mainstream archaeological view is that Solomon existed, however there is zero archaeological evidence about Solomon. Editshmedt cannot distinguish the view from the evidence. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:19, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The evidence is all on my side and the conjecture is all on your side. I've already demonstrated both the Temple and Solomon. The fact is that there pretty much is no intellectual excuse in denying Solomon when the Deuteronomistic history has so many verifiable traditions about him and gets all the other kings right.


 * You go on to utterly manipulate Hayes and Kalimi's work. Let's look back at the quote. "Nevertheless, here also one cannot always offer conclusive proof that a certain biblical passage reflects the actual historical situation in the tenth century BCE, beyond arguing that it is plausible to this or that degree." This is basic protocol, there's no such thing as "proof" in history and archaeology. Everything comes down to likelihood and probability. I am amazed you don't know such basic methodology.


 * You go on to pretty much admit that Solomon built a Temple, albeit you think it was modest. No problem, you've just conceded everything I've argued for. I make no claims about how magnificent the Temple was. The verse quoted is not suspect at all. The "everyone lived under their own fig tree" is about romanticizing. If you weren't ignorant, you'd know that the principles of modern historiography didn't exist in the ancient world. Authors felt free to storytell and romanticize. If you went to the author of Kings and said "but not everyone ACTUALLY had their own fig tree you fool!", they would undeniably laugh at you and walk away.


 * Shoshenq invaded after Solomon's reign ended. I am amazed you missed that. I also don't know why you think there's anything suspect. Someone must have been ruling when Shoshenq invaded, but Shoshenq doesn't mention anyone anyways. Therefore, there's nothing suspect.


 * The SSS is gigantic and bigger than anything in any neighbouring civilizations. The Middle Assyrian Empire is indeed well documented to have existed in a completely different part of the world.


 * All fact checks are wishful thinking. The Deuteronomistic history was composed in the 8th-7th centuries BC and then a bit of redaction may have happened after. You contradict yourself on your second point - admitting he existed and then saying there's no evidence he existed. The Ain Dara temple ceased to exist in the 8th century BC. You can read about that right here: Ain Dara (archaeological site). "According to the excavator Ali Abu Assaf, it was in existence from 1300 BC until 740 BC". 740 BC is when the Assyrians went in, so it appears as though the Assyrians destroyed the Ain Dara temple. Your fourth fact check is some sort of weird desperation. The Solomonic temple is equally close to the Ain Dara temple as it is to the Tel Motza temple as it is to many temples across the Levant. In Israel, the only comparable temples are from the 10th and 9th centuries BC, and so the tradition is at least that early. I'm not sure that this is even up for rational debate. You're saying that the Solomonic temple was based on one specific temple, when in fact its architecture is equally close to plenty of early temples, and no less, that one specific temple you choose is from Syria instead of Israel. You always end up making no sense.


 * There's nothing I failed to respond to. In particular places, modern construction cut to bedrock. Finkelstein does not claim that this magically compromises the rest of the SSS and LSS. So there is no argument to respond to, even from Finkelstein. I am afraid but Dever got it right when he referred to Finkelstein's work as largely convoluted.


 * There's no point further addressing your desperate manipulation of Ahlstrom. As we've seen, Shishak came, attacked, crushed a bunch of sites, but did not set up any occupation, left no stationed troops, and left very quickly after. Soon after the invasion, Shishak died and was succeeded by another pharaoh who had no interest in the Levant. There were no forts, no long term occupation, no constructions, nothing.


 * Sorry, without the Low Chronology, you wont be able to date the six-chambered gates to the 9th century. I'm afraid your fears are materializing and Solomon really did build them.


 * You completely collapse on Tel Rehov as well. Despite claiming you know how radiocarbon works, you didn't even know what calibration was until I informed you of it. In other words, the Tel Rehov strata date to the 10th century BC, on both the models of Mazar and Finkelstein. If you don't understand what wiggle is and how radiocarbon works, please don't pretend Mazar is reaching. Finkelstein's model requires two strata within 25 years. That's not logically impossible, but neither is it logically impossible that pigs fly in some parallel universe. It's not logically impossible so much as patently ridiculous.


 * The MCC "encompasses" the LC, and yet is 80 years too early on the upper point and 40 years too early on the lower point. I'm not sure what you know what "encompass" means. Your confusion at the end regarding the money is kind of weird. I think I need to remind you what just happened. You called the MCC political. Yes, that's how desperate you were. I responded with an obvious objection: Mazar is the least political living Israeli archaeologist and Finkelstein is the most political living Israeli archaeologist. Boy, that was easy.Editshmedt (talk) 00:25, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Whoops, forgot the Na'aman thing. This is just comical, that's all. Na'aman has refuted 99% of your claims regarding the SSS, extent of Jerusalem in the 10th century, campaign of Shishak, and numerous other topics. However, his opinion on all of these doesn't matter. Why? Well, even though you're the amateur, Na'aman is not allowed to be right if he disagrees with you. However, his opinion magically starts counting when he agrees with you on any topic (e.g. Qeiyafa). I think that's enough to rest your credibility. In any case, I operate on evidence and the conviction of the majority of reputable scholars. Once again, the majority of archaeologists would agree that Qeiyafa is Judahite. Thomas Romer writes: " In the current discussion three or even four options are discussed. The site was a Judahite fortress and part of the Davidic kingdom (the majority’s opinion), or it belonged to the Saulide kingdom (Finkelstein 2013: 54–59), or it was a Philistine site (Na’aman 2008), or it belonged to a “Canaanite” as-yet unidentified political identity (Na’aman 2010; Koch 2012). Yosef Garfinkel and Aren Maeir opt – with different degrees of certainty – for the Judahite identity of the site." Na'aman is free to have his opinion. He could even be right. However, I find that the evidence says that Yosef Garfinkel and Aren Maeir are right on this one, and, in fact, the majority of reputable archaeologists also believe that the evidence favours Garfinkel & Maeir on the ethnicity of Qeiyafa. I think that's more credible than your empty opinion. Editshmedt (talk) 00:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

"This group of books, plus Deuteronomy, is called the 'Deuteronomistic history' by scholars. The proposal that they made up a unified work was first advanced by Martin Noth in 1943, and has been widely accepted. Noth proposed that the entire history was the creation of a single individual working in the exilic period (6th century BCE); since then there has been wide recognition that the history appeared in two 'editions', the first in the reign of Judah's King Josiah (late 7th century), the second during the exile (6th century). Noth's dating was based on the assumption that the history was completed very soon after its last recorded event, the release of King Jehoiachin in Babylon c. 560 BCE; but some scholars have termed his reasoning inadequate, and the history may have been further extended in the post-exilic period."


 * Copy/paste from Dating the Bible. So it is not dated to 8th-7th century BCE, it is dated to late 7th century BCE and substantially reworked in the 6th century BCE and maybe substantially reworked in the post-exilic period. Tgeorgescu (talk) 00:51, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * It is not done to modify your messages after they have been replied to. For retractions use and . Tgeorgescu (talk) 00:59, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * According to Talk page guidelines you were depriving of context my copy/pasted information from Dating the Bible. After someone replied to your message, don't modify it substantially, don't change its words/meaning. Tgeorgescu (talk) 04:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * "“The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place,” says University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman, author of Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. “The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99% of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record.”"

