Time period: ca. 975 - 925 BCE

We look at the reign of King Solomon. While Saul and David are portrayed in the Tanakh as the founders of the Israelite states, Solomon is depicted as the founder of their institutions: the bureaucracy, the temple, the palaces, the diplomatic ties, the army, and the taxation. I go on a tangent about the taxes Solomon was supposed to have gathered and determined that he would have received an unreasonably-large sum of $113 million a year. We then look at the remains of Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo, three cities which Solomon was said to have fortified. The archaeology of these sites is very controversial, so we dive into the opposing theories concerning when their gates were constructed.

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