Typological Illusion and Political Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible

EMANUEL PFOH

Varsovia

Congreso; European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting, Warsaw 11-14 August 2019; 2019

European Association of Biblical Studies

In the Hebrew Bible, we learn of families and tribes and of kings and kingdoms, among other social configurations. These native notices of an ancient political anthropology in the Levant has since the 19th century been taken up by both textual scholars and biblical archaeologists in order to offer some historical reconstructions of ancient Israel in terms of political organizations and processes. These reconstructions, also, have usually made use of some ethnographic examples and anthropological theories to make proper sense of the textual notices in the biblical tradition. This paper presents a criticism of this analytical procedure by placing the Hebrew Bible as a secondary source and noting the fallacy of historicizing a mythic discourse through social-science approaches, notably those of neoevolutionism in anthropology. It also provides a discussion of usual concepts deployed in biblical and archaeological studies of the Levant ('city-state', 'state', 'tribe', 'tribal state'), and presents some alternative perspectives for making proper sense of the textual, archaeological and historical-anthropological available data.