- Christopher Klein


 * Ehrman told people the straight dope: there is no archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. But Ehrman wrote a book that it is certain that Jesus has existed. Same applies to Solomon. Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Whichever theorist you want to adopt, the original composition of the Deuteronomistic history is considered by most to be pre-exilic. Here is something that both Dever and Finkelstein will agree on. As for your comments on Solomon, though it still isn't correct to deny when archaeology verifies specific textual traditions, I still find what you wrote pretty interesting. Would you allow the same logic for the united monarchy? I recently got my hands on a chapter in a volume titled "Secondary Sources also Deserve to Be Historically Evaluated: The Case of the United Monarchy" by Rainer Albertz. I'm not going to comment on all of Albertz's findings, but one thing to note is that traditions in both the northern state of Israel and the southern state of Judah traced the origins of their own states to traditions regarding a collapse of an earlier united kingdom. Among other findings, this one is very suggestive that the north and south were in fact politically united at one point. I also want to draw on a very good point made by another scholar. When dealing with fundamentalists, we need to remind them that it is most methodologically sound to treat the Bible like we treat other ancient literature. However, when dealing with, say, a Wdford, the same reminder needs to be brought up. Hans Barstad explains:


 * "There is no need to deny that the use of the Hebrew Bible for historical (re)construction is highly uncertain (to say the least). This, however, is a problem shared by everyone who is engaged in ancient historiography. My main point here must be that we cannot treat the Bible any differently from other historical (or rather literary) sources from the ancient world, like, for instance, those of ancient Greek or ancient Mesopotamian historiography. This is a highly important point. If someone wants to claim that the Hebrew Bible is less suitable as a basis for historical reconstruction than (say) Herodotus’s Historiae or the ‘Sumerian King List’, I have no problems with this (even if I do not hold this view myself). I should, however, need to know the grounds for such a claim. No such grounds have sufficiently been put forward in our discussions so far. Thus, it is not enough to say that we cannot use the Bible as a historical source because it is ‘unhistorical’, ‘unreliable’, ‘ideological’, and so on; and moreover, that it is late (from the Hellenistic period), and that it, as a literary product far removed from the historical periods it describes, has no value for attempts to reconstruct historical reality prior to its composition.2 All of this is something that the Hebrew Bible also shares with other ancient literary sources used for historical reconstruction. If these grounds alone should be the reason behind the claim that we cannot use the Bible for historical reconstruction, we should, consequently, have no ancient history at all. There would, in fact, be no history of ancient Egypt, of Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Persia, Greece or Rome. Since this would represent a major upheaval in intellectual history, I believe that it is imperiously required that those scholars who plead such a special case for the cultural, compositional and cognitive status of the Hebrew Bible as compared to other ancient sources inform us why this is so. In the meantime we shall have to treat the Bible in a similar way as we treat other ancient literature." (Barstad, "The Strange Fear of the Bible: Some Reflections on the ‘Bibliophobia’ in Recent Ancient Israelite Historiography" in (ed. Lester L. Grabbe) The Hebrew Bible and History: Critical Readings, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 24-25)


 * Want to write history based upon the Bible? Fine, it's a free country, you're free to do it. But you have no sufficient reason for calling it "archaeology". Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:35, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Some of the Bible is fiction, some of it is non-fiction, but the vast majority is something in-between, a sort of mix. For example, earlier we say a verse stating that the kingdom extended from Dan to Beersheba. Wdford was a little unsophisticated, throwing his hands up in the air because a bit of romanticism later on in the verse, as if that was to distract from the fact that the "Dan to Beersheba" formula is found not just in this verse but is a wider tradition repeated numerous times throughout the Deuteronomistic history and clearly goes against the grain of the empire-level exaggeration of Solomon's polity. Sometimes, the careful eye needs to be able to prevent itself from being fooled and even distinguish oral tradition from romanticism at the level of the sentence. It is the job of responsible individuals to find out what the biblical tradition does and does not say about history. I find it intriguing that both the northern and southern states traditionally traced their origins to the fragmentation of a larger, united polity.Editshmedt (talk) 05:41, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * So? I don't see the problem, as long as you call it higher criticism and not archaeology. Archaeology is a science based upon physical, unearthed evidence. Higher criticism is a way of interpretting the Bible. Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:44, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I claim that the historical-critical method, when balancing both text and archaeology together, finds that the early 10th century BC represented a single polity stretching from "Dan to Beersheba".Editshmedt (talk) 05:49, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You claim. Maybe that's just a myth about the Golden Age. Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:53, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Then again, maybe all the scholars I'm citing are right. Editshmedt (talk) 05:57, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There are grand speculative studies which pretend to know everything vs. small empirical studies which advance positive knowledge bit by bit. The former are like the medieval castles and the later are like the cannons which destroyed those castles. Tgeorgescu (talk) 06:01, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The grand speculative theories can be interpreted as the work of individuals like Thompson (who instantly blustered that the Tel Dan inscription was a plant upon discovery) and the numerous small empirical studies can be considered work across the Levant from sites like Khirbet Qeiyafa, Tel Rehov, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, Tel Lachish, Tel Eton, coupled with the application of the historical-critical method to certain traditions in Samuel and Kings to build up a model of a united polity in the first half of the Iron IIA period in the southern Levant. Editshmedt (talk) 06:44, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

You missed the point: both historical criticism and archaeology can generate positive knowledge in their own academic field. I don't say that the two fields have to ignore each other, but every overarching model which includes both is suspect. Finkelstein's theories won't be demolished by such overarching models, but by small, incremental advances that he could not have predicted; of course, what applies to Finkelstein also applies to any other reputable theorist in that field. Tgeorgescu (talk) 07:32, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * You really do skitter around evasively when you are backed into a corner, don't you?


 * Despite all your shrill protestations and accusations, there is still ZERO evidence supporting Solomon or his super-temple. None whatsoever. There are no "verifiable traditions" about Solomon. Verification requires EVIDENCE, not wishful thinking. The Legends of King Arthur also include some "verifiable details", as does Shakespeare and Harry Potter. However just because Harry Potter stories speak of England (a real place) and London (a real place) and Kings Cross Railway Station (a real place), it doesn't mean Hogwarts is also a real place, or that children can fly around on broomsticks.


 * No, it is NOT correct to claim that everything in history "comes down to likelihood and probability." The Pyramids of Giza really exist, the Roman Colosseum really exists, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia really exist. We have hard evidence of the existence of the empires of Rome and Persia and Babylonia and Assyria etc, but ZERO evidence of a great Biblical Empire of Judea. We have hard evidence of the existence of Augustus Caesar and Darius the Great and Rameses II and Shoshenq I etc, but ZERO evidence of a king called Solomon in a Judea of any size in the 10th century. Specifically, there is a profound difference between EVIDENCE and CONJECTURE.


