In many academic circles, previous to the excavation of Khirbet
Qeiyafa and its publication, scholars denied the entire notion of
a centralized Jewish polity in the late 11th-early 9th centuries
BCE. Khirbet Qeiyafa as well as some of the discoveries in ancient
Jerusalem have shown that this view should be rejected....
Because of the [Bible's] presentation of [the history of this period]
in quasi-mythic terms, it cannot be taken literally by historians. Yet
properly evaluated it can and should contribute in broad outlines to
the construction of a historical picture of our period....
The early kings of Israel rose to political power beginning with a
limited territorial base later supplemented by military conquest.
Saul's territory was that of the tribe of Benjamin. His son, Ishbaal
(this name appears on an inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa), who ruled
for a very brief period..., also claimed to rule over Ephraim, Gilead,
the Jezreel [Valley], and Asher. David first ruled in the territory of
Judah. His capital was in Hebron in the Judean Hills for seven years
until he moved it to Jerusalem. The Bible attests to his beginning as
a chieftain and traces the evolution and machinations that led to his
kingship.... As David gained power and expanded from his Judean base,
he ruled parts of what would later be considered Israel....
Aside from his name being Schiffman, and not Fishman, I have to disagree with his identifications. The Iron II remains he's talking about are not from the United Monarchy. Rather, they are from the Assyrian occupation and Samaritan settlement. And in fact, they *match* the Assyrian occupation and Samaritan settlement, but do not in any way match the United Monarchy, which is why he had to give the caveat that:
/The elimination of these more extreme, minimalist views of the period of the United Monarchy does not give us an excuse to adopt a simplistic or fundamentalist reading of the biblical historical accounts and the archaeological evidence. Rather, it calls upon us to ask how, when taken together, the age-old historical traditions of the Jewish people can be melded with archaeological evidence from the Land of Israel and evidence from surrounding cultures in the ancient Near East. Our challenge, therefore, is not to ask whether or not biblical accounts and archaeological evidence are true or not, but rather how, when taken together, the evidence available to us can allow us to reconstruct a sense of what the society was like that produced the biblical traditions that we have received.//
/
This is a roundabout way of saying that the remains don't match the biblical narrative, but we can, if we try really hard, kinda see how the remains were later enlarged into the biblical fantasy. He also says:
/In the monarchic period a uniformity of architectural forms throughout Judah/Israel has been discovered... Architecturally the public city gates of Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor are strikingly similar: the walls are very thick and feature casemates where people lived or that were used for storage... The uniformity of the features of the great public buildings in these cities suggests a royal administration./
Substituting Iron II for the incorrect "monarchic period", this is understandable, since the uniform architecture was the result of local governors from the same Assyrian empire. But of course, the architecture of Solomon was on a scale far above that of the Iron II buildings. Interestingly enough, the cities where these uniform city gates were found are, each of them, in the regional capitols of areas conquered by Assyria. He leaves off Lachish, which has the same gates, and which was the Assyrian capitol of their province of Judea in the time between their conquest of all Judea other than Jerusalem and their withdrawal after they were struck down before the gates of Jerusalem.