The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

257 Pages·2009·2.01 MB·English

by  Emanuel Pfoh

THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL
IN ANCIENT PALESTINE
Copenhagen International Seminar
General Editor: Thomas L. Thompson, University of Copenhagen
Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Müller, both at the University of Copenhagen
Language Revision Editor: James West

Other volumes in the series include:

The Origin Myths of Holy Places in the Old Testament
A Study of Aetiological Narratives
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò

The Expression ‘Son of Man’ and the Development of Christology
A History of Interpretation
Mogens Müller

Japheth Ben Ali's Book of Jeremiah
A Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic Translation
Joshua A. Sabih
THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL
IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

HISTORICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

EMANUEL PFOH
First published 2009 by Equinox Publishing Ltd, an imprint of Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge
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© Emanuel Pfoh 2009

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L ibrary of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 9781845535292 (hardback)
To my parents,
Hugo and Silvia
Page Intentionally Left Blank
C
ontents

Foreword by Thomas L. Thompson ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xvii

Introduction 1
1. Defining the Case 2
2. The Contents 8

1.
History, Historiography and History-Writing 11
1. A Perspective on History:
Israel’s Past as a Part of Ancient Palestine’s Past 11
2. Historiography: Biblical, Ancient and Modern 26
2.1. Biblical Narrative and Ancient Historiography 29
2.2. Excursus: On Biblical Hebrew
and the Dating of Texts 39
3. History Writing: Principles and Methods 47
4. The Bible, Theology and History:
An Historian’s Approach 58

2.
Approaches to the Social World of the Hebrew Bible 69
1. Biblical Narrative and Socio-Historical Imagination 69
2. Evolutionary Discourse and Biblical Discourse 76
3. An Alternative Path 82

3.
The Archaeology of Ancient Palestine and Statehood 87
1. The Bible, Archaeology and Israel’s History 87
2. Alleged Evidence of Israelite Statehood 90
3. Towards an Archaeology of Patronage? 108

1
viii The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine
4.
An Historical-Anthropological Approach 113
1. A Plea for an Historical Anthropology
of Ancient Palestine 113
2. Chiefdoms and States, or Prestige and Power in Society 115
3. Patronage in the Ancient Near East and Israel 121
3.1. Patronage in Ancient Near Eastern Texts 124
3.1.1. The Amarna Letters 124
3.1.2. Hittite Treaties 130
3.1.3. Syrian Inscriptions 132
3.1.4. Assyrian Treaties 135
3.2. On the Socio-Political Nature of Patronage 138
4. Covenant Theology and Patronage 143
4.1. Royal Patronage Ideology in the Ancient Near East 150
4.2. Excursus: Patronage and Sectarianism 155
5. A World of Patrons and Clients 158

5.
The First Israel: The Rise of the House of Omri 161
1. The Late Bronze–Iron Age Transition
and Palestine’s Israel 161
2. Archaeology, Peer Polities and Trade:
An Historical-Anthropological Hypothesis 173
3. The Rise of the House of Omri—
or, Historical Israel in Ancient Palestine 182
4. A Final Historiographical Commentary 185

6.
Concluding Reflections 188

Bibliography 195
Index of References 230
Index of Authors 231

1
Foreword

Thomas L. Thompson (Series Editor)

The strategy of biblical archaeology since at least the 1920s has been to
bring archaeology into harmony with a corrected biblical narrative.1 With
the support of ‘parallels’ and analogies, the Bible is then read as an
account of historical events. Certainly, the use of circular arguments to
support the quite absurd assumption that one can identify a particular
biblical story as an actual ‘probable’ context or situation in which bibli-
cal composition took place is one of biblical archaeology’s most obvious
weaknesses. That one still today might speak, for example, of the Abra-
ham stories as belonging to a context that has been drawn from 2 Kings’
fragmented understanding of the sixth century, might assert the existence
of an oral tradition about an actual flight of David into the Judean wilder-
ness in the tenth century or place both Deuteronomy and an earliest
version of the much disputed ‘Deuteronomistic History’ in the seventh
century on the basis of one of its own stereotypical stories about a lost
Torah scroll that was used to launch a religious reform by good king
Josiah are central arguments which are rooted in the common agenda that
biblical archaeology has shared with historical criticism: to write the
history of Israel by taking the Bible’s story of the past as one’s own point
of departure.
That biblical stories, however, spring from originating events is an
arbitrary assumption that is without argument or evidence and evokes an
anti-historical corollary: if we assume that there must have been events
behind the biblical stories and that the stories in fact reflect such events,
we need merely good stories to write history. The breakdown of such
essentially circular argumentation in the debates over the patriarchal
narratives in the 1970s established a basic principle of critical historical

1. For a convenient and classical presentation of biblical archaeology and its
intrinsic strategies, see W.F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (New
York: Doubleday, 1946).
1