I started Niels Peter Lemche's Ancient Israel. In this post, I will talk about Lemche's view on the origin of ancient Israel---at least in this book, where he does not appear to be as minimalist as he does in other books.
Lemche's perspective on Israelite origins is similar to others that I have heard or read---that Canaanites during the Late Bronze Age went to the central hills, tamed the land with new agricultural techniques (i.e., terracing), and became an Israelite people. Lemche's basis for seeing the Iron I central hill inhabitants as Canaanites is that their material culture "represents what is merely a further development of the culture which had already characterized the land for centuries" (page 90).
(I'll be using the term "Canaanites", but Lemche does not seem to do so, as far as I can see. As I peruse what I read today, he mostly uses the term "Syrio-Palestinian", or "Palestinian".)
So why did these Canaanites go to the central hills? There was a refugee problem in the Late Bronze Age, and, according to Lemche, this was because of problems that peasants were experiencing. They were overtaxed in order to pay for the military. They did not receive much protection, for the Canaanite city-states were too busy fighting each other. And they had to fill up vacancies in regiments, which pulled them away from their work of supporting themselves and their families. Moreover, there were other problems affecting Syria-Palestine: the Sea Peoples, and the nature of the land of Palestine, which encouraged competition for resources.
The Canaanite city-states agreed not to accept refugees, in order to ensure that their own residents did not leave to seek refuge elsewhere. Habiru roamed the countryside and became bandits, and the Late Bronze Amarna letters refer to the problem of the Habiru as well as other issues perplexing the city-states. Eventually, the Habiru settled "where the authority of the states was not able to affect them" (page 86), in Galilee and the central hills, which were largely unpopulated. The Habiru formed tribes in order to protect themselves and to establish some system of authority (but, although an Egyptian inscription from about 1300 B.C.E. refers by name to what appear to be Habiru tribes, the names are not those of the Israelite tribes in the Hebrew Bible). The Habiru took a few centuries to become sedentary Israelites, as they tamed the rough terrain with new agricultural technology. In the thirteenth-twelfth centuries B.C.E., villages arose in "both the Galilean mountains and in the central highland...in regions which had not been previously inhabited, as far as we can tell" (page 90). And the thirteenth century Merneptah Stele refers to a people called "Israel."
It's interesting that Lemche says that Habiru became Hebrews. Often, scholars dismiss any attempts to identify the two with one another because the Habiru were not an ethnic group, but were bandits, who could include different peoples. But notice that Lemche does not say that all Habiru were Hebrews. Rather, his claim is that there were Habiru who settled in the central highlands and became Hebrews.
In Ancient Israel so far, Lemche practically sounds like William Dever, the arch-enemy of minimalism, although Lemche even here raises the same concerns that minimalists like to talk about: for instance, he opposes scholarly works that paraphrase the Hebrew Bible and assume its "history" without question (except for the miracles, of course).
On pages 82-83, Lemche makes another interesting point. He says that, during the Middle Bronze Age, the city of Hazor "was far larger and contained a vastly greater population than other urban societies in Palestine", which may explain why Hazor is "one of the very few Palestinian cities which is mentioned in the royal archives of Mari, on the Euphrates, in the eighteenth century BCE." Lemche states that "It is possible that a late reminiscence of Hazor's special status is preserved in the notice in the Old Testament according to which 'Hazor formerly was the head of all those kingdoms' (Josh. 11.10)." Does Lemche accept the historicity of the Bible, only when there is archaeological confirmation (although, in this case, Lemche probably does not think that the Israelites destroyed Hazor in the Late Bronze Age)?