The Deuteronomic introduction to the period in Judges 1 exhibits still another roster: Simeon is something of an afterthought, almost absorbed into Judah (see already Josh. 19.1, 9); Issachar has disappeared, its territory taken up by Manasseh; Benjamin is not doing well finding territory for itself, nor is Dan, who will later remove to the far north of the land. The Transjordanian tribes are not mentioned, but Judges 1 is about the “conquest” of the area west of the Jordan River, and in this scheme the Transjordanian tribes had already been settled during Joshua’s time.
Reuben disappears from other fairly early sources, like David’s census in 2 Samuel 24 and the ninth-century Mesha Stela from Moab, and that same stela places Gadites in what was once Reubenite territory. Reuben’s stature as firstborn in the Genesis sources and in Deuteronomy 33 must reflect an early preeminence, preceding a subsequent rapid decline and disappearance. That preeminence might have depended on an early shrine: Joshua 22 implies such a shrine in Transjordan, and the Mesha Stela mentions a religious center at Nebo, in what was once Reubenite territory. We have also seen in our sketch of the religious beliefs exhibited in the early poetry (and supported by Exod. 3) the tradition that Yahweh himself originated in, or at any rate marched from, the land to the southeast of Israel; Reuben’s territory would have been the closest early Israelite soil that such a march would have encountered.
Conclusion
The nature of the evidence makes it impossible to determine with certainty the makeup of Israel at any point in the period of the judges, but a few elements are dependable, from both literary and archaeological evidence. Archaeology suggests that the central hill country of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin was the core of early settlement, with occupation of parts of Naphtali, Zebulun, and Asher coming either contemporaneously or soon after. These results accord with the picture presented in Judges 4-6, although it is not yet clear what the status of Issachar was in the earliest settlement. Moreover, the book of Judges reports various assortments of northern tribes capable of concerted effort—Zebulun and Naphtali in Judges 4; Ephraim, Benjamin, Manasseh, Zebulun, Naphtali, and Issachar in Judges 5; Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali in Judges 6, with Ephraim also volunteering. These are precisely the areas at the center of Israel’s earliest existence. With the exception of the Deuteronomic frame and the model story of Othniel in Judges 3.7-11, Judah (and its subgroup Simeon) is largely missing from the stories of the early judges, and this, too, is not surprising since Judah was apparently settled late in the premonarchic era. Judah is prominent in the stories set at the end of the period: the Samson stories; several times in Judges 17-21; 1 Samuel 11.8 and 15.4, where Judah is listed separately from Israel; and in the stories of David. There is as yet no way to tie the settlement west of the Jordan River to that in Transjordan, and at the same time to observe ethnic differences between later Israelite Transjordan and later Moabite or Ammonite Transjordan. Whether any of these assortments of tribes argues for smaller, pre-Israel confederations is impossible to say, except to exclude the far southern tribes (Judah and Simeon) from the earliest conception of Israel and to note that Dan was never securely enough situated in the south to be of much help to its Israelite neighbors.
What then was the earliest confederation that was called “Israel”? Perhaps it comprised Benjamin, Ephraim, Manasseh, Naphtali, Zebulun, and Asher (and possibly Issachar); and perhaps it also encompassed the southern Transjordanian area north of the Arnon (thus Gad, and Reuben as long as it existed). Such an answer, however, begs several questions: whether a tribal Israel existed prior to the Iron I settlement of the central highlands and similar areas in Transjordan; whether the people in what became Israel can be separated from the other Iron I tribal societies that sprang up at the same time and in the same way, such as Moab and Edom; whether those who settled the eastern side of the Jordan were tied to Israel in Iron I, or to Moab, or to neither. In other words, did the people who moved into these marginal areas in Iron I already conceive of themselves as tribal confederations, with names and languages that tied some of the tribal groups together into larger entities (say, Israel or Moab, speaking Hebrew and Moabite) and at the same time separating those larger groups from each other? Or were they agriculturalists and pastoralists looking for free land in which to make their living—the withdrawal of Egyptian power at the end of the Late Bronze Age having opened up such possibilities, with structure at the tribal and larger levels coming only after they had settled in their new niches?
