The First Temple era fascinates me because, while it’s the part of the history of the Jews that the Bible spends the most time on, it’s clearly the product of a later civilization projecting its own values and way of life onto an earlier age and depicting it as a sort of lost golden age, the same way modern day America depicts the '50s as a utopia, or how Arthurian legends project late medieval customs onto a pre-Roman era. The historical David was probably a warlord who ruled over a small area around Jerusalem, but he gets turned into the king of all of Israel in the same way that Arthur transformed from a petty Welsh king into the greatest ruler England had ever known.
First Temple Israel was probably a polytheistic society where the cult of El/Yahweh was popular among the elites, where worship of other gods and practices like child sacrifice were tolerated if not officially sanctioned, where tribal chiefs wielded more power than the king, and where other tribes who worshipped other gods were nominal subjects of the king and were allowed to practice their religions openly, but the people who fixed the stories of that era in written form centuries later whitewashed it into a great monotheistic empire in order to sell the common folk of the Second Temple era on the legitimacy of their religion and their nation.
You can just barely see hints in the Bible of the way that that era wasn’t as squeaky-clean as the writers like to present it as - the toleration of the high places and Asherah poles, the necessity to sacrifice an animal to “redeem” the firstborn son, the whole thing with Jephthah and his daughter, the king of Moab sacrificing his son to Chemosh in exchange for victory against the Israelites and it actually working, and so on. It’s a very interesting era that we’ll probably never have a complete picture of.
That is henotheism, not polytheism. In other words, Early Israel was mostly, kinda monotheistic, but they were willing to accept other nations had their own deities, which had powers (see the battle between Aaron and the Egyptian clerics). Not as powerful as Y, of course, but still fine in their own area. That went away later.
If the absence of pig bones is inadequate to identify Jewish towns, it’s too bad that ancient skeletons cannot be diagnosed for circumcision!
The Decapolis was mostly Gentile but fishermen might often find themselves on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee. (The possessed man was a Gentile.) Discrepancy in the name of the region where the exorcism into swine took place may help with Gospel dating.
Mark places the exorcism in the region of Gerasa (conflated with Gergesa?); Matthew moves this to Gadara while Luke retains Gerasa. This immediately casts doubt on the hypothesis that Luke copied Matthew rather than Mark.
Neither Gerasa nor Gadara (both among the ten major provinces that comprise the Decapolis) adjoins the Sea of Galilee but Gadara is much closer. (Hippus is the province which adjoins the Sea.) Did Matthew use his geographic knowledge to correct an error in Mark?
In the 2nd century Matthew was edited to replace the placename with Gergesa, a village near Hippus adjacent to the Sea.
Well, the Babylonians used the Metonic cycle, where 19 years give you 235 months. The question is, how long was an average synodic month once upon a time, but it could not have been that far off the 29.5306 value— in any case that gives us a Jewish year of an average of 12.368 months.