Goliath and was made the subsequent King of Israel. The Qur'anic account differs from the Biblical account (if Saul is assumed to be Talut) in that in the Bible the sacred Ark was returned to Israel before Saul's accession, and the test by drinking water is made in the Hebrew Bible not by Saul but by Gideon. Historicity The historicity of Saul's kingdom is not universally accepted and there is insufficient extrabiblical evidence to verify if the biblical account reflects historical reality. While several scholars believe that the existence of the United Monarchy is corroborated by archaeological evidence, although with considerable theological exaggerations, others, like Israel Finkelstein, believe it to be a late ideological construct. In the Jewish Study Bible (2014), Oded Lipschits states the concept of United Monarchy should be abandoned, while Aren Maeir highlights the lack of evidence about the United Monarchy. However, in his books Beyond the Texts (2018) and Has Archeology Buried the Bible? (2020) William G. Dever has defended the historicity of the United Monarchy, maintaining that the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon are "reasonably well attested". Similar arguments were advanced by Amihai Mazar in a 2013 essay, which points toward archaeological evidence emerged from excavation sites in Jerusalem by Eilat Mazar and in Khirbet Qeiyafa by Yosef Garfinkel. Archeology seems to confirm that until about 1000 BCE, the end of Iron Age I, Israelite society was essentially a society of farmers and stockbreeders without any truly centralized organization and administration. Psychological analyses Accounts of Saul's behavior have made him a popular subject for speculation among modern psychiatrists. George Stein views the passages depicting Saul's ecstatic episodes as suggesting that he may have suffered from mania. Martin Huisman sees the story of Saul as illustrative of the role of stress as a factor in depression. Liubov Ben-Noun of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, believes that passages referring to King Saul's disturbed behavior indicate he was afflicted by a mental disorder, and lists a number of possible conditions. However, Christopher C. H. Cook of the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, UK recommends caution in offering any diagnoses in relation to people who lived millennia ago. See also David in Islam Kings of Israel and Judah Midrash Samuel Paul the Apostle (also named Saul of Tarsus as a Pharisee) References Bibliography Driver, S. R., Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Samuel,