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In this post, I will talk about Niels Peter Lemche's discussion about the amphictyony idea on pages 104-109 of Ancient Israel.
Martin Noth believed that pre-monarchic Israel---the Israel of the time of the Judges, between 1200-1000 B.C.E.---was an amphictyony of twelve tribes. So what's an amphictyony? According to Lemche, Noth was drawing an analogy to an institution in ancient Greece:
"Noth had borrowed the term amphictyony from ancient Greece, and his description of the institution was to a considerable extent based on Greek analogies. The Greek amphictyony was the name given to a sacral coalition of Greek states whose common centre was the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. It was here the membership could meet in peace, even if the member states were otherwise at war with one another. The leadership of the amphictyony was in the hands of a college of administrators who were employed by the Delphic sanctuary. Noth assumed that Israelite society also possessed a corresponding sanctuary, for example Shiloh or Shechem, which served as the religious, but in reality also the political, centre of pre-national Israel. He further held that the membership of this group is preserved in the lists of twelve tribes in the Pentateuch."
Why does Noth think that the amphictyony developed prior to the monarchy? According to A.D.H. Mayes' article on the "Amphictyony" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, one reason is that Numbers 26 only assigns to the tribes land that is in the central hills of Palestine, showing (for Noth) that the list of twelve tribes in this chapter pre-dates David's conquest of the land in the coastal plains. According to Noth, before Numbers 26 in date is Genesis 49, which assumes that Levi is a secular tribe, making Genesis 49 older than Numbers 26, which apparently considers Levi to be priestly because it does not assign any land to Levi---it assumes that the LORD is the Levites' inheritance. I should also note that Noth believes that the twelve-tribe amphictyony came about in the time of Joshua. Years before, there was an amphictyony of six tribes---the Leah tribes. Then, the tribes that Genesis traces to Jacob's handmaids were added to the amphictyony. Finally, Joshua brought in the Rachel tribes---Joseph and Benjamin---and created the twelve-tribe amphictyony.
So what was the basis for the scholarly critique of Noth's amphictyony concept? Lemche states that "careful tradition-historical readings of...the book of Judges...have shown that the twelve-tribe ideology is, in the first place, Deuteronomistic, and hence late, that the pre-Deuteronomistic tradition never refers to all-Israelite actions, but only to those of small units, in some cases these being a single lineage, while in others they may be a tribe or clan." As an example, Lemche refers to the story of Gideon in Judges 6-8. Lemche believes that we see here an earlier version of the story in which "the Manassite clan of Abiezer, under the leadership of one of its leaders, rid[s] itself of a threat to its own territory in the form of the marauding east-Jordanian nomads", but that "additions to this story expanded its perspective so that at last it deals with the entire Israelite tribal society as if it had participated in the events in question." For Lemche, Deuteronomistic redaction took a story about a local area and made it into a story about the deliverance of all Israel.
As I look at Mayes' article, I see similar argumentation to what Lemche presents: that the unification of Israel around a central sanctuary was a concept much later than Israel's alleged time of the Judges. The Ark of the Covenant's connection with Shechem appears only in a Deuteronomistic passage, Joshua 8:30-35, and the "summoning of all the tribes to Shechem (Joshua 24) is related only in a post-Deuteronomistic story of highly dubious historical value". What about the sanctuaries at Gilgal and Shiloh? Could they have been the central sanctuaries of the pre-monarchical amphictyony? Mayes says no:
"Gilgal and Shiloh were sanctuaries of clearly quite distinct Yahwistic traditions, the first of which formed the eventual background for Saul's kingship while the second provided the theological basis for David's kingship. These cannot be treated in any respect as central sanctuaries of a unified Israelite cult." So Mayes sees the Gilgal and Shiloh sanctuaries as two separate traditions, meaning that they were not actually central sanctuaries for all of Israel.
How about Bethel, at which all of Israel gathers in Judges 20? But, in Judges 20-21, Shiloh also appears to be a sanctuary (Judges 21:16-21), and all of Israel also gathers at Mizpah (Judges 20:1). Mayes states that, "Although it is certainly conceivable that secondary expansion of the story has overlaid an original reference to just one sanctuary, it is also more than probable that any critical procedure undertaken to recover the older story will also remove its 'all-Israel' (and so its 'amphictyonic') frame of reference." We see here a similar argument to what Lemche summarizes: that a local tradition was made national at a later date, and so we can't look at these stories and assume that they describe a historical pre-monarchical amphictyony.
Mayes also questions Noth's pre-monarchic dates for Numbers 26 and Genesis 49. He says that Numbers 26 is typical of P and its other lists of tribes in Numbers, and P is late, not pre-monarchic. And, for Mayes, Genesis 49 is late because it mentions Joseph rather than Ephraim and Manasseh. Judges 5, which is early, mentions Ephraim, but (according to Mayes) the term "House of Joseph" came about in the monarchic period to refer to the Northern tribes, as distinct from the Southern tribes, "the House of Judah." During the pre-monarchic period, however, there was no "Joseph," for that was a time of "very complex tribal movements and relationships" which were only gradually stabilized.
And, getting back to Lemche, the way that Lemche characterizes Israel's pre-monarchic period was that it was a time when "alliances were hurriedly formed and then fell apart by themselves." For Lemche, a "pan-Israelite" ideology emerged at the time of David, or maybe even later.
I'll stop here, for the time being, but I may revisit this issue in the future.
