Rethinking Identity in the Iron Age Southern Levant: A View from Jerusalem

The setting of the Iron Age in the Southern Levant is often thought of as the particular instance in which the cultural and political fluidity so commonly discussed in earlier periods is largely replaced by well-defined entities that occupy particular geographic regions, each developing its own particular paradigm of political structure, cultic practice, material culture and more. The influence of the biblical text on such a framework no doubt largely contributed to this. However, more recent studies on unique cultural entities – particularly recent studies on the Philistines – have shown that despite certain political affiliations and cultural affinities, both material culture and culture on a whole were less rigid, with the flow of ideas and commodities not adhering to political borders. Whereas this has somewhat influenced the understanding of borderlands, such as sites in the western Shephelah, more inland Judah has not been seen in light of its possible interactions with other entities and the way in which this may have formed identities on a personal, communal and political identity. The following lecture will examine aspects of the material culture exposed in Jerusalem, in order to further our understanding of the way in which the Jerusalemite viewed his own identity, and the manner in which these identities influenced the political and economic sphere of Jerusalem in the 9th-early 6th centuries BCE.