ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

长期以来，在关于以色列圣经早期君主制和公元前10 世纪考古学的学术辩论中，国家一直是占主导地位的社会政治概念. 人们已经假设，如果以色列此时确实已经成为一个王国，那么它会坚持现代学术中所设想的国家形式，并且该国家的物质相关物将出现在考古记录中。本文认为，这是一种方法论上错误的方法，国家的概念在理论和概念层面上与古代近东的社会政治关系的背景非常不合适。因此，寻找与 10 世纪以色列国家相关的考古学是不必要的。相反，社会政治形式的问题可以从以色列的语境中以主位的方式来解决，从实际出现在希伯来圣经中的本土概念和术语开始，