In the face of all the evidence many find ways to explain away the problems and continue to believe.

"Jerusalem has been excavated time and again - and with a particularly intense period of investigation of Bronze and Iron Age remains...fieldwork there and in other parts of biblical Jerusalem failed to provide significant evidence for a tenth century occupation. Not only was any sign of monumental architecture missing, but so were even simple pottery sherds...The most optimisitic assessment of this negative evidence is that tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent...not more than a typical hill country village.

This modest appraisal meshes well with the rather meager settlement pattern of the rest of Judah in the same period, which was composed of only about twenty small villages and a few thousand inhabitants, many of them wandering pastoralists." The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman

Watching so many trying to cling to the remnants of tattered belief systems is interesting. There seems to be something within each of us that needs to believe the unbelievable even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.