De tribus, Estados y relaciones de patronazgo: ¿Qué es Israel en la Edad del Hierro II?

EMANUEL PFOH

Parentesco, patronazgo y Estado en las sociedades antiguas

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2009; p. 123 - 146

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 book of Kings. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnographical 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 instead in the 9th, with the rise of the House of Omri. The ultimate aim of this paper is to explain why and how the House of Omri –the first historical Israel– appears in the history of the Levant.