Archaeological Record
Little archaeological evidence of an extensive, powerful Kingdom of Judah before the late 8th Century BC has been found, leading some archaeologists of the minimalist school to doubt its extent as depicted in the Bible. Around 1990–2010, an important group of archaeologists and biblical scholars formed the view that the actual Kingdom of Judah bore little resemblance to the biblical portrait of a powerful monarchy. These scholars say the kingdom was no more than a small tribal entity. Some people doubt whether the kingdom existed at all. Others maintain that recent findings support the biblical story, for example Yosef Garfinkel has written in a preliminary report published by the Israeli Antiquities Authority that finds at the Khirbet Qeiyafa site support the notion that an urban society existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE. Other archaeologists say that the identification of Khirbet Qeiyafa as a Jewish settlement is uncertain.
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