1992

A number of recent studies into Israel's origins and the early history of Palestine have taken up the difficult challenge of trying to describe the structure of ancient Palestinian society in the light of the growing conviction since the 1950s that emergent Israel of the Iron Age is both indigenous to Palestine and closely associated with the new Iron I settlements of the central highlands. This has brought not only a welcome clarity to Albrecht Alt's original paradigm of the origins of Israel in his model of transhumant Pastoralists of the Late Bronze period, but also promises to resolve some long-standing misconceptions about early Pastoralists in Palestine. This has been encouraging, especially for those among us who have been influenced by such scholars as Manfred Weippert, Max Miller, and Gösta Ahlström, and not least their effort to fragment what had appeared to be the near-global ethnicity we used to call ‘Canaanite’ or ‘Amorite,’ in favor of a more regional approach to Palestine's early history.

This new paradigm for writing the history of this region has been presented largely independently in the Chicago dissertations of Doug Esse and Diana Edelman, the book-length studies of Niels Peter Lemche, Robert Coote and Keith Whitelam, and Israel Finkelstein, is already presupposed in Axel Knauf's Midian, and has achieved near-normative status in Helga Weippert's encyclopedia of archaeology and Gösta Ahlström's History of Palestine.