Wolve said:
In the 18th Century they were also calling Troy a "myth." Just because "archaeological evidence" has yet to be discovered doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
I don't mean "the united kingdom of Israel has not yet been discovered", I mean evidence has been uncovered that *disproves* it.
Biblical archaeology is an odd beast. From the start a century ago, it was basically a religious enterprise - anything that resembled something in the Bible was interpreted as proving the biblical account. In the last couple of decades, however, archaeologists operating without blatant religious bias and using the same techniques and dating technologies that were applied to other civilizations have made an effort to figure out the real history of the region of Israel.
It is now quite uncontroversial that everything in the Bible prior to the "unified kingdom" period is "not historical". No Abraham, no Moses, no Pharoah dying in the Red Sea, no tribes wandering the Sinai, period. A big problem with the biblical account comes from trying to correlate it with Egyptian history which is uncommonly well known. For example, wandering the Sinai is something that would have seemed plausible around ~700BC when these stories were actually written down (everything in the Bible about periods before that resembles the world of ~700BC, not the real world at any prior time). During the only plausible periods when an Exodus could have occurred, centuries before that, the Sinai was actually well inside the Egyptian empire. IIRC, the Egyptians actually ruled Canaan itself for a long time. (And there's no evidence of extended human habitation in the Sinai at any plausible period - and in this case, absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence, because archaeologists have learned to find even the tiniest bits of evidence that people were living in a region).
There is still some debate over whether the unified kingdom actually existed, but the balance of evidence seems to be swinging to "no". Israel and Judah both definitely existed - the Egyptians conquered and ravaged a nation known as Israel around 1200BC, IIRC (no information is available other than a victory monument). But Judah was always very distinct from Israel - specifically, it was always a relative backwater with no indications that it ever benefitted from being a part of some great conquering kingdom. There's also no evidence of Israelite conquests - there is evidence of wars in the area which were previously thought to have been Israel's conquests, but modern dating technologies indicated they had no plausible connection.
By far the most plausible explanation given the evidence are that Israel and Judah were never united, and Judah was a relatively backwater nation. Israel was later destroyed by the Assyrians, leaving Judah in a short-lived position of prominence in which it was inundated with Israelite refugees. The priests of Yahweh in Judah took this opportunity to write Deuteronomy, codifying Jewish law - the rules on intermarriage were specifically designed to protect their culture against men of Judah taking refugee wives. Biblical history reflects the world at this point because that was the first time any of the stories/legends in the Bible were put to paper. Much of it was clearly motivated by ethnic nationalism - a primary goal was to explain why it was great that Judah should now have primacy over Israel and its people, and also the right to seize Israelite land (specifically, that they'd once been one kingdom but the Israelites had ruined it).
An extremely detailed, popularly accessible archaeological-detective-story explanation can be found in "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Filkestein and Neil Asher Silberman.
