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ON THE COVER: Four leading scholars fail to see eye-to-eye over one of the most controversial issues in Near Eastern archaeology: Was there an Israelite monarchy in the tenth century B.C.? According to the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, David and Solomon built a powerful kingdom centered in Jerusalem; upon Solomon’s death, this united monarchy split into the northern kingdom of Israel (destroyed by the Assyrians in about 722 B.C.) and the southern kingdom of Judah (destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.). Most scholars have accepted this chronology as a largely reliable historical outline. Recently, however, some revisionist scholars, the so-called Biblical minimalists, have provoked heated debates by arguing that the Bible’s accounts of David and Solomon, along with much else, are myths devised centuries later to give Israel’s past an element of grandeur. In “Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers,” two minimalists, Thomas Thompson (right) and Niels Peter Lemche (left center), take up their differences with archaeologist William Dever (left) and textual critic P. Kyle McCarter (right center) in a no-holds-barred conversation hosted by BAR editor Hershel Shanks.