On the archaeology of 10th Century BCE Israel and the idea of the ‘state’

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.