Saul, David, and Solomon are among the most influential—and most contested—figures in the Hebrew Bible. The biblical narratives portray them as rulers of an expanding Israelite polity that eventually divided into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Yet how much of these accounts reflects historical reality? Did the United Monarchy truly exist, and what can archaeology tell us about Israel’s earliest kings?

In The Bible’s First Kings: Uncovering the Story of Saul, David, and Solomon (Cambridge UP, 2025), archaeologist Avraham Faust and biblical scholar Zev I. Farber enter one of the most vigorously debated areas of biblical scholarship. Against the growing skepticism surrounding the historicity of the United Monarchy, they argue that Saul, David, and Solomon were real rulers of consequence and that the early Israelite kingdom developed into a regional “mini-empire”—even if the biblical authors later reshaped the memories of these kings in order to glorify, criticize, or vilify them.

Combining recent archaeological discoveries with close and critical readings of Samuel and Kings, Faust and Farber reconstruct the rise, development, and collapse of this short-lived ancient polity. Their study examines settlement patterns, fortifications, demographic change, relations between Israelites and Philistines, copper production in Edom and Timna, and the complex relationship between material evidence, historical memory, and biblical narrative.

In this interview, Professor Avraham Faust discusses what archaeology can—and cannot—tell us about Saul, David, and Solomon; why the scholarly consensus concerning the United Monarchy has changed so dramatically; how biblical traditions preserve genuine historical memories while also reshaping the past; and why a kingdom that lasted for less than a century left such an extraordinary religious and cultural legacy.

The interview was conducted by Željko Stanojević of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, with invaluable assistance from his colleague Mila Lekić. The Institute publishes the Diamond Open Access European Hebrew Journal and organizes the EHJ International Scholarly Online Conference 2026, at which Professor Faust will present “The Archaeology of the Return to Zion and the Achaemenid Economic Revolution.”

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Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner’s Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences in 2023. 

In this interview she discusses her new book Absence in the Archives (Cambridge UP, 2026).

Absence in official records can have profound implications for social memory, civil rights, restorative and transitional justice, citizenship, social welfare, and redress for historical abuse. Scholars of archivistics and early modern New World imperial contexts have uncovered the epistemological problems that archival silences pose for historical research, and the author contends that absence deserves separate conceptual treatment. Archival absences, both permanent and temporary, have particular resonances for postcolonial countries, and are an ongoing threat under totalitarian regimes. Using Britain and Ireland as primary examples, this Element traces how absence took root in the domestic and subsequently the colonial archive, and how through legal mechanisms it became an accepted part of archival praxis. The aim of this Element is to raise awareness of archival absence in order to prevent more losses, particularly in the abundance of the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Absence in the Archives was recently published with Cambridge University Press, as part of their Elements short book series.

Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregrounding neglected areas such as femtech, queer infrastructures, and digital precarity. The volume not only reanimates classic concerns of Indian feminist sociology but also aims to intervene in global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge, and the sociology of everyday life.

Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues.

Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy.

Deepali Aparajita Dungdung teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and care work within contemporary capitalism, with her more recent work focusing on language, education, and development.

Priyam Sinha is an Early-Career Fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where her work sits at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production cultures, disability studies, gender studies, and digital media development in Asia. She previously held a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and her doctoral research was awarded by the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Her articles appear in the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and South Asian Diaspora, among others. Committed to public scholarship, she is a regular host on the New Books Network and has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, the Asian Film Archive, and FemAsia. Her work can be found at here and you can follow her on X here

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