 * Hans Barstad is quite correct. The difference is of course the EVIDENCE. When Herodotus mentions the city of Troy, and actual ruins exist in that place and from that time, we give him credit. When Herodotus mentions gods and miracles and sea-monsters etc, we discount those details until EVIDENCE is discovered to support them. When Mesopotamian texts mention cities and ziggurats and kings, and we have actual EVIDENCE in the form of ruins and stela and statues and clay tablets etc, then we give the texts credit. When those texts speak of gods and miracles and sea-monsters etc, we discount those details until EVIDENCE is discovered to support them. Duh. The Bible stories have been validated re figures like Shoshenq and Hazael and Nebuchadnezzar, but there is no EVIDENCE to support King Solomon, his mighty empire and all its purported palaces, gates and fig trees.


 * You now admit that the Bible contains huge amounts of fairy tales, but you still claim the personal ability to distinguish which of these stories are real historical facts – and big surprise, these turn out to be the stories that support your POV.


 * You sheepishly concede that the Deuteronomistic history "may" have suffered a "bit of redaction". No, it was heavily redacted, and more than once, carrying on well into the exile period and beyond, and it was probably not particularly factual to begin with – as you also conceded, the scribes of the day didn’t feel any particular need to be honest and factual.


 * There is no contradiction whatsoever in saying that some or other king must have existed in a certain time-slot, and that his name may have been Solomon, but that there is ZERO actual evidence of him. Obviously someone must have been the tribal headman at every given point, but of this particular headman there is ZERO evidence. There is no contradiction here, you are merely clutching at straws again.


 * I have always accepted that a temple of some size existed in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE – as I am sure that a temple of some size existed in every substantial inhabited town in the entire known world in the 10th century BCE. However, whether or not Solomon built a new temple, or renovated an existing Jebusite temple, or built some additional temples to foreign gods to placate his foreign wives, or renovated some additional temples to foreign gods, is all CONJECTURE, because there is zero EVIDENCE that Solomon did anything at all.


 * The SSS is not gigantic. You really need to visit some properly large ancient structures to get some perspective. Even if taken together with the LSS – which is not universally accepted – the SSS is much smaller even than the 10th century (Canaanite) fortifications at Khirbet Qeiyafa. I'm sure Mazar was aware of those structures?


 * It is nonsense to claim that the Ain Dara temple "ceased to exist in the 8th century BC" – it still exists today, and we can still clearly see the floor plan and the sculptures and the statues etc etc after an extra 2800 years of wars and weathering. Other experts translate Assaf as saying the building was last renovated/redecorated in around 740 BCE, although this dating is itself based on comparing the style of the many sculptures to those at other sites. There is zero evidence that the Assyrians destroyed the Ain Dara temple. It is very transparent how you are trying to twist this into another rabbit hole, so as to obscure the actual point – that the existence of various similar ACTUAL temples scattered all around the Levant does not in any way provide EVIDENCE that the Solomonic Temple of the Bible stories was a real thing, rather than just a scribal fantasy concocted to support their mythical Golden Age.


 * Re the many phases of construction at the SSS subsequent to the Jebusite period, you are correct that Finkelstein does not claim that this "magically" compromises anything – he never used the word "MAGIC" at all. In Reality versus Yearning, page 4, Finkelstein actually notes that the entire area under discussion had been excavated in the early 20th century and then backfilled, and consequently many of the finds collected by E. Mazar cannot be considered as retrieved in situ. At page 8, Finkelstein also notes that Iron Age IIB pottery was found below the Iron Age IIA items, and that E. Mazar has herself raised the possibility that these sherds "were introduced into the material of the lower part of the locus during the excavation". Finkelstein again concludes logically that, since the entire deposit cannot be regarded as in situ material, the reliability of the entire dig is shattered and the pottery finds cannot be used to date the structures. There is no MAGIC involved, just EVIDENCE. Perhaps Dever hasn't read this paper?


 * What is really comical is how you cling to Na'aman like a comfort-blanket when he supports E Mazar on your precious SSS, but you throw the poor man under the bus when he contradicts your POV on Khirbet Qeiyafa. That speaks volumes about your own credibility.


 * Obviously someone must have been ruling each city which Shoshenq invaded, but Shoshenq doesn't mention individuals, because they were insignificant. Duh. There is no EVIDENCE about exactly when Shoshenq invaded or how long Shoshenq stayed at Megiddo, so to say that he "left very quickly after" and that he died soon after is merely your POV spinning tales of wishfulness. The EVIDENCE shows that he was clearly at Megiddo for a while, and we know that the Egyptians were competent and experienced builders. On the other hand, there is still ZERO evidence that Solomon built the gates at Megiddo, or anywhere else. You can twist this all you want, but at the end of it all, you still have ZERO EVIDENCE.


 * I am quite familiar with radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dates actually derived at Tel Rehov placed the samples at 840-750 BCE. Mazar is hanging all his hopes on a "radiation anomaly" that has been detected at around 960-940 BCE, but the precise size and extent of this anomaly is still uncertain, so he is grasping at air here, and Finkelstein called him out on it. Finkelstein also points to corroborating C14 evidence from contemporaneous sites, including at Megiddo, which Mazar ignores. Yes Finkelstein does accept that the band of probability could perhaps extend into the last few years of the 10th century, but too late for the Solomonic years – even if you choose to believe the Bible stories about a "40 year reign". It is also nonsense to assume that strata are always the same size every time in every place – and especially ridiculous when there is clear evidence at Rehov of destruction events. Destructions do not happen on an agreed global timetable, and destroyers don’t delay their attacks for a few more decades because a "strata" hasn't yet run its full course as per the Editschmedt Strata Hypothesis.


 * Re the MCC, Bodine states in "Gates, Dates, and Debates: A Review of Megiddo's Monumental Gate and the Debates over Archaeology and Chronology in Iron Age Palestine." Studia Antiqua 8, no. 1 (2010) at Page 16: "While the MCC fits well enough with most of the archaeological data for this period, it is perhaps not saying much due to the ambiguity it implies—of course it fits the data better if we do not have to be specific as to what century a particular strata dates to. (In the context of Megiddo, then, with the MCC “the door is left open to date Megiddo Stratum IVB–VA to either the tenth or the ninth centuries.”) But Mazar is not oblivious to this uncertainty as he admits that the specific assignment of remains to either the tenth or the ninth century b.c.e. is obscured in the MCC." And yet you claim that Solomon was the only possible builder of those gates? Shame on you.


 * Please provide WP:RS evidence to support your defamatory statement that "Finkelstein is the most political living Israeli archaeologist." Wdford (talk) 14:39, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Gee whiz, the Assyrians didn't waste Ain Dara? Then why did the excavator say he did, buddy? Was he lying? Were the Assyrians very nice gentlemen and just kindly left Ain Dara alone? I also no longer see the point wasting my time on you on Solomon's temple with your novel "Jebusite temple" suggestion. Yes, it is the case that the Solomonic temple constructions traditions only go to the 10th-9th centuries BC, which by itself adds a dose of authenticity to the narrative, but we are supposed to take it that this known Solomonic tradition during the 10th-9th centuries BC based on the architecture of an actual Jerusalemite temple (as there must have been one at the time) is just as plausible as your undocumented Jebusite temple. Got it. If you actually did take the comparisons to other literature (and we're talking about building a temple here rather than sea monsters) seriously, then this conversation would have been closed a long time ago. By the way, there is no textual documentation of the states of Rome, Babylon, or Assyria in their first few decades of existence (compared to when they became giant empires centuries later). So your analogy favours me. As for your Arthur analogies, Barstad's comparisons of the Bible to Mesopotamian and Greek historiography sully that suggestion.


