Patronage in Ancient Palestine and in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader

EMANUEL PFOH (EDITOR)

Sheffield Phoenix Press

Lugar: Sheffield; Año: 2022 p. 484

978-1-914490-08-8

Patron-client relationships have been documented and studied by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1950s, from rural settings to urban locations, and virtually on every region of the world. It was, however, only in the last decades of the twentieth century that this analytical model was slowly incorporated into the socio-political interpretation of biblical texts and other ancient Near Eastern sources. The patronage model proves to be a useful interpretive tool, as it casts new light on many aspects of the history of Israel and of other socio-political communities in the southern Levant. Moreover, the concept of patron-client relationships clarifies many of the implicit socio-politics found in the stories and motifs of several biblical books. This reader collects a number of studies by internationally renowned scholars dealing with different aspects and situations of patronage: in the context of Southwest Asia during the second millennium BCE, related to the history of ancient Palestine during the first millennium BCE, and lastly with notices of patron-client ties in texts of the Hebrew Bible. While these selected papers do not presume to offer a complete or exhaustive treatment of periods, historical cases and themes in ancient Palestine and Hebrew Bible literature, they variously illustrate the many possibilities of the concept of patronage to elucidate them.