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Of Fathers, Kings and the Deity

The nested households of ancient Israel

By Philip J. King, Lawrence E. Stager

043 Ancient Israelite society was structured in a way that few of us in modern times experience. Its focus was on family and kin groups organized around agrarian activities. Family and kin groups, in turn, generated the symbols by which the higher levels of the social structure—the political and the divine—were understood and represented. A three-tiered structure formed a series of, as it were, nested households. At ground level was the ancestral or 044patriarchal household known in the Bible as bêt ’aµb literally “house of the father” (Genesis 24:7; Joshua 2:12, 18; 6:25). As a social unit, the […]

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Footnotes

1.

See “‘David’ Found at Dan,” BAR 20:02; Philip R. Davies, “‘House of David’ Built on Sand: The Sins of the Biblical Maximizers,” BAR 20:04.

2.

See André Lemaire, “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” BAR 20:03.

Endnotes

1.

A. Leo Oppenheim (translator), “Babylonian and Assyrian Historical Texts,” in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edition with Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 284–285.

2.

Frank M. Cross, From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 3–21.

3.

John Bright, A History of Israel, 4th edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), p. 187 ff.; G. Ernest Wright, “The Provinces of Solomon,” in N. Avigad et al, eds., Eretz-Israel 8 [E.L. Sukenik Memorial Volume] (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1967), pp. 58–68; Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), Part IX; see also his The Politics of Ancient Israel, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001). For the theory of patrimonial authority, see Max Weber, “Economy and Society,” in G. Roth and C. Wittick, eds., Economy and Society vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), ch. 12. For its application to Ancient Israel, see L.E. Stager, “Archaeology of the Family,” BASOR 260 (1985), pp. 25–28. For its application to the whole of the ancient Near East, see J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard Semitic Museum, 2001); Baruch Halpern, The Constitution of the Monarchy in Israel, Harvard Semitic Monographs No. 25 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981); Hayim Tadmor, “‘The People’ and the Kingship in Ancient Israel: The Role of Political Institutions in the Biblical Period,” Journal of World History 11 (1968), pp. 46–68.

4.

For example, seals nos. 6–11 in Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997).

5.

W.F. Albright (translator), “Palestinian Inscriptions,” in Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 320. The use of “his month” to refer to the month when one works at a specific occupation is idiomatic in Hebrew. As an example: “Those officials supplied provisions for King Solomon and for all who came to King Solomon’s table, each one in his month hodsûô” (1 Kings 5:7).