From Bandit to King: David's Time in the Negev and the Transformation of a Tribal Entity into a Nation State

Summary of the book

The arid areas of the Negev and Edom played a prominent role in the socio-economic and cultural development of the Iron Age civilizations of the southern Levant and northwestern Arabia, being at the interface of key trade routes, providing essential resources and developing cultic practices that spread to neighbouring regions. This volume comprises the papers presented at the symposium "Unearthing the Wilderness: Workshop on the History and Archaeology of the Negev and Edom in the Iron Age", held at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem, on 12 December 2010, and supplemented with studies from other leading scholars. Research questions include the socio-economic and political fluctuations in the arid margins of the southern Levant, southern Judah, and the northern Hejaz in the Iron Age, the exploitation of the copper mines of Timna under New Kingdom Egyptian and local control, the relationships between the southern Levant and the Arabian world as seen from the archaeological and epigraphic record, and the question of the "Edomite" pottery assemblage in late Iron Age Judah.