Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine

Abstract

This paper offers a critique on state formation theories used in the explanation of the rise of the biblical United Monarchy. 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. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnological 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, gives us important keys for understanding Palestine's societies. The historical perspective that appears then is one different from the Bible's stories and from modern ideas such as “states” and “nations”, offering us instead a better methodology for reconstructing ancient Palestine's historical past.