Archaeological Views: Israelite Life Before the Kings

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BAR editor Hershel Shanks called me because he was curious why my book published in 2005, on the Israelite settlement, would, at a publisher’s suggestion, be republished with a new preface¹; perhaps there was something particularly relevant that justified a republication.

Indeed, there was. It’s not about the minimalist/maximalist debate over the existence of the Israelite monarchy in the tenth century B.C.E. but about the earlier period, between 1200 and 1000, when the Israelite tribes were settling down in what was to become the Land of Israel. What was life like for the Israelite tribes in this period before statehood? (I am not concerned with the issue of the Israelite conquest. I think most scholars are agreed that the conquest did not occur as the Bible describes it, although Hazor may have been conquered by the Israelites, as excavator Amnon Ben-Tor powerfully argues.)

Anyway, what I wanted to do—and what makes the book worth republishing—was present the archaeological evidence that tells us what life was like in this early period when Israel was coalescing. This is what I will describe here, but first a word about the evidence I provide to prove my case. My evidence comes from two sources: archaeological survey data and excavations. The area I focus on—the highland Israelite settlement in the northern West Bank—was archaeologically surveyed in its entirety in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily by Adam Zertal and Israel Finkelstein. I supplemented this with some surveying of my own in 1997–1998. Survey data can be very useful in anthropological interpretation; the arrangement of sites, their sizes and arable land can be statistically analyzed using methods geographers have devised for identifying economic and political systems. Excavation data, both from recent excavations (Shiloh, for example) and from digs long past (such as Bethel), give evidence of the society’s wealth, warfare, housing and so on. If you want the detailed evidence, you’ll have to buy the book, but the portrait that emerges for early Israel is as follows:

In the days before the monarchy, the Israelite villages were on the hilltops. They were quite small, possibly 400 people in the largest of these—Shiloh or Gibeon, for instance. These towns were mostly unwalled; for defense, the builders just clustered the houses together. The Israelites had no domesticated horses or camels, nor did they have iron. They were using flint and bronze tools and weapons, especially slings. All of this was in contrast to their Canaanite neighbors, who had iron, horses and walled towns.

Israelites lived in nuclear households, often with their relatives in clusters of houses around a common courtyard. The average family had two or three children who lived past infancy. Houses were made of mudbrick with a stone foundation and perhaps a second story of wood—poplar, tamarisk or palm. The living space of the houses consisted of three or four rooms, often with sleeping space on the roof or in a covered roof loft. One of the first-floor rooms was probably a courtyard for domestic animals.

These animals were mostly sheep and goats, used for dairy products, not meat. The boys of the village could take the animals out in the morning to graze up to 5 or 6 miles away from the village. But the hills at that time were densely overgrown, covered with a thick scrub of pine, oak and terebinth trees no more than 13 feet high. And it was often too rocky for the sheep, so animals were never foremost in the economy. Instead, the Israelites would burn off some of the brush, terrace the hillsides within an hour’s walk of the village, and plant grain, primarily wheat. From wheat, they could make bread, pasta-like foods, beer, mulch for gardens, fodder for the animals, and straw for baskets and mats. Other lesser crops included lentils, garbanzo beans, barley and millet. They had orchards on these terraces as well. Olives grew wild and were easily domesticated, so olive and grape orchards were prevalent.

Each town had its rich and poor—perhaps a ruling family of town elders or a chief and his family. These had a separate neighborhood in the village—usually in the northwest so the prevailing winds kept unpleasant smells away. Their houses were larger than the rest, and some had walled yards or paved courtyards. The elders or chiefs likely wore jewelry of silver or gold or gems like carnelian, and possessed luxury items such as mirrors, iron tools and weapons, all of which have turned up in the excavations of their neighborhoods.

The villages belonged to larger political units or regional chiefdoms. The villages within a given region were subject to the major town of the area. Some of these chiefdoms were large. The one centered around Shechem, likely that over which Abimelek was the 068 chief (Judges 9), was about 20 miles across. But in the land of Benjamin farther south, they were smaller—a chiefdom of 5-mile radius around Gibeah, another the same size around Bethel, and so on. It is in these regional centers that we find imports from the Philistines and Phoenicians on the coast: jewelry, iron and Mediterranean fish.

There are many things that archaeology cannot yet tell us and that my book leaves out. Religion is one of them. The Book of Judges suggests religion was very confused in those days. No large temples have been found from that period, although there are some small ones. There are no idols except for small hand-held figurines—if that is what these are. That’s about all one can say at this point. It’s an area I hope to be able to say more about in the years to come!

BAR editor Hershel Shanks called me because he was curious why my book published in 2005, on the Israelite settlement, would, at a publisher’s suggestion, be republished with a new preface1; perhaps there was something particularly relevant that justified a republication. Indeed, there was. It’s not about the minimalist/maximalist debate over the existence of the Israelite monarchy in the tenth century B.C.E. but about the earlier period, between 1200 and 1000, when the Israelite tribes were settling down in what was to become the Land of Israel. What was life like for the Israelite tribes in this period before […]