Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 Bce

by Norman K. Gottwald

A twentieth-anniversary reprint of the landmark book that launched the current explosion of social-scientific studies in the biblical field. It sets forth a cultural-material methodology for reconstructing the origins of ancient Israel and offers the hypothesis that Israel emerged as an indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement. In a new preface, written for this edition, Gottwald takes account of the 'sea change' in biblical studies since 1979 as he reviews the impact of his work on church and academy, assesses its merits and limitations, indicates his present thinking on the subject, and points toward future directions in the social-critical study of ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.

Genres: History, Biblical Studies, Theology, Middle East, Politics, Religion, Sociology

968 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Norman Karol Gottwald is an American Marxist biblical scholar and political activist.
Gottwald, a Fulbright scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1960 and a former Baptist minister, is presently the W. W. White Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary. He has lectured at numerous universities, including Princeton, Brown, Brandeis and the Universities of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley. He is the author of The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion-of Liberated Israel 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979).

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books you have to read to be literate in the history of a discipline, even though it has next to no utility in current scholarship. It is an attempt to write a history of the emergence of ancient Israel in Iron 1A-1B applying Marxist anthropological models, that today are obsolete in the face of further archaeological discoveries. Mendenhall and Gottwald are famous for the "peasant revolt" model of the emergence of ancient Israel, which had its brief glory in the sun, but has now been largely discarded. You still need to know about it, when discussing the intellectual history of the scholarship on the emergence of the Israelites: Albright, Kaufmann, Alt, Mendenhall, Gottwald, Mazar, Stager, Ahlstrom, Dever, Finkelstein and Faust.

[Fred Kohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of three books on early Israel I committed myself to reading. The one that started my adventure was By Niels Peter Lemche - Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israel . Next I read The Tribes of Israel by C.H. de Geus. After reading this present one I expect I’ll be done for a while. This is outside my usual mode of reading (New Testament) and I find it pretty rough going. Since the first two books were translations, I was hoping this one would be easier since it was written in English, but it wasn’t much easier. One thing I appreciated was the fact that when Gottwald quoted from German scholars such as Martin Noth or Albrecht Alt he did quote them in English and not in the original German, as Lemche and de Geus did.

An attractive feature of this edition was a response to criticisms levied against the premises of the original edition. Gottwald spends a lot of time responding to de Geus, but I was disappointed that he did not respond to Lemche's criticisms, especially Lemche's criticism of Gottwald's thesis that early Israel was an egalitarian society. Lemche claims that Gottwald presents no evidence that early Israel was egalitarian, a criticism that I don’t think is fair.

Gottwald's Marxist analysis of the social conditions of early Israel is a fresh and interesting perspective. I especially enjoyed the last chapter in which Gottwald speculates on the future of religion. He states that we have no way of knowing whether religion will survive the death of religion as a mystifying accompaniment of class rule and that religion needs to be demystified, deromanticized, dedogmatized, and deidolized if we are to make progress. Can religion survive if all this is accomplished? Only time will tell.