 * I am afraid that the Deuteronomistic redaction is probably not even relevant to our discussion.


 * "the SSS is much smaller even than the 10th century (Canaanite) fortifications at Khirbet Qeiyafa". LOL. Citation? Again, the MAJORITY OF ARCHAEOLOGISTS say that Khirbet Qeiyafa is JUDAHITE. Yes, the MAJORITY. You threw Na'aman under the bus at every turn and suddenly his words are divine truth. By the way, you misread Finkelstein's paper. Finkelstein is talking about contamination at specific loci (rooms), not the construction fill which he himself dates to the early Iron IIA in the exact paper you are citing. Yes, I am sure Dever has never read this paper - nevermind the fact that it's in the bibliography of his book Beyond the Texts. Knowing you, however, I'm sure you'll find some sort of reason to convince yourself he hasn't read it regardless.


 * Ahlstrom said that Shishak did not leave behind stationed troops. In other words, he went to one site, destroyed it, and then moved on to the next one, and when he was all done, he simply left. In other words, Ahlstrom is your end. A 2-lined victory inscription at Megiddo is only evidence that Shishak stayed there for up to a few days. The whole campaign is dated to a single year, and since Shishak attacked dozens of sites, he couldn't have been at any one of them any longer than a week or two.


 * After claiming you are familiar with radiocarbon dating, you once again cite the uncalibrated dates. I rest my case. You also seem to be really really emotional at Mazar, dismissing him as incompetent on a whole variety of issues on the basis of tangled misreadings of the paper. It seems you really are really sad that Mazar took on the bulk of the work destroying Finkelstein's Low Chronology and has convinced almost every scholar that it is wrong. You must now get petty revenge on Mazar by posting ill-informed half-read dismissals of both him and his competence for the rest of your life on Wikipedia forums. Ultimately, there is little question that Mazar is right. Read Finkelstein carefully: "This analysis uses the calibration curve to translate the historical hypotheses to uncalibrated dates and, notwithstanding the wiggles in the curve, to use the measured (uncalibrated) data more conclusively, with smaller uncertainties". This method of analyzing radiocarbon results was discredited in 2008 and Finkelstein subsequently admitted it. In other words, Mazar ended up right, as usual.


 * Finkelstein has admitted that Megiddo fits the MCC, not his LC. There is one strata separating the six-chambered gate strata and the beginning of the Iron IIA. This strata only lasts a few decades, which means that the Megiddo strata begins somewhere around 950-940 BC. Once again, you do not even know the basics. The way Finkelstein gets around this is by inventing an unheard of strata between the first Iron IIA strata and the gate strata to push the gate strata back a couple decades into the 9th century. As usual, Finkelstein has yet to convince anyone of this proposal. I am sorry but there really is no getting around this.


 * I don't need a WP:RS for an opinion, thank you very much. Are we done here, or do I need to work you down again? Editshmedt (talk) 17:08, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * About politics: Finkelstein is a Zionist. But he is Zionist in his spare time, not at his job. He does not conflate between archaeology and present-day politics. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:29, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I believe that Finkelstein is actually heavily anti-Zionist. Editshmedt (talk) 21:57, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is again one of your usual non-sequiturs, misreadings and misinterpretations. He believes that archaeology is a science in its own right, not a servant of Zionism. But he votes Zionist, in his spare time he is Zionist. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am afraid that insults aren't evidence. Editshmedt (talk) 22:11, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Remember how you accused me that I had claimed that Solomon didn't exist? That is a non-sequitur, my friend. And neither have you evidence that Finkelstein is anti-Zionist. You did not watch him vote, did you? In Israel there are two big political choices: religious right and Zionism. Zionism is the enlightened position taken by liberal Jews and secular Jews (agnostics and atheists). He just says: science is science and politics is politics, these two should not be conflated. That's not an anti-Zionist position. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:17, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am pretty sure I read somewhere that he is anti-Zionist (critical of the Israeli state). Editshmedt (talk) 22:32, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe you conflate him with Norman Finkelstein. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:37, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Who knows, I don't really care since it's just something I passingly read. By the way, do you have an explanation for why Wdford has gone completely unhinged? Just look at the number of times that he capitalizes "ZERO" and "EVIDENCE". He's completely crazy. His userpage attributes himself to being raised in the "one of the world's most interesting cities", and so he probably thinks of himself as being one of the most interesting people in the world despite being a unidimensional antireligious caricature as can be easily shown by his obsessive editing on pages like the Zamzam Well, Shroud of Turin, and Exodus, desperately trying to fight off the fictional aura of religious zealots he sees himself as a crusader against. Earlier, he imaginatively claimed that I "admitted" that the Bible is not 100% right, which shows that he has pre-assigned me to his fictional aura of zealots he must crusade against. Poor Wdford, he does not realize that his attempts on this page are all a failure to his real purpose - probably "DESTROYING" relgious zealots. He has already admitted that the Bible is in the same category as Mesopotamian and Greek historiography, but these historiographies are not the genre of modern historiography. In other words, they felt free to combine authentic tradition, memory, history, with romanticizing, storytelling, and so forth. In other words, no amount of inaccuracy in any of the OT traditions will ever do an iota to disprove a single one of the two religions he seems to be frustrated most with, i.e. Judaism and Christianity, because he has already conceded that the scriptures of these religions themselves were not implying standards of perfect accuracy. In other words, you can't get historically wrong what you didn't claim was historically right. That is the end of Wdford's crusade. Editshmedt (talk) 22:44, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You applied them the previous block for WP:NPA. Read the above message. Do you think they need another block? Tgeorgescu (talk) 01:59, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Please watch the tone of your messages, because the next one in the same tone can trigger a block of your account.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Editshmedt, your personal attacks are getting a bit out of hand here. Perhaps you are starting to realise that we are not going to swallow your POV as easily as you had hoped? You have finally revealed your core issue, when you say: "I am afraid that the Deuteronomistic redaction is probably not even relevant to our discussion." Well, well. Since the entire point of this discussion is the fact that Solomon and his super-temple are unknown outside of the Bible stories, the reliability of the Bible stories as accurate historical fact is critical to the assumptions of Solomon's exploits, and the existence of the United Monarchy. And as so many experts have stated, and as you yourself have finally admitted, the Bible stories are NOT accurate historical fact, and their authors never intended them to be accurate historical fact, and subsequent waves of POV-pushing redactions have made the Bible stories to be even less accurate, historical or factual, to the point where we are forced to look instead to actual evidence for clues about 10th century Palestine. And, as I have noted and as many experts have variously stated, "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."

