Frequently Asked Questions

Biblical archaeology has uncovered millions of objects — pottery sherds, animal bones, lamp fragments, coins, and architectural rubble — the overwhelming majority of which tell us about daily life but have no direct connection to the biblical text. This site is not an attempt to catalog everything dug up in the ancient Levant. Every artifact here was chosen because it does something specific: it names a biblical figure, confirms a biblical event, illuminates a biblical institution, or corroborates a detail that was previously known only from Scripture. A common storage jar from the Iron Age is genuine archaeology, but a clay seal reading "Belonging to Hezekiah son of Ahaz, King of Judah" is a conversation with the Bible. That distinction — does this find speak to the biblical record? — is the filter applied to every entry on this site.

The artifacts are grouped into eight categories:

• Inscriptions & Ostraca — Text carved into stone or written in ink on pottery sherds. Ostraca (pottery fragments used as writing surfaces) were the ancient equivalent of scrap paper. Examples: Lachish Letters, Siloam Tunnel Inscription, Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon.
• Stele — Standing stone monuments, usually carved with text or reliefs, erected to commemorate military victories or royal decrees. Examples: Tel Dan Stele, Merneptah Stele, Mesha Stele.
• Reliefs — Carved stone panels depicting scenes. Often decorative panels from palace walls. Examples: Lachish Relief (Sennacherib's palace), Shoshenq Karnak Relief (Egypt).
• Tablets & Annals — Clay tablets pressed with cuneiform recording administrative, legal, or historical records. Annals are official royal chronicles. Examples: Sennacherib's Prism, Cyrus Cylinder, Jehoiachin Ration Tablets.
• Seals & Bullae — Stone or metal seals used to authenticate documents, and the clay impressions (bullae) they left. They often name the owner directly. Examples: Hezekiah Bulla, Bullae of Jeremiah's Scribes.
• Temples & Structures — Excavated buildings: temples, gates, palaces, and altars whose architecture corroborates the biblical text. Examples: Solomonic Gate at Megiddo, Tel Arad Temple, Beersheba Altar.
• Papyri & Scrolls — Documents written on papyrus or leather. Fragile; usually only survive in dry climates. Examples: Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls, Great Isaiah Scroll, Elephantine Papyri.
• Archaeological Sites — Entire tells (excavated mounds of ancient settlements) whose stratigraphy illuminates biblical history. Examples: City of David, Tel Megiddo, Tel Lachish, Shiloh.

The site covers the period of the Hebrew Tanach — from the patriarchal era through the close of the biblical canon, roughly 2000–400 BCE. That is the scope of the text this site is built around, and the primary filter for what belongs here: does this find illuminate or corroborate something in the Tanach?

There are a small number of exceptions. A few later artifacts — most notably the Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 250 BCE–68 CE) — appear on the site not because they fall within the Tanach's narrative, but because they directly confirm its historicity: they are the oldest surviving manuscripts of the biblical text itself, and their inclusion is a matter of textual transmission, not chronological scope.

A few landmarks that define the edges of the timeline:

• Earliest named mention of Israel: The Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE) — the oldest extrabiblical source to mention Israel by name, setting a hard lower bound for when Israel existed as a recognized people in Canaan. The site includes earlier finds (Ebla Tablets, Tell el-Dab'a, Amarna Letters) that illuminate the patriarchal and Exodus periods, though direct corroboration of the biblical text becomes harder to pin to specific artifacts before 1200 BCE.
• Latest entries within the Tanach period: The Persian-era Elephantine Papyri and artifacts from the return from Babylonian exile (c. 539–400 BCE), corresponding to the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the later prophets.
• Post-canonical exceptions: The Dead Sea Scrolls, included because they are the primary archaeological evidence for the transmission and integrity of the biblical text.

The site has five main sections, each offering a different way into the same material:

• Timeline — The primary view. Artifacts and events arranged chronologically, with filters by era and category. Start here if you want to follow the biblical narrative in sequence.
• People — A guide to the kings, prophets, and patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible. Each entry summarizes the person's role and links to the artifacts that corroborate their existence or the events of their lives.
• Events — A period-by-period map of how well the archaeological record covers the biblical narrative, from the Patriarchs to the Second Temple era.
• Map — A geographic view showing where artifacts were found and where biblical events took place. Useful for understanding the spatial relationships between sites.
• FAQ — You're here. Background on the field, common questions about the evidence, and guidance on going deeper.

