The Source

"I read a lot of books on the history of religion and most of them deny a historical David and Solomon, well they don't deny it, they just say they can't find them in history outside the Bible." - Uncle Ken (emphasis mine)

Okay, that's the key to this whole dilemma, "outside the Bible".  Uncle Ken asserted that there are no historical references to David and Solomon, and I quoted him one.  I am sure there are others, lots of them.  The problem is all the information that any subsequent book contains about David and Solomon was derived from Biblical sources.  That's because the Hebrew scriptures that ultimately became the Old Testament are the only source of information we have about Hebrew history in the BC years.  It's not because of any religious significance they have for some people, it's because they are the only written records of the era that have survived to this day.  Other ancient civilizations like the Greeks and the Egyptians wrote about their own history, not the history of Israel, probably because they considered Israel to be insignificant, if they were even aware of its existence.  Greek and Egyptian historians of the day also spiced up their stories with religious mythology, but nobody today would say that proves the stories are totally bogus.  Maybe that's because the ancient Greek and Egyptian religions are no longer practiced, so nobody feels the need to take sides on them one way or the other.  

Speaking of the Greeks, consider the case of Socrates.  Any writing that Socrates might have done has been lost to the ages, so the only written information we have about him comes from Plato.  For all we know, Socrates might be a fictitious character that Plato made up to be a vehicle for his own pronouncements.  I have never heard anybody make this claim, yet I have heard people claim that the Bible is just a collection of fairy tales.  Again, this may be because, as far as I know, nobody has ever ascribed supernatural powers to Socrates. 

Speaking of fictional characters, the Czech philosopher Jara Cimrman was undoubtedly the smartest fictional character who never lived.  That's because he was the founder of the Externalist School of philosophy.  An Externalist believes that he has no intrinsic existence of his own and only exists in the perception of other people.  Other philosophers of the day scoffed at Cimrman's  hypothesis but, if he is indeed a fictional character, it just proves that Cimrman was spot on about Externalism.  How many other fictional characters do you know that are aware of their own fictionality? 

Dick and Jane were characters in the reading textbooks that were used in my first few grades.  Funny, the teachers who wouldn't tolerate the use of nicknames in their own classroom had no problem with Dick.  I remember John and Mary as being characters in my early arithmetic text books, and it seemed like they were always passing apples back and forth between them.  There may have been others, but John and Mary are the only two I remember.

Our teachers had seating plans which they usually kept locked up in their desks.  If a teacher knew that she would be absent the next day, she would leave her seating plan in the office for the substitute to use.  Substitutes who filled unplanned vacancies would take attendance by passing around a sign up sheet.  Kids used this as an opportunity to express their creative writing skills by signing names like Jim Shoe, Claude Balls, Guy Wire, and Regus Patoff.  I learned a new one decades later from the radio personality Garrison Keillor: Xavier Onassis.  Boy I wish I knew about that one when I was in school!