Patronage and the Political Anthropology of Ancient Palestine

EMANUEL PFOH

Copenhague

Congreso; The Palestine History and HeritageProject--The Third International Conference and Workshop, 11th-13th April 2016; 2016

Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen

This contribution aims at showing the potentiality of the concept of patronage, or patron-client relations, for understanding the working of socio-politics in ancient Palestine. Patronage is well documented in the ethno-historical record of the Levant from Roman to Ottoman times. However, when dealing with pre-Roman Palestine, the practice of patronage is usually ignored or downplayed by mainstream biblical and historical scholarship, or also overshadowed by more current notions of "tribalism", "ethnic states", and even more anachronistically, "nation-states". If the political anthropology of ancient Palestine is addressed through its practices, as reflected in the epigraphic and archaeological records, instead of its institutions (many times, built upon biblical images, for instance, of a united monarchy, and therefore of full-blown statehood and a national territory), a different historical reconstruction appears, one more realistic and related to the long-term social structures of the region and at the same time less dependent on biblical paraphrases. This communication will therefore address the heuristic value of patron-clientage for understanding the political arrangement of hierarchical society in Palestine from the late fourth to the first millennium BCE, its dynamic building on kinship structures and its vertical linkage to states and empires.