On the Archaeology of 10th Century bce Israel and the Idea of the ‘State’

ABSTRACT

The State has long been the dominant socio-political concept in the scholarly debate over the biblical early monarchy in Israel and the archaeology of the 10th century bce. It has been assumed that if Israel had indeed become a kingdom already at this time that it would have adhered to the form of a State as conceived in modern scholarship, and that the material correlates of the State would appear in the archaeological record. This essay argues that this is a methodologically false approach and that the concept of the State is quite inappropriate to the context of socio-political relations in the ancient Near East on a theoretical and conceptual level. As such, the search for archaeological correlates to a State in 10th century Israel is an unnecessary one. Instead, the question of socio-political form can be approach emically from within Israel’s context, beginning with the native concepts and terminology that actually appear in the Hebrew Bible, which can then be linked to larger patterns of socio-political organisation in the Near East and to sociological conceptualisations, namely Max Weber’s idea of household-based patrimonial structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Iron Age
• patrimonialism
• state-formation
• neo-evolutionism
• Israel
• united monarchy

Acknowledgements

The idea for this paper originally arose during research for my doctoral thesis at Macquarie University, so I would like to first thank my supervisors Kyle Keimer and Baruch Halpern. An initial version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of SBL in 2017, and I would like to thank the session organizer Jacqueline Vayntrub. My thanks for helpful feedback there from Avraham Faust and Erez Ben-Yosef, and to the latter also for giving me his forthcoming article. My thanks to Oystein LaBianca for commenting on an earlier version of this article and giving me his forthcoming article. Finally, my thanks to PEQ’s anonymous reviewers. All opinions and any errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For more a more detailed review see essays by Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar, the two leading figures in the debate, in Schmidt 2007. Other relevant works include Halpern 2001, Dever 2001 and essays in Levy and Higham 2005.

2 It should be noted that in these and other publications Mazar is more nuanced and flexible in his treatment than Finkelstein. He notes in the above reference that the epigraphic corpus of the 10th century bce would be limited by the fact that papyrus was a primary medium for writing, but papyrus rarely survives in the clime of the southern Levant.

3 It must of course be recognised that the term ‘patrimonialism’ is itself essentially etic, but here it is not claimed that it is a native concept, only a way of characterising sociologically the nature of socio-political relations in Israel’s Near Eastern context. As Brendon Benz has pointed out, it is not so much a problem to use modern terms to discuss ancient social and political systems but more a matter of how precisely they are used (2016, 8–9). In any event, the word ‘patrimonial’ has of course its etymology in Latin patrimōnium, the inheritance from the pater ‘father’.

4 See further Rainey 1975; Postgate 1971; 1974; 2013; Nam 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary Thomas

Zachary Thomas completed his PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, with a thesis on the early monarchy of Israel as a Weberian patrimonial kingdom. His research focuses on early Iron Age Israel and the surrounding Levant, and he is a staff member for excavations at Tel Abel Beth Maacah and Khrirbet er-Ra’i in Israel.