Tensions, interactions and power negotiations between 'tribes' and 'States' in monarchic Israel: Towards a new understanding based on case studies from Middle Bronze Age Mari and Iron Age Moa

This dissertation analyzes the interactions and power negotiations between "tribes" and "States" with the emergence of a more centralized political and social structure in the Iron Age southern Levant. It advances the argument that the eventual emergence of a more or less centralized state led to a diminished role for kinship under central political control and a concomitant greater complexity of social organization. Such an exploration depends on evidences from the Middle Bronze Age Mari texts of the interactions between tribal groups and Mari's leaders and on tribes nominally subject to the state and their complex power negotiations with the monarchy, and the transition of societies in the Iron Age Moab which provides a promising comparative model of change in hegemony as a result of "force and consent operating together." The evidences from the Middle Bronze Age Mari texts and the Moab society of the Iron Age serve as case studies to argue that the emergence of a more centralized monarchy in Israel consolidated and legitimized its power through manipulation and coercion by co-opting and weakening the structures of the Iron Age tribal societies, although tribes never disappear because of political centralization.;This dissertation demonstrates that tribes and states continued to exist in various forms and permutations and in a relationship of opposition to each other where each have mutually shaped and maintained each other, although such a relationship was one of inherent instability. Thus, there were both continuities and changes in tribal structures and kinship allegiance in ancient Israel after the establishment of the monarchy. And, irrespective of the historical period or social locations, a sobering example in ancient Israelite society demonstrates the truth of the famous dictum that "power corrupts." Demonstrably, tribal society was unjustly controlled and changed by the pressures of the state-making project of the Israelite monarchy.