These are the most useful resources for going deeper:

• Biblical Archaeology Society — Publishes Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), the flagship journal bridging academic archaeology and general readers. Their archive includes detailed articles on virtually every artifact on this site.
• Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology — Focuses on excavations in Jerusalem and produces accessible articles and Let the Stones Speak, a free magazine on Israel's biblical archaeology.
• Sefaria — Free, searchable library of primary Jewish texts: Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and Rishonim. Use it to read the biblical passages referenced on each artifact card in their full textual context.
• The Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Home to the Shrine of the Book (Dead Sea Scrolls), Ketef Hinnom amulets, and dozens of other artifacts from this site. Their online collection is searchable.
• Bible History Daily — The Biblical Archaeology Society's free online journal. Regularly updated with new finds and scholarly debates.
• JSTOR — For peer-reviewed academic papers. Search for the artifact name plus "inscription" or "archaeology" to find the primary literature. Many papers are available for free after creating an account.

The finds cluster in four main geographic zones, each yielding a distinct category of evidence:

• Israel and Shomron (Judea and Samaria) — The densest concentration of biblical-era finds anywhere. Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings (City of David, Ophel, Ketef Hinnom) have produced royal bullae, altars, inscriptions, and tombs. The Judean lowlands and Negev (Tel Lachish, Tel Arad, Beersheba, Khirbet Qeiyafa) preserve fortress cities, temples, and ostraca from the monarchy period. The Dead Sea caves at Qumran yielded the most important manuscript discovery of the 20th century.
• Jordan and the Transjordan — Ancient Moab, Ammon, and Edom are well-attested here. The Mesha Stele came from Dhiban (ancient Dibon), the Deir Alla Inscription from the Jordan Valley, and the region has produced seals, tablets, and sites that directly intersect with the biblical narrative of Israel's neighbors.
• Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) — Nineveh, Babylon, and Nimrud are the source of nearly all the Assyrian and Babylonian material: Sennacherib's Prism, the Black Obelisk, the Babylonian Chronicles, and the Cyrus Cylinder. Most were excavated by British and French teams in the 19th century and shipped to European museums.
• Egypt — The Nile Delta region (Tell el-Dab'a, ancient Avaris) preserves the physical context of the Joseph and Exodus narratives. Upper Egypt (Luxor/Thebes) yielded the Merneptah Stele and the Karnak reliefs. The Sinai desert produced papyri and inscriptions, and the dry Egyptian climate is the reason so many fragile documents survived at all.

Biblical-era artifacts appear in three main scripts and several languages:

• Cuneiform — Wedge-shaped impressions pressed into clay tablets. Used across Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Most Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts on this site (Sennacherib's Prism, Cyrus Cylinder, Jehoiachin Ration Tablets) are written in Akkadian cuneiform.
• Paleo-Hebrew (Ktav Ivri) — The original Semitic script used throughout the First and early Second Temple periods. It appears on seals, the Siloam Tunnel inscription, the Gezer Calendar, the Merneptah Stele's "Israel" glyph, and most Iron Age inscriptions. Closely related to Phoenician script; still used on Dead Sea Scroll titles and Jewish coins centuries after Ktav Ashuri was adopted for scrolls.
• Block Hebrew (Ktav Ashuri / "Assyrian script") — The square Hebrew script used in Jewish texts today. It became standard during or after the Babylonian exile and is the script of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ketef Hinnom amulets (transitional). The Talmud (Sanhedrin 21b–22a) attributes its adoption for sacred use to Ezra the Scribe upon the return from Babylon.
• Demotic and Hieroglyphic Egyptian — Used in Egyptian artifacts like the Merneptah Stele and the Shoshenq Karnak Relief. The "Israel" entry on the Merneptah Stele is written with the hieroglyphic determinative for a people (a seated man and woman), not a land.
• Aramaic — The international lingua franca of the Near East from the 8th century BCE onward. The Tel Dan Stele is in Old Aramaic. Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew in everyday speech after the Babylonian exile, and portions of Ezra and Daniel are written in it.

