Herrschaft, Konigtum und Staat: Skizzen zur soziokulturellen Entwicklung im monarchischen Israel.

• Author: Halpern, Baruch
• Position: Review

By HERMANN MICHAEL NIEMANN. Forschungen zum Alten Testament, vol. 6. Tubingen: J. C. B. MOHR, 1993. Pp. x + 318.

Books on the character of the Israelite monarchy have emerged hot and heavy from the presses in the last decade. Yet the nature of that monarchy remains in dispute. Some historians, such as J. A. Soggin, Abraham Malamat, Maxwell Miller, and Hayim Tadmor, maintain that the United Monarchy of Saul, but especially of David and Solomon, reflected as well as shaped a national consciousness and ethnicity. Others, particularly Gosta Ahlstrom, maintain that the early kings were essentially local bandits, who coerced primitive capital accumulation and state formation from a narrow territorial base, at least until Solomon's building activities. Still others, including most recently Keith Whitelam, argue that the whole United Monarchy is nothing more than a construct, projected back from the Persian period to the beginnings of Israelite nationhood. In their view, the state did not exist until external records attest it - in the case of Israel, in the ninth century (and the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III), and, in the case of Judah, in the eighth century (and the inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III or, more certainly, Sargon II). In support of this third view and, in part, of the second, the relative dearth of fortified, concentrated population centers in the south is called into evidence. In the north, the dates of public works at such sites as Megiddo are sometimes either downdated into the ninth century (from the tenth, the era of the United Monarchy) or are dissociated from any overarching state.

Niemann's study, the revision of a Rostock Habilitationsschrift, belongs to none of the above groups. Niemann takes seriously biblical evidence concerning the Israelite state. He finds increasing levels of bureaucratic complexity in the reports concerning the United Monarchy, especially in Judah. Moreover, the variety of people represented in sealings from the (early) eighth century forward indicates the continuation of this trend in Judah, as do biblical reports about the seventh century. In contrast to Judah, where a state cultic establishment was erected in the capital, the north remained less broadly developed, with a more limited power elite; thus, the Samaria ostraca, for example, document payment only in a limited area surrounding the capital, in the early eighth century. Unlike Jerusalem, Samaria was never the focal point of a national...