Etic and emic expressions of power in ancient Israel: recalibrating a discussion

This article details the way that sociopolitical power was expressed in ancient Israel and how modern scholars have distorted this expression through the application of post-Enlightenment concepts and terminology. As such, ancient Israel’s early first millennium BCE polities are studied and articulated in anachronistic terms and concepts (e.g., the “state”, “empire”, what a “king” is) that find no home in the Bronze or Iron Age Near East (ca. 2000–500 BCE). This disaccord between indigenous concepts of power, terminology related to political structure and leadership roles, and modern discussion of these features has important repercussions for how the biblical text is interpreted, how the archaeological remains from the 11th-10th centuries BCE are interpreted, and how text and realia are collocated. This article traces the divergence between modern approaches to ancient Near Eastern sociopolitical structures and indigenous expressions of those same structures to establish a starting point for recalibrating the fierce debate about the historicity of the early Israelite monarchy in the days of Saul, David, and Solomon.