The southern Transjordanian area shares its material culture with the settlements west of the Jordan, but it also does with Moab, for instance. So there is no archaeological way to tie the southern Transjordanian areas exclusively with the area west of the Jordan in Iron I. By the ninth century BCE, the Mesha Stela assigns the area in question to the Gadites, but we cannot prove that a tribe Gad (much less Reuben) held this territory in Iron I, or that whoever held the territory was related by covenant to contemporaneous settlements west of the Jordan. The languages and dialects of the entire area in question were close enough to each other to have been mutually understandable.
The idea of a covenant or a confederation of tribes bound to each other and to a particular deity by treaty/covenant is not something archaeology can test, whether the question be about “Israelites” east and west of the Jordan River or about the hill country and Galilean settlements. We do know, however, that settlement of the central hill country west of the Jordan and the southern valley east of the Jordan began to flourish at about the same time at the beginning of the Iron Age, that they were part of later Israel, and that they were remembered as forming coalitions for defense based on their common adherence to the religion of Yahweh.
Select Bibliography
Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth. Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead. JSOT/ASOR Monograph Series, 7; JSOT Supplement, 123. Sheffield, England: JSOT, 1992. Archaeological survey covering 1200-586 BCE, describing types of burials and grave goods, as well as a discussion of the biblical material.
Boling, Robert G. Judges. Anchor Bible, vol. 6A. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. A standard commentary, with archaeological information.
Callaway, Joseph A. “The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges.” In Ancient Israel: A Short History from Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, ed. Hershel Shanks, 53-84. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988. An accessible summary of archaeological evidence of conquest and settlement and of scholarly controversy about the evidence.
Campbell, Edward F., Jr. Ruth. Anchor Bible, vol. 7. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. A commentary stressing literary issues, with much archaeological and ecological detail.
Cross, Frank Moore. Conversations with a Biblical Scholar. Ed. Hershel Shanks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994. An informal exposition of wide-ranging views from the dean of American biblical scholars.
Dothan, Trude, and Moshe Dothan. People of the Sea. New York: Macmillan, 1992. A popular and well-illustrated summary of Philistine history and culture.
Finkelstein, Israel. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988. A technical exposition of the results of recent archaeological surveys in the central hill country, with conclusions drawn about Israel’s earliest settlement.
Freedman, David Noel. Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy: Collected Essays on Hebrew Poetry. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1980. Several of the essays in this collection focus on what the earliest biblical poetry tells us about Israel’s history and religion in the early Iron Age.
Frick, Frank S. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel. The Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series, no. 4. Sheffield, England: Almond, 1985. A comparative social-scientific discussion of the stages in moving from a segmentary society to a centralized state.
Hackett, Jo Ann. “1 and 2 Samuel.” In The Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon Ringe, 85-95. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992. A consideration an
d explanation of the various women’s roles and gender issues in the books of Samuel, including a discussion of method.
McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr. I Samuel. Anchor Bible, vol. 8. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. A sound and readable commentary stressing historical and text-critical issues.
Naveh, Joseph. Early History of the Alphabet. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1987. A survey of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions and of the later evolution of the script traditions.
Seow, Choon-Leong. “Ark of the Covenant.” In Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman, 1.386-93. New York: Doubleday, 1992. A concise and complete discussion of the history and literary uses of the ark.
Stager, Lawrence E. “The Song of Deborah: Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not.” Biblical Archaeology Review 15, no. 1 (January-February 1989): 51-64. A study of Judges 5 utilizing linguistic and archaeological evidence, especially settlement patterns.
Wilson, Robert R. Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. A short, informative introduction, including test cases.
