On the Prospects for Writing a Social History of Iron Age Palestine

Abstract

This paper surveys some recent approaches to the social history of ancient Israel/Palestine – or rather the problems and perspectives involved in such attempts. It places the impulses towards writing social histories of Israel considering the developments of this perspective in general history during the 1960s and 1970s. Two key factors – class and state – are analysed in their usefulness for assessing the archaeological, epigraphic and textual (biblical) data of ancient Palestine when social history is aimed at being produced. The social history of Iron Age Palestine, finally, should be written according to primary data and apart from biblical images of social organisation and practice, which constitute a later reflection, and probably distorted, of previous historical contexts.