We don't have to try to understand how nice the Assyrians might have been – that is just your latest attempt to create another strawman. The fact is the Ain Dara temple is still there today, 2700 years after the Assyrians arrived, and we can still determine the floorplan, measure the dimensions and study the sculptures and carvings. If we can do that now, the Judahite scribes (or people they spoke with) could do it 2700 years ago. And since their "descriptions" of their super-temple parallel the real-life Ain Dara temple down to the detail of the wall carvings, this resemblence seems highly unlikely to be a coincidence.

It matters not that there is no textual documentation of the states of Rome, Babylon, or Assyria in their first few decades of existence - where we have actual evidence of people and places then we are not reliant on textual documentation, and we don’t worry too much about hypothetical earlier people and places for which there is zero evidence, such as Romulus and the wolf. There is zero actual evidence of Solomon or his super-temple with its Hittite decor - just highly-redacted Bible stories.

It seems (from evidence) that the last occupiers of Khirbet Qeiyafa probably were Judahite, but the identity of the original constructors is still undetermined, and there is no consensus among the experts. As was noted by the authors of the "governor's residency" paper, you cannot determine the origins of a building only by studying the residue of its final phase. (Remember that paper?)

Per E Mazar, the SSS is about 48m long and about 35m wide, so a perimeter of about 170m. Per Yigal Levin, the stone wall fortification encircling Khirbet Qeiyafa is about 700m long, and this fortification wall was greatly expanded by casemate structures, the attached dwelling structures and a couple of gates. Which one sounds larger to you – 170m or 700m? Just saying.

Re the SSS and the LSS, Finkelstein concludes his "Reality versus Yearning" paper with the sentence "Based on solid archaeological arguments alone, that is, without relying on the biblical text, no seasoned archaeologist would have associated the remains in question with monumental architecture of the 10th century B.C." It seems therefore that Finkelstein doesn’t agree with your interpretations about his paper.

Since Israel Finkelstein is a highly decorated archaeologist, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the current excavator of Megiddo, I think we should accept his interpretations about his own paper over your different interpretations.

Shoshenq's campaign into Palestine was extensive, and Shoshenq's army used Megiddo as a base. There is zero evidence of the actual duration of the campaign, and the army could have been at Megiddo for years. Ahlstrom said that Shoshenq did not leave behind stationed troops after he withdrew, but nobody knows how long the original army spent at Megiddo before they withdrew. Your "conclusions" are not supported by evidence – as usual.

Re the radiocarbon dating at Tel Rehov, you continue to blatantly misrepresent my statements. I accept that Mazar is a highly-regarded archaeologist, but Finkelstein pointed out that Mazar's interpretation of the radiocarbon dating at Tel Rehov "ignores previously published samples … that provide younger dates", and he points out other methodological failings in the Mazar paper as well. Mazar made the excuse that they deliberately excluded these earlier dates because of their "consistent disparities". That sounds like they preferred the older dates, which happened to be closer to their desired outcome. I know that cleaning contaminants from the sample is a critical part of the C14 process, and that different labs clean contaminants with different levels of success, and that different samples are differently contaminated to begin with. However there is no basis to assume that the Groningen dates are more accurate than the others. Finkelstein also clearly states that his own C14 analysis "uses the calibration curve".

This is then followed with more of your familiar insults and personal attacks, along with more of your familiar obsessing over Finkelstein's Low Chronology. Since Finkelstein is still adamant that the six-chambered gate strata at Megiddo is Omride not Solomonic, it once again seems that Finkelstein does not think what you claim he thinks. It is however interesting that you admit that a stratum at Megiddo "only lasts a few decades", thereby admitting that "short-duration" strata do exist – again indirectly supporting Finkelstein's interpretation of Tel Rehov as well.

I'm glad that you admit that your highly personal attack on Finkelstein is purely your own unsupported opinion, and does not represent the stated opinion of any professional scholar. Typically, your frothing personal attack on me is equally unsupported by facts. Wdford (talk) 14:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Starting with the end of your comment. Thomas Levy & Mohammad Najjar wrote in 2006: "there is a disturbing trend in Finkelstein's recent work to ignore data or simply force it into his model" (Levy & Najjar, "Some Thoughts on Khirbet En-Nahas, Edom, Biblical History and Anthropologya Response to Israel Finkelstein", Tel Aviv (2006), pg. 14). In other words, it is well-known in the literature that Finkelstein is motivated by his ideology. I can reproduce many more references. Ultimately, half your arguments are undocumented and rely solely on your opinion, and the other half rely on interpretations or misinterpretations of Finkelstein's "idiosyncratic" and "convoluted" (per Dever) opinions.


 * Your argument from what I said to reinforce Finkelstein's LC is not based on a correct reading of my views. As noted earlier, the MCC is accepted by almost everyone, including you, who admits that Iron IIA pottery is continuous from the 10th-9th centuries BC. One of the reasons why Finkelstein has convinced very few people is due to the insufferable stratigraphic compression his theory causes. In order to counter this, you quote me allegedly accepting these broadly acclaimed "short duration strata". The Megiddo strata I'm referring to is perhaps 40 years in length. On the MCC, the shortest recorded strata possible are about 40 years in length. Finkelstein's Low Chronology requires 25 years on average for Hazor strata and 12-15 years for Tel Rehov strata. There is no analogy to such strata in what I wrote or from Megiddo's stratigraphy. Trust me, if Finkelstein could have said himself by appeal to Megiddo, he would have.


 * You write I "finally" admit the Bible is not completely inaccurate, which, as noted earlier, is a misinterpretation. Since the Bible is analagous to Greek and Mesopotamian historiography, it is by definition setting up a different standard for its writing than modern historiography. In other words, there is no relevance to the accuracy of any OT text to any religion, and so it is impossible for me to have a care whether this or that is historical. If you paid closer attention, you would notice that almost all my views are nicely integrated into the mainstream if not outright majority or somtimes consensus of scholars on all topics we are discussing. You, on the other hand, always end up in a minority if not fringe place across the range of all your views. That prima facie indicates you are wrong and there is perhaps a motivator besides evidence that forms your views.


 * The Ain Dara temple is still around today because Ali Abu Assaf excavated it a couple decades ago. Before that, it was abandoned for something like 2,700 years due to the Assyrian invasion. If you want to claim that the Assyrians were fine gentlemen and kindly left Ain Dara alone, you are free to believe hypothesis over evidence. You are correct that the resemblance between Solomon's Temple and the Ain Dara - and the Tel Motza temple, and the cultic site at Khirbet Qeiyafa, in addition to a couple of other temples from that time, is not due to coincidence. This architectural plan was shared in that time period across a significant number of temples across the Levant and even some in Mesopotamia. In other words, there is no one source of inspiration for Solomon's temple. The architects were simply trained and knowledgeable in the usual types and designs of construction from their period and built Solomon's Temple in accordance. This is simply the rational conclusion of modern scholarship.


 * You are actually wrong that we do not rely on textual sources for architecture. Much to essentially all of modern historiographical knowledge regarding the Second Temple built in the aftermath of the Babylonian invasion comes from Josephus, sometimes up to a few centuries before his time. Whether or not Josephus was correct to the detail does not change that his account is accepted more or less. Since we have both agreed on the analogy of the Bible to Greek and Mesopotamian geography, it would seem irresponsible to create, without much good reason, a massive divide between our use of Josephus and our use of the Bible.


