So whatever your view of the historicity of the biblical account may be, it is anachronistic to understand kingdoms like the United Monarchy as states. Is this just a matter of terminology and theory? What does this have to do with the archaeological record of Israel in the 10th century BCE? Quite a lot, because if we uncritically assume that the United Monarchy was a ‘state’ then we are only going to look for elements of a state in our archaeological evidence. This in turn directly affects how assess that archaeological evidence against the biblical text.For more on this perspective, see here and here.
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