Stephen said
The United Monarchy, to the degree it actually existed, 

  

Is there any compelling evidence of a united kingdom, aside from the six-chambered gates?

Stephen said

Porphyry said

Stephen said

The United Monarchy, to the degree it actually existed, 

  

Is there any compelling evidence of a united kingdom, aside from the six-chambered gates?

  

Well there’s no evidence for the World Empire described in the Hebrew Bible.  The main reason to doubt it is that none of the surrounding cultures seem to have heard of it.   Archeologists who begin with the presupposition that some kind of monarchy existed are all the time finding evidence that is immediately disputed.  I suspect there was something.  David was probably a tribal chieftain who united the tribes against some external threat like the Philistines.  Subsequently it was looked back upon as a golden age by certain portions of the intelligentsia who produced our written records.  The Books of Samuel are literary masterpieces and that David one of the great characters in world literature.

  

Well, there is the Tel Dan stele which attests to the existence (or at least, extra-Hebrew legend) of a Davidic line.  So I think we can conclude that, whether king David existed or not, there was a least a legend of him that was known to neighboring peoples.

That the six-chambered gates at Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo counted as evidence of a Solominic building project in a united kingdom (they are monumental construction, using a uniform design, both in the northern and southern kingdom, from approximately the time of Solomon–though there is dispute on dating–precisely in the cities that 1 Kings 9:15 says Solomon undertook construction of city walls) was, I’d thought, fairly mainstream

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