 * You agree that Khirbet Qeiyafa, towards the end of its phase (which is at most one century long), was Judahite? That prima facie suggests that we should assume ethnic continuity with only a few decades earlier unless there is evidence to the contrary. The most important scholars on this question are Aren Maeir and Yosef Garfinkel because they are the excavators of Khirbet Qeiyafa and nearby Gath. Both agree that Qeiyafa was Judahite. The other suggestions are, admittedly, speculative. Nadav Na'aman first suggested a Philistine identification, but he then dropped it. No one seems to posit Philistine anymore. Finkelstein also has a completely idiosyncratic interpretation of Khirbet Qeiyafa, identifying it as an outpost of northern Israel despite the fact that it is nowhere near the actual mainland of Israel but is instead dead in the center of the border between Judah and Philistia. A couple scholars have suggested Canaanite, but it seems that Judahite is more plausible because of the material continuity with later Judahite sites. In addition, there is a known Judahite state at the time that could have built Khirbet Qeiyafa. Nadav Na'aman posits his thesis as a more or less completely de novo out of nowhere, last ditched effort by the Canaanites to gain some sort of power in the region. This is highly speculative, not to mention the fact that Khirbet Qeiyafa appears like a military site set up specifically on Philistia's borders suggest it is part of a larger effort against the Philistines. Ultimately, I am convinced Judahite is most plausible. The only remotely possible identification is Canaanite, but that has serious limitations. I don't know any particular good reason for saying it is Canaanite. Your comparison between the SSS and Qeiyafa will not work.' You are comparing the perimeter of a city wall to the perimeter of a building. Apples and oranges.


 * The only reason why Finkelstein opts for a 9th century dating and not a 10th century dating is because, as he explicitly states in his paper, he dates early Iron IIA pottery to around 900 BC in accordance with his LC rather than 980 BC according to the MCC. Remember, Finkelstein has not performed any radiocarbon dates here. He is dating the site according to pottery, and he is interpreting that pottery per his LC framework. Even if we accepted all of Finkelstein's findings, none of which I find valid (and Dever has called "convoluted"), you'd still end up with a 10th century BC dating unless you adopted the LC.


 * Google it buddy, Shishak's campaign was within a single year, as campaigns almost universally were in the ANE. I am also not sure where you came up with the whole "Megiddo was his base" thing. Feel free to cite a scholar to back you up on that. If all you have is your evidence based on Shishak leaving behind a two-lined victory stela, I am afraid there is nothing to discuss and you wont convince me because that is not evidence of being used as a base. Hazael left behind an inscription at Tel Dan during his attack on Israel and Judah - that doesn't prove that Dan was his base and Hazael does not claim it was.


 * You say that you highly regard Mazar, but quite frankly, you could've fooled me. Your last response made it sound like you thought he was completely and totally incompetent. There are indeed discrepancies between the dates that came out of the different labs (Wiezmann Institute, Arizona lab, Groningen lab). The 2003 publications were certainly not the end of it and Mazar and his team went on to publish dozens more radiocarbon dates in the next few years. Whereas the Wiezmann Institute pumped out something like 15 readings, I think there are now more than 100 across various labs. Tel Rehov is, quite literally, is the single most radiocarbon dated site in the entire ANE. As I also noted, Finkelstein's model is flawed. Instead of converting the uncalibrated dates into calibrated dates using a calibration curve, he instead translated the LC and MCC into supposedly uncalibrated equivalents and made a direct comparison. However, all authorities, including Finkelstein, have dropped this method. Calibration is required for methodological reasons. Therefore, I see no alternative to Mazar's work. Another advantage of Mazar's conclusions is that it does not hypercompress strata like Finkelstein's model does. Recall that almost all authorities thought that 25 years on average for Hazor's strata was seriously pushing it. Finkelstein's model requires 12-15 years per strata at Tel Rehov. That only the LC produces these hypercompressed dates is prima facie evidence for the Mazar's MCC interpretation. Mazar's model of Tel Rehov has strata averaging out at ~40 years which is perfectly in line with a number of other sites.


 * I'm well aware that Finkelstein still claims that the gates are Omride. I explained why. Finkelstein posited a literally unheard of phase between the first Iron IIA phase and the six-chambered strata in order to keep the six-chambered gates in the 9th century BC. Doesn't that just seem ... suspect? Mazar himself explains what Finkelstein does in the aftermath of dating this strata to the early 10th century BC contra his LC and why it can not be accepted: "However, since this conclusion would create a serious problem for the Low Chronology by including most of the tenth century in the frame of Iron IIA, Finkelstein and Piasetzky now claim that the Iron I continued in the “eastern plains” well into the tenth century b.c.e. Their reasoning is based on 14C dates from three sites in the Jordan Valley and the Lake Kinneret region: Tell el-Hama, Tel Rehov, and Tel Hadar. Yet this argumentation can be easily dismissed (see appendix to Mazar and Bronk Ramsey 2010). At Megiddo, Tell Qasile, and other sites, the great destructions at the end of Iron I are followed by Iron IIA levels, and there is no evidence for a later Iron I phase. Thus, the dates between circa 940 and circa 900 suggested by various Bayesian models for the transition between Iron I and Iron II appear to be too late; the transition probably occurred during the first half of the tenth century, closer to the time of the destructions that mark the end of Iron I." (Amihai Mazar, "The Iron Age Chronology Debate: Is the Gap Narrowing? Another Viewpoint", NEA (2011), pp. 105-106). Dever also has his own heavy criticisms here but I will not quote them. Dever and others continue to find that the MCC best suggests a 10th century date for the three six-chambered gates in Israel. Editshmedt (talk) 18:53, 9 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I was right all along: is the WP:SOCK of a banned user, so not allowed to edit Wikipedia. Tgeorgescu (talk) 06:50, 10 February 2021 (UTC)


 * For the umpteenth time, I have no allegiance to any particular chronology. Your personal fixation on this is tedious.


 * So not everyone agrees with Finkelstein. That doesn't mean he is wrong, and it certainly doesn’t entitle you to make defamatory comments about him on the talk page. I don't see where you get the statement "Finkelstein is motivated by his ideology" – what ideology could possibly drive a patriotic and respected professor to risk his professional reputation merely to change the dating of these structures by 80 years?


 * Once again, you shamelessly cherry-pick scholars who agree with you, and those who disagree are labelled "speculative" and "idiosyncratic".


 * To reiterate, there is no rule about how long a strata has to be. If there is no disturbance, an occupation period can last hundreds of years, but if there is a lot of war happening then an occupation layer might last only a few years before the next destruction occurs. Both Megiddo and Tel Rehov suffered destructions in this period. I understand that you desperately want the MCC to be correct for some reason, but there really is no rule about strata lengths. Every site is different, and every year is different. I don't know where you get "insufferable" from, other than that it threatens your POV?


