Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in, the United Kingdom.

We at last come to the United Monarchy of Saul and David and Solomon,

a period where we can assign some real dates to real people.

Or maybe not.

There is some very serious dissent about whether anything about the United monarchy is credible,

including all the dates.

I'll get to that later.

For the next few episodes, I'll present the story of the kingdom as told by the Bible and as traditionally dated by centrist scholars. Archaeologists

traditionally divide this period into two, Iron Age 1 and, well, Iron Age 2.

Iron Age 1 covers the short period from the end of the late Bronze Age collapse in about

1150 BC to somewhere between 1,000 to 900 BC.

Iron Age 2 then continues until the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel.

Thereafter, archaeologists drop metallic designations

and start referring to periods by the dominant power,

the Babylonian period, Persian period, and so on.

One of the major controversies in modern archaeology is dating the boundary between Iron One and Iron 2.

I'll get to that in later episodes. It's a big deal, believe me.

Iron One is the time of the judges, and later the priest-judge Eli, the prophet judge Samuel,

and the King Saul Shaul.

Here is how the customary dates were worked out.

We work backward from Solomon's death at the end of the United Kingdom.

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