Authentication draws on several independent lines of evidence:

• Controlled excavation — The gold standard. An artifact recovered by professional archaeologists in a documented stratigraphic context has a known provenance: the layer it came from, what surrounded it, and what that layer's date range is. The Hezekiah Bulla, the Siloam Tunnel Inscription, and the Tel Dan Stele all came from controlled digs.
• Epigraphy and paleography — The shape of the letters, the writing conventions, and the formulaic language of an inscription must match what is known from the period it claims to be from. Forgeries frequently fail here — anachronistic letter forms, unusual word order, or phrases not attested elsewhere are red flags.
• Physical and chemical analysis — Lab testing can date the patina (the mineral crust that accumulates on stone over centuries), analyze the clay composition of tablets and bullae, detect tool marks inconsistent with ancient methods, or identify modern materials in an ostensibly ancient object.
• Internal consistency — Does the object's content fit what is independently known? An inscription naming a king should use his known titles. A bulla should match seal impressions found elsewhere. Anachronistic references — a detail the forger could only have known from the Bible, not from genuine historical context — are a tell.

The harder problem is unprovenanced artifacts — objects that surfaced on the antiquities market without any excavation record. The Jehoash Inscription is a prominent example: it appeared without provenance in the early 2000s, purporting to record repairs to the First Temple, and became a major controversy when Israeli authorities indicted the dealer Oded Golan for forgery. Every unprovenanced artifact on this site is noted as such.

No single artifact "proves" the Bible true in the way a mathematician proves a theorem. That's not how historical evidence works for any ancient text — not Homer, not Herodotus, not Thucydides.

What archaeology has done is far more significant: it has independently corroborated the biblical narrative at dozens of specific, falsifiable points — kings named in foreign annals, cities destroyed in the right sequence, administrative and legal practices matching what the text describes, geography confirmed in precise detail.

The pattern is the argument. When Assyrian battle records name Ahab, Menahem, Pekah, and Hoshea in the exact political context the Bible describes — when Sennacherib's own annals confirm the 701 BCE siege of Jerusalem without claiming to have taken it (matching 2 Kings 19 perfectly) — when the Tel Dan Stele names the House of David — these are not coincidences. They are the archaeological record independently arriving at the same history.

Israel was not written in a vacuum. The world the Hebrew Bible describes is the world archaeology keeps finding.

Archaeology hasn't "proved" the Bible, and it can't. But the cumulative weight of evidence is substantial — and the field has moved decisively in that direction over the past four decades.

The field has two broad camps, with most serious scholars somewhere between them:

• Minimalists — associated with scholars like Israel Finkelstein (Tel Aviv University) and Thomas Thompson. They argue for a late composition of the biblical texts (mostly post-exilic, 6th–5th century BCE or later), minimal historical content before the monarchy, and a "United Monarchy" of David and Solomon that was at most a small highland chiefdom, not an empire. Their watchword: absence of evidence is significant evidence of absence.
• Maximalists — associated with Kenneth Kitchen, James Hoffmeier, and others. They take the biblical text seriously as a historical source, read it alongside comparative ancient Near Eastern evidence, and argue that the narrative is broadly reliable where it can be tested. Their watchword: ancient peoples remembered their own history.

The Merneptah Stele places "Israel" as a recognized people in Canaan by 1208 BCE. Every king from Omri onward has been corroborated by at least one extrabiblical source. The administrative, legal, and geographic details of the text consistently match what excavation reveals — which is why most working archaeologists have moved away from the extreme minimalist position over the past two decades.

Notably, Israel Finkelstein's own excavations at Megiddo and Jezreel have produced finds — including the Jezreel Palace — that fit the Omride period better than his minimalist framework predicts.

It depends on the period — and the distinction matters. Dates on this site fall into two broad categories:

Externally anchored dates are cross-referenced with sources outside the Bible: Assyrian royal annals, Egyptian records, Babylonian chronicles, and astronomical synchronisms. From the monarchy onward (c. 1010 BCE), these anchors become increasingly dense. The reigns of Ahab, Jehu, Hezekiah, and Josiah can all be pinned to Assyrian inscriptions that name them directly, making monarchy-era dates generally reliable to within a decade.

