Saturday, December 04, 2021

Did David and Solomon rule a "State?"

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST TODAY: David and Solomon’s Kingdom as a State: An Archaeo-Historical Anachronism (Zachary Thomas).
So whatever your view of the historicity of the biblical account may be, it is anachronistic to understand kingdoms like the United Monarchy as states. Is this just a matter of terminology and theory? What does this have to do with the archaeological record of Israel in the 10th century BCE? Quite a lot, because if we uncritically assume that the United Monarchy was a ‘state’ then we are only going to look for elements of a state in our archaeological evidence. This in turn directly affects how assess that archaeological evidence against the biblical text.
For more on this perspective, see here and here.

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