Shifting Alliances, Shifting Identities: Political Networks and Ethnic Identities in the Iron Age II Southern Levant

EMANUEL PFOH

Helsinki

Workshop; Workshop ''Social Identity and Religious Studies Scholars in Dialogue''; 2023

Universidad de Helsinki

What is the role of political alliances and networks of dependence in crafting different identities, not less, ethnic identities on concrete territories? Building on ethnographic and historical data and on anthropological insights on ethnicity, this paper assesses this issue considering the changing historical situation in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE in the Southern Levant, when Aramean and Assyrian political and military forces intervened in the territory of the kingdom of Israel and interacted, either actively or passively, with its population. Yet, this sentence begs some questions: Who is then an Aramean? And, who is an Israelite? Are the traditionally deployed linguistic criteria paramount definers to assign identity or rather secondary in the light of other features? Furthermore, which are the particular (political, military, inter-cultural, cultic) situations generating ethnic self-awareness and, most importantly, how can historians reconstruct these scenarios when data is usually fragmentary or lacking? Lastly, and in relation to socio-political ties, this paper addresses the question, mainly from epigraphic and archaeological evidence, of the inter-relationships between religious and cultic practices and constructions and maintenance (or, in sociological parlance, reproduction) of identity in the Iron Age Southern Levant.