Traditional dates are derived from the internal chronology of the Hebrew Bible itself: genealogies, reign lengths, and the timeline the Masoretic Text provides. They are not arbitrary; the biblical text has an internally consistent chronological framework. But they cannot be independently cross-checked against external sources in the same way monarchy-era dates can. The patriarchal era (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), the sojourn in Egypt, and the Judges period all fall into this category.

The Exodus is the most contested dating question in biblical chronology, because it sits at the boundary between traditional and externally anchored history. Three competing dates are in scholarly circulation:

• Early model (~1446 BCE) — Based on 1 Kings 6:1, which places the Exodus 480 years before Solomon's Temple. Favored by conservative and evangelical scholars.
• Seder Olam (1313 BCE) — The date derived from the rabbinic chronological text Seder Olam Rabbah, compiled by Rabbi Yose ben Halafta in the 2nd century CE. The standard date in traditional Jewish scholarship.
• Late/Ramesside model (~1270 BCE) — Places the Exodus during the reign of Ramesses II, based on archaeological correlations with Egyptian records. The most common date in mainstream academic scholarship.

No Egyptian source mentions the Exodus directly — which is either suspicious or exactly what you would expect from a state that did not record its own humiliations. See "Why is there no direct archaeological evidence of the Sinai wandering?" for more on this.

Archaeologists use several independent methods, and dating disputes usually come down to which method is being weighted, or how a layer is being interpreted. The main tools:

• Stratigraphy. The foundational method: objects found deeper in the ground are generally older. A site is excavated layer by layer (strata), and the sequence of layers establishes a relative chronology — this layer is earlier than that one — before any absolute dates are assigned. Most dating controversies begin here, when scholars disagree about which stratum an object actually came from, or whether a layer represents one event or many.
• Pottery typology. Ceramic styles changed over time in recognizable patterns, and a trained archaeologist can date a layer to within roughly 25–50 years based on the shapes, fabrics, and decorations of the sherds found in it. It is the workhorse of Levantine archaeology — fast, cheap, and well-calibrated for the Iron Age. The controversy at Jericho, for instance, turns almost entirely on competing pottery readings.
• Radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dating. Organic material — charred grain, burned wood, olive pits, bone — absorbs carbon-14 while alive and decays at a known rate after death. Measuring what's left gives a date range, typically with a margin of ±50–100 years. AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) has refined this to ±30–40 years in favorable conditions. The key limitation: you are dating when the organism died, not when the object was made or deposited. A roof beam reused from an older building will return an older date than the destruction that burned it — the "old wood problem."
• Dendrochronology. Tree-ring dating — each ring is one year, and ring-width patterns are unique to climatic periods. Extremely precise (to the year) when intact timber is available, but rarely preserved in the Levant.
• Archaeomagnetism. Fired clay — kilns, hearths, mud-brick walls burned in a destruction — preserves the magnetic field orientation at the moment it was last heated. The earth's magnetic field changes over time, and those changes have been mapped, so measuring the orientation in a burned feature can constrain its date. Increasingly used for Iron Age destruction events.
• Historical synchronisms. When a site contains an imported Egyptian scarab, an Assyrian cylinder seal, or a coin bearing a datable king's image, that object provides a terminus post quem — the deposit cannot be earlier than the object's date. Synchronisms with Egyptian and Assyrian records are especially valuable and anchor much of the Late Bronze and Iron Age chronology.

The most significant chronological controversy in the field is Finkelstein's Low Chronology, which argues that Iron Age I pottery sequences have been systematically misdated, pushing many 10th-century BCE strata — including those associated with Solomon — into the 9th century. If correct, this would eliminate the material-culture basis for a Solomonic state. Opponents, led by Amihai Mazar, contend the radiocarbon data from sites like Tel Rehov support the conventional chronology. The debate has been running since the 1990s and is unresolved.

