I’d been planning to attend the Restoration Quarterly breakfast on Monday at 7:00 AM, but on Monday morning I decided to sleep in instead.

At 9:00 I hit the Biblical Lands and Peoples in Archaeology and Text (I think I have that right) session. I spotted Jim West on the back row and started to sit by him, but then my eyes were drawn to an electrical outlet on the opposite wall, and I drifted that direction instead.

First up was Nathan MacDonald, who built on mid-1980s models of Israel’s transition to statehood “in the early Iron Age” and tried to add to them a mechanism by which Israel could move from a segmentary society to a monarchy. MacDonald used anthropological studies of “feasting” to suggest that “feasting” might have played an important role in consolidating monarchical power. The paper was interesting but, in my estimation, too speculative to inspire much confidence. In the Q&A, someone mentioned more recent work on chieftainship, including Robert Miller’s Chieftains of the Highland Clans (Eerdmans, 2005), work that would present problems for MacDonald’s thesis. MacDonald’s answer was rather unsatisfying, something along the lines of, “I’m just trying to plug a hole in Frick and Coote-and-Whitelam.” Okay, but the question really challenges the decision to take on that task in the first place, and MacDonald seemed to dodge that particular aspect of the question.

Second, Amir Eitan presented a paper on “the rise of ‘Israel.’” I found it hard to follow the paper because Eitan used a PowerPoint presentation with lots of text, through which Eitan went at a rapid rate. Basically, Eitan hypothesized that drought conditions created pressures that spurred migration into and settlement in the Canaanite highlands and the Beersheba valley in the mid-10th century BCE. Eitan’s thesis also had a “mixed multitude” component. He acknowledged continuities in the highland material culture from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, and agreed that this shows that some of the highlands population in “early Israel” were culturally Canaanite. However, Eitan argued that the population of early Iron Age Palestine was too large to stem entirely from the natural growth of the Canaanite population. Eitan brought in evidence of Arameans in Canaan in the 13th and 12th centuries; combining this with the “Little Credo” (“my ancestor was a wandering Aramean …”), Eitan argued that earliest Israel included a mixture of Canaanite and Aramean populations.

In the third paper, Avraham Faust presented persuasive evidence that Sennacherib’s campaign to Judah in 701 BCE devastated the cities and population of the Shephelah, but otherwise left most of Judah untouched (except for a few spots in the highlands, damaged or destroyed when an Assyrian contingent marched on Jerusalem). Faust also showed that the archaeological evidence does not support the common picture of an Assyrian siege of Jerusalem. He also provided textual evidence suggesting that the phrase “like a bird in a cage” was used by Assyrian kings to “save face” when they attacked cities unsuccessfully.

Fourth, Jonathan Kaplan read a paper about the term אשׁוח in the Mesha stele. Kaplan spoke clearly and obviously knew what he was talking about, but there were so many small details that I found it hard to follow the argument audibly. I would need to see a printed version in order to really understand or assess it. I’m pretty sure that Kaplan was trying to identify particular urban water system structures that are identified by this word אשׁוח and some other terms, but I can’t really tell you what the payoff is.

The fifth paper—no, I’m not kidding. This overstuffed session included six papers. At some point I looked around and noticed that Jim West had left the room. I was getting tired, too, my brain starting to reach saturation point. Brad Crowell’s paper asked whether any archaeological or textual evidence can sustain the common scholarly claim that Edom had a vibrant wisdom tradition. Crowell was reacting to scholars who suggest that the Edomite “flavoring” of the book of Job and a few biblical references to Edom as a region renowned for wisdom reveal that Edom was home to a scribal tradition that produced wisdom literature similar to the biblical wisdom literature. Crowell concludes that the available evidence cannot sustain this notion. During the Q&A, John Day noted that if we only had the archaeological evidence from Israel to go on, we wouldn’t expect Israel to have produced a literary wisdom tradition either.

Finally, Harold Betton launched into his paper about satrapial politics in the Persian era. I really wanted to learn more about this topic, but Betton’s delivery combined with my tired brain militated against that. I bailed out early and went to get a crab sandwich at Joe’s.