 * Since so many experts agree that there is no archaeological evidence for a United Monarchy, your POV is supported only by Bible stories. Since Bible stories are not reliable history, and were never intended to be reliable history, your POV has no supporting evidence. This reduces you to whinging about chronologies.


 * I see you are still desperately trying to manufacture an Assyrian rabbit hole, while at the same time you now admit that the template/s of the purported Solomonic temple were clearly pagan. Per the Bible stories the architects and craftsmen who built the temple were also pagan, as were the craftsmen who built the palace of David in Jerusalem. Many experts assume that the six-chambered gates were also built by pagan architects and craftsmen, hence their similarities despite being built in different countries. The simplest explanation seems to be that there were no "kingdoms" here in this period other than pagan kingdoms. And since the Israelites were themselves Canaanites to begin with, who perhaps only really differentiated themselves from the 9th century onward, this is not surprising at all. Mystery solved.


 * There is no massive divide between our use of Josephus and our use of the Bible. We have corroborating evidence for some of Josephus, but some of Josephus is suspect. Where we have corroborating evidence for the Bible we accept it, but much of the Bible stories are suspect. There is zero corroborating evidence for Solomon and his temple – ergo, suspect. Once again, please see discussion re King Arthur and Harry Potter above.


 * I don’t see why we should assume (conjecture) ethnic continuity at Khirbet Qeiyafa. Lots of these towns changed hands regularly in this period, sometimes peacefully and sometimes accompanied by destruction. The Bible stories even record towns being exchanged between kings as dowries, and as payments for services rendered. Since even the temples were all the same across the various ethnicities, there are scant grounds to attribute towns to specific ethnicities. In their paper about the "Governor’s Residency" at Tel ‘Eton, Faust and Sapir acknowledge that the site had major Canaanite influences, and that it might have originally been an "older building" that was taken over and underwent "transformation".


 * I agree that Khirbet Qeiyafa looks like a military site built in an unstable and dangerous border zone, but your assumption that it was "part of a larger effort against the Philistines" is pure conjecture. Maybe it was a Philistine fort set up as "part of a larger effort to defend the Philistines". Why not indeed?


 * The absence of pig bones at Khirbet Qeiyafa is not conclusive. It is quite feasible that a later Judahite occupation started off by sweeping up all the rubbish – specifically including any pig bones. Whenever I buy a property I always start with a good clean-out and repainting, so why should Judahites be any different? The remains at Khirbet Qeiyafa are built on bedrock, with no strata of previous ruins beneath them, so it was easy to clean. If the subsequent Judahite occupants cleaned up the small amount of "material continuity" that already existed when they arrived, including specifically the pig bones, then your claim about the "material continuity with later Judahite sites" is also meaningless. The "known Judahite state at the time" is of course your POV.


 * Re your beloved SSS, I am not comparing "the perimeter of a city wall to the perimeter of a building". The SSS was not a building, it was just a pile of stones stacked against a sloping hillside, perhaps as a retaining wall and perhaps as a fortification (although providing attackers with a nice staircase is not best practice for a fortification wall.). And, to be clear, it was a SMALL pile of stones. Clearly when Mazar mentioned Jerusalem's "neighbours", he meant an area closer than Khirbet Qeiyafa.


 * Where is it written that "Shishak's campaign was within a single year"? Nonetheless, the Egyptian army would not have needed a whole year to build a few gates. At Gath, Hazael built a siege trench 2500m long, 8m wide and more than 5m deep. That is about 100,000 cubic meters of rock excavated, or about 200,000 tons. Did they do it all in a single one-year campaign? If yes, then how much quicker and easier for an Egyptian army to use the already-available Bronze Age ashlars to build a smallish wall and a gate?


 * Did Shoshenq set up a headquarters at Megiddo? Apparently yes. Per Kevin A. Wilson in "The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine":
 * Page 7: "He [Siegfried Herrmann] suggests that Shoshenq led the main part of his army up the Via Maris and established a main camp around Megiddo."
 * Page 10 – citing Kitchen: "Shoshenq then set up camp at Megiddo, from which squadrons were dispatched for forays into the surrounding area."
 * Also Ahlström, in "History and Traditions of Early Israel", edited by André Lemaire et al, uses the term "headquarters" at pages 8 and 10 and 13, also citing Kitchen at page 5 and Herrmann at page 6.


 * In "The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating Archaeology, Text and Science", at Mazar et al wrote Chapter 13 – "Ladder of Time at Tel Rehov" from page 193 onward. This included a detailed discussion of the Tel Rehov carbon dating.
 * Page 212: "Yet the local stratigraphy in each excavation area or part of an area is sometimes more complex; in certain places there were more than three Iron IIA phases, and in others less than three. Thus, the correlation between the different areas is complex and should be taken as tentative."
 * Page 213: "The detailed calibration curve covering the Iron Age IIA period shows a fundamental problem for radiocarbon dating in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE. Radiocarbon dates in the range of about 2770–2750 BP, with a standard deviation (s) of 20 or higher, can be related to three different historical periods (975–955, 930–890 and 880–835 BCE). This means that short-lived organic samples (charred seeds) from these three historical periods will have similar radiocarbon BP dates. …. Indeed, the paradox is that the comparatively older part of the 10th century BCE, 975–955 BCE, has younger radiocarbon BP dates than the period 955–935 BCE."


 * Under "Conclusions" at page 250-252. Mazar et al openly admit that the calibrated wriggled Bayesian-adjusted and manipulated radiocarbon dates STILL show the highest probability by far for all strata VI to IV at younger than 940 BCE, with the destruction of Stratum V separately "secured" at around 910–914 BCE – and that "any date between ca. 900 and 833 BCE is thus legitimate for the end of Stratum IV". However notwithstanding this scientific evidence, they then state that: "Considering the fact that the radiocarbon dates for Stratum VI come from only one locus, the actual duration of Stratum VI could have been the period 980–950 BCE, while that of Stratum V would be 950–910 BCE." And on that tenuous massaging of the data, rests the MCC. Finkelstein accepted that the most probable dates show Strata VI to IV all clustered at younger than 940 BCE. Despite their admissions above, Mazar et al feel that strata need to be longer, and thus the science needs to be over-ruled in favour of the conjecture. Finkelstein feels that strata actually can be quite short, especially in a heavily populated node on a major trade route which has suffered war and destruction, and that the science should be respected. Choose a POV – science vs conjecture?


 * If the six-chambered gates are from the 10th century, or at least some of them are from the 10th century, then all of the Philistines and the Canaanites and the Egyptians, and even early Northern Israelites, are all more likely to be the builders thereof than Solomon. Why? Because we have EVIDENCE that the Philistines and the Canaanites and the Egyptians and Northern Israelites operated in these various areas in this time-frame, while there is ZERO evidence that Solomon or the United Monarchy existed at all outside of Jerusalem. Also, the workmanship of structures at Megiddo and Hazor etc for this period is superior to anything at the Imperial Capital of Jerusalem.


 * At the end of the day, the United Monarchy exists only in Bible stories, and the evidence shows that the Judahite polity during the 10th century BCE was limited to Jerusalem and its immediate environs. They almost certainly did have a headman at some point named David, his successor quite possibly was named Solomon, and they doubtless had a temple of some size in Jerusalem – built to pagan templates by pagan architects and pagan craftsmen.


