Not much kick back and read time on this cruise but I have made a start on After 1177 by Eric Cline. It's the sequel to his book on the late Bronze Age Collapse, looking both at the societies that survived the collapse and how they fared going into the Iron Age and at new societies that arose. Of interest to WC2, some of those new societies include the Philistines and the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Basically, he makes the point that there is some verifiable history in Biblical books like Kings and Chronicles (which he cites a few times himself), with figures like Ahab actually being mentioned in texts of other societies. Not to say they are objective history, more like heavily biased and mythologized history. But most historical texts of that era were like that, usually inscriptions or documents to promote some king or other.
