Social World of Ancient Israel: 1250-587 B.C.E.

• Author: Evans, Carl D.

This is a selective study of social institutions in the world of ancient Israel. It is divided into two parts: "ancient Israel as villages" (early Israel, 1250-1000 B.C.E.) and "ancient Israel as a state" (monarchy, 1000-587 B.C.E.). Each part gives attention to five areas of life: politics, economics, diplomacy, law, and education.

The principal thrust of the book is to bring together anthropological and biblical studies to illuminate aspects of the social world of ancient Israel. The authors state: "Each chapter begins with an anthropology and ends with an ethnography" (p. ix). That is, every chapter discusses how a particular social institution functioned in the ancient Near East and then examines afresh a set of biblical texts which illuminate, or are illuminated by, the social world just discussed.

The social institutions covered in the five areas of the study are:

Politics

Village: the father; the mother (chs. 1-2) State: the monarch; the virgin (chs. 12-13)

Economics:

Village: the farmer; the herder; the midwife (chs. 3-5) State: the priest; the slave (chs 14-15)

Diplomacy:

Village: the host and the stranger; the chief; the legal guardian (chs. 6-8) State: the prophet (ch. 16)

Law:

Village: the elder; the widow (chs. 9-10) State: the lawgiver (ch. 17)

Education:

Village: the wise and the fool (ch. 11) State: the storyteller (ch. 18)

Matthews and Benjamin do not explain why these institutions were selected instead of others. If they were chosen because of their perceived centrality or importance, one must ask whether in the transition to a state culture the previous village institutions were superseded by state institutions in every area of life, as the listing of topics suggests. The question nags throughout the book, especially since the authors claim that "the reformation of ancient Israel as a state was not a complete break with the traditions of ancient Israel as villages" (p. 160).

Since village culture survived into the period of the state, one would expect that some of the same institutions would have been dealt with in both parts of the book. Such a study would have been very illuminating, especially if accompanied with a careful analysis of how the institutions were transformed by the transition to a state culture. But we have something less than that. This limited study results, ironically, in the isolation of the selected institutions from much of the larger social context. We see only selected pieces of the cloth, not the...