 * Therefore, as many experts have variously stated, "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."


 * The amount of text you are building up in the "Archaeologic criticism" section of the article supporting the United Monarchy POV is becoming unbalanced and WP:UNDUE. Wdford (talk) 12:05, 11 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm clearly beating a dead horse here. All of Finkelstein's opinions on these topics range from minority to idiosyncratic, and I agree with Levy && Najjar's peer-reviewed statement that Finkelstein is driven by his ideology. Your comments trying to save short duration strata are of no help. Scholars pointed out decades ago that they can find no analogy to Finkelstein's magical strata in even the most wartorn regions of ancient Israel. Again, if you want to convince yourself, feel free, but my standards are evidence. Equally irrelevant is your "solving" of the six-chambered gates. The thing is, there's nothing that needs to be solved except on your own view. Since I don't presuppose that there is no United Monarchy, I simply follow the evidence where it leads. There are clearly three Israelite six-chambered gates from the 10th century and the conclusion from there is obvious. But since you cannot have thought, you, by your own words, must engage in "solving" a "mystery". The solution itself is strained and hardly worth addressing. It's impossible for a site of Israelite ethnicity to have a Philistine construction of the gate. Similarly, there are simply no six-chambered gates in Egypt and so Egyptian attribution is wishful thinking. (Of course, you apparently don't even bat an eye at the fact that no legitimate scholar thinks this and that it's your pet theory, that it doesn't make sense for Shishak to build a bunch of six-chambered gates and then leave a few weeks later for Egypt without leaving behind any forces for continuing occupation, that it doesn't make sense for Shishak to build anything like this when he wasn't building at all but simply conducting a campaign, etc.) Since the discourse on the gates is a factor of facts versus personal theory in order to explain away facts, you will not convince me or anyone. Your comment shows additional simple errors such as claiming that Israel/Judahite only distinguished itself from the 9th century forwards, a claim that ignores everything ever written about the subject. The topic of the Temple is already a beaten horse. The only comparable architecture in Israel is from the 10th-9th centuries BC. A 9th century temple in Motza proves one in Jerusalem at the time, and there's no way a different king was attributing what they built to Solomon. If you want to dismiss all these converging facts because you can conjecture an undocumented Jebusite temple, there is no convincing you with evidence once again. Your next few comments also warrant little discussion. In the absence of any shred of alternate evidence, we don't pretend Khirbet Qeiyafa had a different occupation just a few years earlier. Per the SSS and Qeiyafa comparison, once again, comparing the perimeter of a city wall to the perimeter of a specific construction is apples and oranges. I don't know how many times I need to say that. The way you reinterpret Mazar's obvious words is also taken as evidence that you wont be admitting you're wrong any time soon, even in the face of the plain and obvious.


 * Unfortunately, I need to devote a little more space here to Tel Rehov because, once again, you insist that Mazar is completely incompetent and going against obvious science. Right off the bat, we can dismiss the claim that the MCC wholly rests on Tel Rehov. Since all authorities agree the relevant strata is 10th century, that is enough to end the discussion on Tel Rehov in terms of the relevance to the MCC. I've also pointed out that everyone has completely debunked Finkelstein's work on this topic. 12-15 year strata is undocumented in any site, warzone or not (oddly you don't mention that this was not a warzone site), and Finkelstein's method of translating the chronologies into uncalibrated dates rather than the reverse is proven methodologically wrong. In other words, we're not talking about "Mazar or Finkelstein". There is no Finkelstein option on the table. The only option is the work of Mazar et al. I'm not sure if you actually expect me to respond to the quotes you give from Mazar, since they're all irrelevant and/or misrepresented. Per pg. 212, it doesn't matter which phase within the Iron IIA you correlate or don't correlate. What matters is, obviously, the Iron IIA in general, and the specific phase of Tel Rehov V. Your quotation of pg. 213 is quote-mining as Mazar solves all the issues he lists out in the sentences right after the ones you quote. Thus, we find ourselves in a situation similar to the Ahlstrom one. Similarly, the claim you make based on pp. 250-252 is answered ... within pp. 250-252. I'm not sure what world we're living in where you can take a paper that analyzes a problem and then demonstrates the solution, only quote the problem, and then declare to everyone that the author is incompetent.


 * I think we should have a discussion regarding whether Finkelstein taking up half the space of the archaeological criticism section is WP:UNDUE since there are almost no scholars that follow Finkelstein's LC interpretations. The views of Mazar, Dever, and Faust are more representative of scholarship. Editshmedt (talk) 04:43, 12 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I think an administrators noticeboard discussion should be opened on your insistence that Shishak built the three six-chambered gates. It has no support among any scholar and that Shishak attacked Israel is not evidence that he constructed three six-chambered gates (which just so happen to be precisely the structures you need him to have constructed in order to take away attribution from the Israelite's who were the inhabitants at the time.) Editshmedt (talk) 05:03, 12 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Again, there is no evidence about who built the three six-chambered gates. It is only you begging the question. The only thing we know thereupon is that such gates were usual much beyond Solomon's biblical range. Fanciful stories are only evidence of a vivid imagination. There is no evidence that the stories about Solomon's empire are not fanciful. And the burden of proof is upon those who claim that the stories are not fanciful. Otherwise there is no sufficient reason for calling it archaeology. Tgeorgescu (talk) 14:03, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 1 Kings 9:15 says, very specifically, that Solomon fortified or added significant architecture to Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer - and no other site. And in the 10th century, the only sites with monumental architecture are Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. Solomon is also the only ruler recorded to have been ruling at the time. That is more than enough archaeological evidence (which you've known about for a long time). Editshmedt (talk) 15:06, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Go back to school. You don't understand what evidence is. Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:15, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Your dispute is with other archaeologists, not me: "The best evidence for the extension of Judahite rule into the north in the tenth century (the biblical notion of a united monarchy) is probably the four-entryway gates and casemate city walls at Hazor and Megiddo, which all agree are nearly identical to the same constructions in Gezer VIII." (Dever, Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah, SBL Press, 2017, pg. 349) Editshmedt (talk) 15:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Such match is disputed.
 * It is guessiology, not evidence (i.e. it cherrypicks by ignoring matches outside Solomon's pretended empire). Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:38, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Solomonic tradition: X, Y, and Z. Archaeology: X, Y, and Z. Me: "That's a match." You: "No you're guessing." In other words, there is no credible response to the match. Obviously nothing has been ignored and the you keep vague about what you think is being ignored because what you're referring to is actually six-chambered gates from a different region in a different century (and so not a factor). What is being ignored is, in addition, the architectural closeness of the three 10th century six-chambered gates compared to the ones that come in later centuries. In other words, such a connection becomes even more clear archaeologically speaking. Editshmedt (talk) 16:07, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Such match is disputed is fact, not opinion. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:15, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Mazar and Dever felt free to follow the evidence where it leads on this one even though not everyone else accepted it. Why should that affect me? Editshmedt (talk) 16:54, 12 February 2021 (UTC)