Rural Settlements, State Formation, and "Bible and Archaeology"

Abstract

In NEA volume 66, I suggested a new reconstruction of the formation of the Israelite monarchy during the transition from the Iron I to Iron II (what has traditionally been called the tenth century bce; the terms will he used here interchangeably). My reconstruction in that article was based on an observation that there is a break in rural at that time. The vast majority of the excavated Iron I rural sites, and especially those in the highlands (the settlement sites), did not continue to exist as villages in the Iron II. The trend itself had already been observed, but its full scope had not been addressed because most archaeological studies tended to concentrate an the excavation of major sites (usually tells) with historical or biblical importance. 2 Moreover, following a number of works on the Iron II rural settlements (see references), I noticed that practically all the excavated Iron II sites were established during the later phases of the Iron II and were not continuations of earlier settlements. In sum, we are discussing more than one hundred excavated Iron Age rural sites, so the pattern is clear: there are almost no rural settlements in the highlands during the tenth century.