Several questions remain genuinely open and actively debated among scholars:

• Jericho. John Garstang excavated in the 1930s and found a dramatic destruction layer: city walls collapsed outward (walls normally fall inward when undermined by attackers), and storage jars still full of grain — meaning the city fell at harvest time and was never looted. Both details match Joshua 6 precisely, including the herem command, the sacred ban on plunder that explains the untouched grain. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated in the 1950s and concluded this layer dated earlier than Garstang thought, and — crucially — that Jericho was unoccupied in the 13th century BCE. That 13th-century absence became the centerpiece of the minimalist case against Joshua: no destruction layer, no conquest. But the argument has a foundational flaw. The 13th-century date was never in the Bible — it was imposed on the text by modern scholars who preferred a Ramesses II context for the Exodus. The Bible provides its own explicit chronology: 1 Kings 6:1 states that Solomon began building the Temple 480 years after the Exodus. Solomon's Temple is independently dated to c. 966 BCE. Counting back 480 years places the Exodus at c. 1446 BCE and the Conquest of Jericho at c. 1406 BCE — the 15th century, not the 13th. Bryant Wood's subsequent stratigraphic analysis argues that Garstang's destruction layer, dismissed by Kenyon as too early, actually dates to precisely this 15th-century window. When you look for a Jericho destruction at the date the Bible actually gives, you find walls fallen outward and grain jars full. The apparent absence evaporates once you stop testing the Bible against a chronology it never claimed. Wood's stratigraphic argument remains contested in the field, but it has not been definitively refuted — and the 15th-century window continues to attract serious scholarly attention.
• The United Monarchy. Did David and Solomon rule a true empire or a small highland chiefdom? Israel Finkelstein's "low chronology" systematically pushes 10th-century BCE material culture into the 9th century, effectively erasing the archaeological foundation for a Solomonic state. If Finkelstein is right, the monumental gates at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer — which 1 Kings 9:15 attributes to Solomon — belong to the era of Ahab, not Solomon, and the United Monarchy shrinks to a modest tribal polity. But the low chronology's core tool is ceramic typology, and its assumptions are contested. Amihai Mazar and others argue the pottery sequences Finkelstein relies on are themselves calibrated against the very chronology he is trying to revise — a circular problem. More critically, the physical evidence keeps accumulating against him. Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified city in the Judean Shephelah with two gates, an Israelite cultic shrine, and administrative storage jars, has been radiocarbon-dated to 1020–980 BCE — the reign of David — with no ambiguity. The scale and planning of the fortifications imply a centralized state capable of organizing large-scale construction, not a highland chiefdom. The Khirbat en-Nahas copper works in Edom — 24 acres of industrial smelting — are radiocarbon-dated to the 10th century BCE, consistent with David's documented conquest of Edom. The Kurkh Monolith already places Ahab commanding 2,000 chariots in 853 BCE, implying the military-industrial infrastructure of a genuine state built over generations before him. The low chronology requires dismissing or reinterpreting all of this. The debate continues, but the weight of recent excavation runs against Finkelstein's framework.
• The Exodus route and date. Two chronologies compete. The majority of 20th-century scholarship favored a 13th-century BCE Exodus under Ramesses II, largely because Exodus 1:11 names Ramesses as one of the store cities built by Israelite labor. But as with Jericho, this date was imposed on the text rather than derived from it. The Hebrew Bible provides its own fixed point: 1 Kings 6:1 places the Exodus 480 years before Solomon began the Temple (c. 966 BCE), yielding an Exodus date of c. 1446 BCE — squarely in the 15th century, under Thutmose III or Amenhotep II. Proponents of the early date note that it aligns with the Jericho destruction layer, the Amarna Letters' picture of Canaan in upheaval, and the Merneptah Stele's reference to Israel as an established people by 1208 BCE — hard to explain if the Exodus was only a few decades earlier under Ramesses. The Sinai route is separately debated: the "way of the Philistines" along the northern coast was deliberately avoided (Exodus 13:17), pointing to an interior route, but the specific path remains unresolved. As for Egyptian silence on the Exodus itself — no Egyptian source mentions it, which minimalists cite as damning. But Egyptian records systematically omitted military defeats and national humiliations; the reign of Ramesses II produced monuments boasting of a Kadesh campaign that was at best a draw. Absence from Egyptian records is exactly what you would expect from an event the Egyptians had every reason to suppress.
• Hazor and the conquest narratives. Tel Hazor was the dominant city-state of Canaan — described in Joshua 11:10 as "the head of all those kingdoms" — and it was violently destroyed around 1230 BCE. The destruction is not in dispute: excavations by Yigael Yadin and later Amnon Ben-Tor found buildings burned to ash, storage vessels smashed in place, and — most strikingly — every Canaanite cultic statue deliberately decapitated or mutilated. The question is who did it. Three candidates are proposed: incoming Israelites, internal Canaanite revolt, or Sea Peoples. Ben-Tor argues forcefully for an Israelite conquest based on the pattern of destruction — the systematic desecration of cult objects points to an ideologically motivated destroyer, not a rival Canaanite city-state (which would have looted the statues, not smashed them) and not the Sea Peoples (who arrived a century later and left a different destruction signature elsewhere). The biblical account is specific: of all the Canaanite cities, Joshua burned only Hazor (Joshua 11:13) — exactly matching the archaeological record, where Hazor's destruction layer is far more thorough than those at other conquest-period sites. The date of ~1230 BCE fits the 13th-century Exodus chronology but sits uncomfortably with the 15th-century reading — a genuine tension. Ben-Tor's excavations continue, and each season produces new data. The deliberate mutilation of the cult images remains the hardest feature to explain without an Israelite hand.

