A Plea for an Historical Anthropology of Ancient Palestine

Abstract

The following arguments and thoughts deal with an interpretive direction that, although already advanced in some recent works within the field of Old Testament studies and the archaeology of the southern Levant, it deserves to be fully expanded and realised: a socio-anthropological understanding of historical processes in ancient Palestine during the first millennium BCE that successfully overcomes the shortcomings found in standard "histories of ancient Israel" and their almost exclusive attention to Old Testament-related themes and events.