The United Monarchy () is a political entity described in the deuteronomistic history of the Hebrew Bible as, under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon, encompassing the territories of both the later Kingdom of Judah and Samarian Kingdom of Israel. Whether the United Monarchy actually existed is a matter of ongoing academic debate, and scholars remain divided between those who support the historicity of the biblical narrative, those who doubt or dismiss it, and those who support the kingdom's theoretical existence while maintaining that the biblical narrative is exaggerated. Proponents of the kingdom's existence traditionally date it to between and . In the 1990s, Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contested that existing archaeological evidence for the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE should actually be dated to the 9th century BCE. This model placed the biblical kingdom in Iron Age I, suggesting that it was not functioning as a country under centralized governance but rather as tribal chiefdom over a small polity in Judah, disconnected from the north's Israelite tribes. The rival chronology of Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar places the relevant period beginning in the early-10th century BCE and ending in the mid-9th century BCE, addressing the problems of the traditional chronology while still aligning pertinent findings with the time of Saul, David, and Solomon. Both Mazar's chronology and the traditional one have received fairly wide acceptance, though there is no current consensus on the topic. Recent archaeological discoveries by Israeli archaeologists Eilat Mazar and Yosef Garfinkel in Jerusalem and Khirbet Qeiyafa, respectively, seem to support the existence of the United Monarchy, but the dating and identifications are not universally accepted. According to the biblical account, on the succession of Solomon's son Rehoboam, the United Monarchy would have split into two separate kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel in the north, containing the cities of Shechem and Samaria; and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, containing the city of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Historical sources According to standard source criticism, several distinct source texts were spliced together to produce the current Books of Samuel. The most prominent in the early parts of the first book are the pro-monarchical source and the anti-monarchical source. In identifying both sources, two separate accounts can be reconstructed. The anti-monarchical source describes Samuel as having thoroughly routed the Philistines, begrudgingly accepting the people's demand for a ruler and appointing Saul by cleromancy. The