Footnote 5 – The Song of Deborah—Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not

Because this same area becomes the heartland of Israel during the monarchy, with many of the Iron I settlements continuing into Iron II (1000–600 B.C.), it seems logical to conclude that many of the Iron I settlements were also Israelite. In other words, within the general field of survey (more than 550 square miles) many sites have to be Israelite; however, at present it is difficult, if not impossible, to point to any one particular settlement in the hills during Iron I and say this is “Israelite” rather than “Hivite,” “Jebusite,” or whatever, in the absence of textual or epigraphic evidence. They all seemed to share a common culture of such everyday items as cooking pots and storage jars (even collar-rimmed storage jars). My hunch is that when “ethnic” boundary markers, distinguishing “Israelites” from “Canaanites,” are found by archaeologists, they will relate to ideological differences, particularly in the realm of religion. Hints of these distinctions are already emerging from the pioneering work being done by zooarchaeologists Drs. Paula Wapnish and Brian Hesse in relating the presence or absence of pig to dietary taboos, such as we find in the Hebrew Bible (for example, Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnich, “Pig Avoidance in the Iron Age,” a paper presented at the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, Boston, 1987).