On Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine: Middle Eastern Ethnography, Archaeology and the Rise of Early Israel

EMANUEL PFOH

Lisboa (Portugal)

Congreso; European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting - Lisbon 2008; 2008

This paper offers a critique on state formation theories used by biblical scholars and archaeologists in the explanation of the rise of the biblical United Monarchy. The last three decades of archaeological and biblical research have shown that there is no firm evidence for speaking of a kingdom or empire of David and Solomon in ancient Palestine as depicted in the books of Kings, and therefore any rationalization of biblical images picturing Israelite society through anthropological theory, and without extra-biblical historical evidence of it, is wrong-headed. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnological record of the Middle East, keeping the biblical stories apart from this interpretation. The analysis of the dynamics and structure of Middle Eastern ‘tribal states’ and ‘chiefdom societies’, including here the practice of patronage bonds, may give us important keys for understanding Palestine’s socio-politics as reflected by the archaeological record of the Iron Age. This methodology allows us to affirm that early Israel should not be sought during the 12th-10th centuries BCE but in the 9th, with the rise of the House of Omri.