tribes in making David, who was then the king of Judah, the king of a reunited kingdom. According to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, there is doubt about whether the biblical ordering of the reigns of the early monarchs is reliable, and that the sequence preserved in the Bible, in which David follows Saul as king of Israel, may not be historically accurate.

However, on the accession of Rehoboam, David's grandson, in c. 930 BCE,