Ivory figurines from the Beer-sheba region dating to the late Chalcolithic period (early fourth millennium BCE). The male figure on the right is about 33 centimeters (13 inches high); the perforations on his head were probably for attaching hair. Figurines like these may have been used in domestic or communal fertility rituals. (© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
A Canaanite caravan arrives in Egypt in this drawing of a nineteenth-century BCE tomb painting from Beni Hasan in central Egypt. Such depictions provide information about Canaanite culture, including dress, weaponry, hairstyles, and types of trade. Some of the items depicted are paralleled in archaeological discoveries from the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine. (Erich Lessing/AH Resource, NY)
Faience tiles from Medinet Habu, idealized but detailed depictions of Egypt’s enemies that served as decoration for the temple and place of Rameses III (1184–1153 BCE). Shown here are, from the left, a Libyan, a Nubian, a Syrian, a Shasu bedouin, and a Hittite; each figure is about 2.5 centimeters (9.75 inches) high, (©jurgen Liepe, Berlin)
Some of the more than forty anthropoid coffins from the fourteenth to twelfth centuries discovered by archaeologists and grave robbers at Deir el-Balah, near the Mediterranean coast about 13 kilometers (8 miles) southwest of Gaza. Once attributed to the Philistines and other Sea Peoples, such coffins were probably used by Egyptians stationed abroad during the latter part of the Late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. (©The Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Nahum Slapak)
A typical Israelite pillared house. On the ground floor, food was prepared and the family’s animals were stabled. On the second story, warmed in winter by the cooking fire and the heat of the animals, dining, sleeping, and other activities took place. (Courtesy Lawrence E. Stager)
Bronze bull figurine from the Iron I period (late first millennium BCE) in the central hill country of Palestine, 18 centimeters (7 inches) long. The bull may be either a symbol of a deity or a pedestal for a statue. The Canaanite gods El and Baal and the Israelite god Yahweh all have bull imagery associated with them. (© zev Radovan, Jerusalem)
Detail of relief on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos in Phoenicia in the late eleventh century BCE. Holding a lotus blossom in one hand and a cup in the other, the king is seated on a winged-sphinx throne, facing a table on which offerings have been set. His feet rest on a footstool, reminiscent of descriptions of the biblical ark Of the Covenant. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
Three joined fragments of the stela found at Dan, memorializing the victories of an Aramean king (probably Hazael) over, among others, the kings of Israel and Judah in the mid-ninth Century BCE. (© Zev Radovan, Jerusalem)
A seal impression on clay, or bulla. After a papyrus document had been rolled and tied, it was sealed with one or more lumps of clay on which individuals would impress their seals. Dozens of bullae like this were excavated in debris resulting from the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in the early sixth century BCE. This bulla, purchased privately, was made by a seal belonging to “Berechyahu, the son of the scribe,” the longer form of the name of Baruch the son of Neriah, the scribe who wrote down the words of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 36.4). (© zev Radovan, Jerusalem)
Bronze cast of a Hebrew seal. The original, now lost, was found at Megiddo in 1904. It was made of jasper and was 2.7 centimeters (1 inch) high. Above the exquisite image of a roaring lion is the owner’s name, Shemaand below is his title, “the servant of Jeroboam II.” The date of the script makes it likely that the Jeroboam in question was Jeroboam II, king of Israel from 788 to 747 BCE. (© zev Radovan, Jerusalem)
Detail from the reliefs from the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib showing his capture of the Judean city of Lachish in 701 BCE. In this scene, an Assyrian soldier is escorting two Judean captives, perhaps royal officials, before the king (not shown); their hands are raised in a plea for mercy. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
Detail from the sixth-century CE mosaic map of the Holy Land in the Church of St. George in Madaba, Jordan. This part of the map is its central portion, and depicts the Byzantine city of Jerusalem. A colonnaded main street (cardo maximus) traverses the city from north (left) to south (right), with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher represented on its west side. Excavations in Jerusalem have uncovered details corresponding to those Shown On the map. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
Silver quarter-shekel of Judah. Inscribed Yehud in Aramaic script and dated to the early fourth century BCE, this is the single most discussed Jewish coin of any era. The obverse shows the head of a bearded, helmeted Greek warrior. On the reverse, on a winged wheel, sits a bearded male divinity, variously identified as the Jewish god Yahweh, the Greek god Zeus, or some other Greco-Phoenician deity. (© zev Radovan, Jerusalem)