This is one of the most common objections to the Exodus narrative — and one of the least compelling, once you understand what archaeology can and cannot find.

Nomadic tent-dwelling populations leave almost no archaeological trace. This is not a special pleading for Israel — it is a documented fact about pastoralist and semi-nomadic peoples generally. Ancient groups that lived and moved in tents, cooked over open fires, and drank from temporary wells simply do not leave the kind of material culture that survives for 3,000 years.

The Egyptian copper-mining operation at Timna Valley in the Sinai ran continuously for centuries. Thousands of workers lived there for extended periods. They left almost nothing archaeologically detectable. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence for nomadic populations.

The Egyptian court had powerful institutional reasons not to record the Exodus. Ancient Near Eastern kings did not commemorate defeats, humiliations, or the flight of slave populations. The Egyptians excised their own history when it was politically inconvenient — including entire pharaohs (see: Hatshepsut, Akhenaten). A mass departure of enslaved laborers culminating in the destruction of Pharaoh's army would not appear in official state records.

What we do have: the Tell el-Dab'a Exodus Layer, showing sudden total abandonment of a massive Semitic settlement in the Nile Delta with no destruction — consistent with mass departure. The Merneptah Stele placing Israel as a recognized people in Canaan by 1208 BCE, requiring an earlier departure. The Brooklyn Papyrus documenting Hebrew-named slaves in Egypt in the right period. The absence of a smoking gun is not a refutation.

Subjective — but here are the strongest candidates and the case for each:

• Tel Dan Stele (9th century BCE). The first and only extrabiblical text to name the "House of David" directly — eliminating the argument that David was mythological. Found in 1993; the scholarly debate about its reading lasted less than a decade before consensus formed. If you had to pick one find that changed the field most dramatically, this is it.
• Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE). The oldest known extrabiblical mention of Israel by name — carved in stone in Egypt, predating the monarchy by two centuries. It proves Israel existed as a recognized people in Canaan before 1200 BCE and sets a hard terminus ante quem for the Exodus.
• Sennacherib's Prism (c. 690 BCE). The Assyrian king's own official account of his siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE — naming Hezekiah, listing 46 captured cities, and conspicuously failing to claim Jerusalem fell. The convergence between the Assyrian and biblical accounts of the same event is one of the most compelling in all of ancient historiography.
• Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls (7th century BCE). The oldest surviving biblical text — the Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6, inscribed on tiny silver amulets worn around the neck. They pre-date the Dead Sea Scrolls by 400 years and prove the Torah was in active use, in recognizable form, during the reign of Josiah.

A strong case can be made for the Tel Dan Stele — it directly confirms the Davidic dynasty from an enemy king's own monument, in stone, within a century of David's reign.