The Economy of Ancient Judah in Its Historical Context ed. by Marvin Lloyd Miller, Ehud Ben Zvi, Gary N. Knoppers

Reviewed by: The Economy of Ancient Judah in Its Historical Context ed. by Marvin Lloyd Miller, Ehud Ben Zvi, Gary N. Knoppers Michael S. Moore marvin lloyd miller, ehud ben zvi, and gary n. knoppers (eds.), The Economy of Ancient Judah in Its Historical Context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015). Pp. xii + 276. $49.50. These eleven essays represent the results of two recent workshops (one in Germany, the other in Canada) in which historians of ancient economies and ancient Israel came together and discussed the forms and functions of agrarian economic activity in Achaemenid Yehud. Recognizing that the formalist-substantivist debate that polarized much previous discussion has “run its course” (p. 5), Miller introduces the anthology by challenging readers (a) to learn how to distinguish (with Carol Smith, “Exchange Systems and the Spatial Distribution of Elites,” in Regional Analysis, vol. 2, Social Systems [ed. C. A. Smith [New York: Academic Press, 1976] 309–74) between dyadic and polyadic market exchange; (b) to learn how to incorporate political, religious, and socioeconomic perspectives in contemporary analysis of Achaemenid culture; and (c) to learn how to identify the primary forces responsible for triggering the evolutionary changes within specific markets. Ben Zvi starts things off with an essay entitled “The ‘Successful, Wise, Worthy Wife’ (his translation of ) of Proverbs 31:10–31 as a Source for Reconstructing Aspects of Thought and Economy in the Late Persian/Early Hellenistic Period,” a text in which he sees embedded the following concepts: (a) economic power brings honor and the strongest endorsement for the pursuit of profit; (b) pursuing profit is wise and involves wisdom about [End Page 167] how to make a profit; and (c) wives often enact a role as “heroic economic agent,” one without which the colonial economy of Yehud simply cannot function. Knoppers (“More than Friends? The Economic Relationship between Huram and Solomon Reconsidered”) observes how the Book of Chronicles transforms the international -treaty in 1 Kgs 5:12 (cast in Kings as a kinship relationship between brothers) into a patron–client relationship characterized by “an asymmetrical system of transnational economic exchange” (p. 70). Whereas Hiram refers to Solomon as (“my brother”) in 1 Kgs 9:13, in 2 Chr 9:14 he calls him (“my master”), suggesting that the difference likely indicates “aspirations on the part of Judean scribes for something better than the realities of their own economic and political conditions” (p. 70; cf. my discussion of this -treaty in What Is This Babbler Trying to Say? Essays on Biblical Interpretation [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016] 140–55). Presuming (a) that the genealogies in Chronicles are the product of “the cultic elite in Jerusalem in the Persian province of Yehud” (p. 87), and (b) that Roland Boer’s Marxist economic model is a competent analytical tool (“The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel,” SJOT 21 [2007] 29–48), Louis Jonker (“Agrarian Economy through City-Elites’ Eyes: Reflections of Late Persian Period Yehud Economy in the Genealogies of Chronicles”) rereads the genealogies in Chronicles from a quasi-Marxist perspective, concluding that “the Chronicler’s genealogies very clearly configure the relationship between Jerusalem and rural towns in the tribal areas in terms of donors and beneficiaries,” the latter including “the Levite families who receive their land from all the tribal areas” (pp. 97–98). While this is but one of a handful of attempts to read these genealogies from a socioeconomic perspective, it nevertheless remains more than a little bewildering that the simplistic polarities of warmed-over Marxism still find a place in contemporary scholarship (see my review of I. Jaruzelska, Amos and the Officialdom in the Kingdom of Israel: The Socio-Economic Position of the Officials in the Light of the Biblical, the Epigraphic and Archaeological Evidence, www.bookreviews.org/pdf/2714_1709.pdf). Searching for middle ground between substantivism and formalism, Peter Altmann (“Ancient Comparisons, Modern Models, and Ezra-Nehemiah: Triangulating the Sources for Insights on the Economy of Persian Period Yehud”), utilizes the New Institutional Economics of Douglass North (Understanding the Process of Economic Change [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) to argue that Nehemiah’s critique of Tyrian and other “external traders in Jerusalem who provide elite consumption (Neh 13:15–18...

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