Reviews

The archaeology of Palestine (or the ‘Holy Land’) is studied in common textbooks as a monolith. Only recently have analytical efforts been specifically dedicated to distinct states within this geographical area in the Iron Age: namely Israel, Judah, Aram, Ammon, Moab, Edom, and the even smaller city-states in Philistia (Ashkelon, Eqron, Gaza, Ashdod, and Gat) and in Phoenicia (Sidon, Tyre). The intensive exploration of Transjordan during the last two decades has yielded numerous publications on excavations and surveys that call for a comprehensive synthesis. In addition, current trends in archaeological analysis prompt scholars to dissociate themselves from the traditional ‘biblical archaeology’ paradigm and to undertake a less biased approach of social or interpretive archaeology. Therefore a monograph on Moab in the Iron Age, which purports to blend a factual survey of the archaeological data within a theoretical framework, is seemingly a most welcome contribution. However, as it turns out, the author’s objective is much more ambitious. His main interest is the theoretical riddle of ‘state formation’, with Moab serving as the case study to unveil this intriguing social phenomenon. Thus, since the theoretical discussions outweigh the archaeological documentation, the book did not meet this reader’s expectations. Indeed, as the subtitle of the book clearly indicates, the archaeology of Moab takes third place after the issues of hegemony and polity. The book is organized into ten chapters. The first two discuss the theoretical background of the state and the processes that generated its emergence in antiquity. Chapter 1 is a broadly knowledgeable, detailed survey of the possible ways social scientists and philosophers have defined (following the chapter’s title) ‘the “thingness” of the state’. The author criticizes neoevolutionary state theory for ‘its teleological subsumption of historical change to universal processes and its holistic view of society’ (p. 9). He acknowledges the state as a modern phenomenon, but nevertheless traces its genealogy through Giddens’ structuration theory, Foucault’s governmentality, Weber’s concept of legitimacy, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and even Hobbes’ Leviathan, and concludes that the phenomenon ‘is content and history specific’ (p. xiv). Chapter 2 discusses the processes that create the state. These processes are effectively understood with reference to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and its