Pharaoh Sheshonq’s campaign through Palestine. As a datable event that allows correlating Egyptian records with archeological evidence of destruction levels in Canaanite cities mentioned in these records, this serves archeologists as the marker of transition from Iron Age I to Iron Age II. The campaign is mentioned in 1 K 14:25-26, where it is said to have occurred in the fifth year of king Rehoboam of Judah under whose reign the united kingdom is said to have broken up. This may reflect a genuine memory of the campaign of Shoshenq (Shishak) as an event that shook up the emerging new system of states that was in the process of formation. The date of Sheshonq’s campaign thus more or less coincides with what the biblical authors describe as the apostasy of the northern kingdom. Historians therefore conventionally begin the history of Judah and Israel as separate kingdoms with this date. Since Jerusalem was not affected by this campaign, one may speculate that the city had remained loyal to Egypt, as perhaps implied in the story about King Solomon’s marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter. (Cf. 1 K 3:1)(1)

Footnote 1 Diplomatic marriages were a common way of establishing friendly relations between nations but, in the case of ancient Egypt, they always meant that foreign princes moved to the Egyptian court. Princesses were never sent to live in foreign countries. A famous case is the attempted, but failed, marriage between an Egyptian princess and a prince of Mittani, which had to be cancelled because the prince never arrived in Egypt. The marriage of King Solomon to Pharaoh’s daughter seems therefore unlikely, at least in this form.