“King David and King Solomon lived merry, merry lives,

With many, many concubines and many, many wives.

But when old age crept after them, with many, many qualms,

King Solomon wrote the Proverbs and King David wrote the Psalms.”

There are several versions of this anonymous rhyme, but the problem, some biblical archaeologists argue, is that there is little evidence that either king existed: archaeological remains have been assigned to their reigns on the basis of cryptic verses in the Old Testament, and then used to “prove” the date of similar buildings at other sites.

Until 15 years ago, Professor Eric Cline notes in a new book, there was no extra-biblical documentary mention of even the House of David as ruling in Judea. The fragmentary Tel Dan Stele, found reused as building material at a site in what is now northern Israel in 1993-94, provided the first evidence outside the First Book of Kings.

Dating to about 842BC, the Tel Dan inscription describes the defeat of Joram, king of Israel, and Ahaziyahu, king of Judah, by a ruler of Aram-Damascus earlier in the 9th century BC. The Israelites had invaded his territory, located somewhere in Lebanon or southern Syria, but he “slew seventy kings, who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. And I killed Joram son of Ahab, king of Israel, and I killed Ahaziyahu, son of Joram, king of the House of David.”

“However, we are still lacking any contemporary or near-contemporary inscriptions that mention Solomon: at the moment we do not have a single one,” Professor Cline says. “Moreover, there is still very little archaeological evidence for the existence of David.”

The status of Jerusalem at this period is also debated, with some scholars arguing that the Bible account of a powerful capital city is true, others that it was, two millennia after its first settlement in the Bronze Age, what Professor Cline dubs “a small ‘cow town’. In fact, it is still not clear where David is positioned along the continuum from tribal chieftains to might kings.”

Buildings identified in excavations as the palace of King David and of 10th century BC date are neither certainly dated nor of certain palatial function, Professor Cline argues. Israel Finkelstein, the Israeli archaeologist, suggests that much of the pottery and other material assigned to this date is at least a century later and thus unrelated to the dates assigned to David and Solomon.

He directly contradicts the work of the late Yigael Yadin, who assigned impressive walls and gates found at Hazor, as well as a “palace” to the reign of Solomon on the basis of the mention (in I Kings 9:15) of the king’s use of forced labour to build “the house of the Lord and his own houses and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer”.

The American excavators of Megiddo used I Kings again to identify structures as “Solomon’s Stables”; they may well have been stables, Professor Cline says, but could have been built by any of a number of later kings.

The same applies to Yadin’s identification of a “Solomonic” gate at Gezer; Professor Finkelstein’s use of radiocarbon dating, not available when the original excavations were carried out at these sites, brings the dates forward in time by one to two centuries, to the 9th or 8th centuries, something which agrees with the evidence of identical mason’s marks on a palace at Samaria, known to have been built by Omri’s dynasty in the 9th century BC, and a palace at Megiddo. Other carbon dates, from Tel Rehov, have been cited in support of the traditional dates assigned to the biblical kings.

The problem, Professor Cline points out, is that the biblical references were used to identify and thus date the architecture, and the pottery was then dated by association with the buildings. These assumed dates were then rolled out across the field of biblical archaeology where similar pottery was encountered.

The impact of Professor Finkelstein’s redating is that “not only do all of our assumptions about the tenth century have to be re-examined, but also that Solomon, and perhaps much of the tenth century itself, essentially disappears from the archaeological and historical record”. Although on balance David and Solomon most likely did exist, the biblical accounts may have been concocted several centuries later, Professor Cline argues.

“Ultimately, biblical archaeology is not about proving or disproving the Bible: archaeologists are more concerned with reconstructing the culture and history of the Holy Land.”

Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press