Remarks on Patronage, the History of the Southern Levant and the Hebrew Bible

EMANUEL PFOH

Siracusa

Seminario; Workshop 'Aspects of Patronage in the History of the Southern Levant and the Hebrew Bible'; 2023

European Association of Biblical Studies

Patronage, or patron-client relationships, is a well-attested socio-political phenomenon among the societies of the Mediterranean basin, being continuously active in the region at least since Roman imperial times, from where it took, more recently, its socio-analytical terminology. Further enquiries have taken the analytical gaze to survey ancient Near Eastern historical realities, including of course the biblical world. Since the 1980s, patronage has growingly been used as an interpretive model in biblical studies, both in Old and New Testament scholarships, to achieve a socio-political understanding of biblical stories, myths and motifs, but also of the more mundane, political realities of the first-millennium BCE southern Levant. This paper offers a synthesis of these approaches and discusses the present state of the research as well as its prospects for the future.