Early Israelites

Rebelling against bureaucratic city-states, the early Israelites established a tribal, pastoral society that, while extremely patriarchal and theologically repressive, resisted statehood for about three hundred years until they established a monarchy in the tenth century BCE. For “These early Israelites had no temple, no city, no king,” writes the Catholic Worker theologian Laurel Dyksta.

A monument erected by Pharaoh Mernaptha reports that the Israelites emerged as a distinct nation by 1220 BCE. Although the Old Testament describes an exodus of Israelite slaves from Egypt into Canaan, archaeological findings contradict the biblical account. Cities said to have been destroyed by the Israelites were actually destroyed long before the Israelites are said to have arrived in Canaan. There is no evidence that Israelites were in Egypt, or that masses of slaves left Egypt. Some scholars say, therefore, that the Israelites were actually dissident Canaanite farmers and herders who were sick of obeying and paying tribute to city-state rulers.

Norman K. Gottwald, a sociologist and biblical scholar, argues that the Israelites were indigenous Canaanites who rebelled against their rulers and creditors: “All the evidence for early Israel points to its tribalism as a self-constructed instrument of resistance and of decentralized self-rule”. Early Israelites had no taxes, no rent, and no interest. People had “approximately equal access” to basic resources. Israel had “no specialized political offices” Political structures included extended families and their protective associations called mispahot, a citizen army, the ritual congregation, the landless Levite priests, and the Rechabite metal specialists.

Anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber notes, “Resistance, in the ancient Middle East, was always less a politics of rebellion than a politics of exodus, of melting away with one's flocks and families—often before both were taken away.” Graeber later adds, “The world's Holy Books—the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to this day—echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for corrupt urban life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny.”

By the time of the monarchy, if not earlier, the Israelites' theology replaced animistic tribalism with a belief in an anthromorphic God who trasnscended nature. Murray Bookchin argues that their fear of God "provided an ideology of unreasoned obedience, of rule by fiat and the powers of supernatural retribution."