A silver tetradrachm minted during the second Jewish revolt against Rome (132–35 CE). The obverse shows the faóade of the Temple of Jerusalem, with the ark of the Torah between the central pillars; the inscription, in Hebrew reads “Simeon,” the given name of the leader of the revolt (Bar Kokhba). On the reverse are Jewish symbols and the legend “for the freedom of Jerusalem.” (© British Museum)
Detail from the Arch of Titus, in the Forum in Rome. Erected after his death in 81 CE, the monumental arch commemorated Titus’s victory in the First Jewish Revolt a decade earlier. In this scene Roman soldiers are carrying the seven-branched menorah from the Jerusalem Temple in a victory procession. (Aimari/Art Resource, NY)
CHAPTER FIVE
Kinship and Kingship
The Early Monarchy
CAROL MEYERS
For nearly a century at the beginning of the Iron II period (ca. 1025–586 BCE), most of Palestine was organized as a national state with a dynastic figure—a king—at its head. During the preceding two centuries, coinciding with the emergence of loosely connected Israelite tribal groups, people had lived mainly in small settlements scattered throughout the central highland areas and in a sprinkling of small cities in the lowlands and valleys. Then, with startling rapidity, a centralized state was formed late in the eleventh century. By the middle of the tenth century, according to the biblical narrative, this state reached near-imperial proportions, complete with a capital city, complex regional centers, a royal court, luxury goods, and other social, economic, and political features associated with the concentration of power in a monarchy. The changes it wrought in the structure of society and the accompanying cultural expressions rank among the most important in ancient Israel’s history.
The formation of a state in Iron Age Palestine, however its benefits and liabilities might be evaluated, was an extraordinary event. Never before in the millennia of sedentary life in the eastern Mediterranean had a territorial state existed in that land. And following the dissolution that would occur fairly soon, never again until the mid-twentieth century would this narrow stretch of the ancient Fertile Crescent be home to an autonomous cultural entity under local leadership. Brief as would be the life
span of early Israelite kingship, its ideology would profoundly affect Western religious and political traditions. The very idea of the messiah in Judaism and Christianity is explicitly rooted in the dynasty of the “house of David.” The notion that the eschatological resolution of the world’s social tensions and inequities will be manifest in a “kingdom” of God flows directly from the impact of the tenth-century BCE polity on its political and spiritual heirs. And the medieval concept of the divine right of kings would be based on biblical precedents associated with the Davidic dynasty.
Accounting for the origins of such a phenomenon requires us to consider the processes at work in state formation. We must identify the increasingly complex organizational structures that mark the development of a territorial state; and we must situate the emerging Israelite state within those trajectories of social, political, and economic development that across many different cultures constitute recognizable features of early, agriculturally based nation-states.
Yet addressing these crucial descriptive and analytical tasks is not enough. Profound moral issues hover in the background of the investigation of the Israelite monarchy, or of any such sociopolitical form. The monarchic state is an exceptionally powerful organizational construct. No matter how benign its rulers, it characteristically exists by dint of greater inequity in the distribution of resources than in virtually any other form of human collective. The pooling of resources can allow a state to make enormous changes, for better or worse, in the material and demographic shape of its territory. Furthermore, in giving up substantial amounts of individual or regional autonomy to state control, people may find themselves subject to despotic rule. Concentrating power in a single ruler and his or her support bureaucracies may often be beneficial, even essential, for the initial establishment of a state. Yet the famous dictum that power corrupts is everywhere evident in the often harsh and unjust policies that states impose on their populaces. Thus the empirical questions that we must ask in assessing the rise of the Israelite state, or any state, can never be separated from difficult philosophical problems of justice and equity in human affairs, of the sanction of violence, of the nature of political power and its abuses. Linking the Israelite state with the concept of divine favor makes the issue of morality all the more difficult, overshadowing all critical assessments. Yet the profound moral questions about the consolidation of power in the hands of a few should remain in the larger field of vision on which the specific shapes of Israelite monarchic rule will be sketched.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World Page 28