In this comprehensive final report David Ilan and 12 other contributing authors present the rich finds from the Iron Age I (circa 1200-950 BCE) levels at Tel Dan, gleaned in the course of Avraham Biran's 1966-1999 excavations at the site. The architecture, ceramics, metal, flint, bone and ground stone objects and ecofacts, all contribute to the portrayal of a cosmopolitan society that thrived, initially, under Egyptian imperial rule, subsequently forging its own way with the departure of Egyptian hegemony. The early Iron Age levels at Tel Dan show material evidence for the presence of local peoples, Egyptians, Cypriots, Aegeans, and Syrians, who together, negotiated a new identity, as Danites.

This volume presents the work of the international, interdisciplinary research project Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions (CSTT), whose members focused on cultural, ideological, and material changes in the period when the sacred traditions of the Hebrew Bible were created, transmitted, and transformed. Specialists in the textual study of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, archaeology, Assyriology, and history, working across their fields of expertise, trace how changes occurred in biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts and traditions. Contributors Tero Alstola, Anneli Aejmelaeus , Rick Bonnie, Francis Borchardt, George J. Brooke, Cynthia Edenburg, Sebastian Fink, Izaak J. deHulster , Patrik Jansson, Jutta Jokiranta, Tuukka Kauhanen, Gina Konstantopoulos, Lauri Laine, Michael C. Legaspi, Christoph Levin, Ville Mäkipelto, Reinhard Müller, Martti Nissinen, Jessi Orpana, Juha Pakkala, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Christian Seppänen, Jason M. Silverman, Saana Svärd, Timo Tekoniemi, Hanna Tervanotko, Joanna Töyräänvuori, and Miika Tucker demonstrate that rigorous yet respectful debate results in a nuanced and complex understanding of how ancient texts developed.

The focus of this book is on temples in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age (ca. 1200-600 BC) and their transformations. In order to capture the long-term context, some significant sites with temples from the Late Bronze Age are also presented and discussed. The author traces both material culture related to the temples and the way in which the same themes are treated in Old Testament texts concentrated primarily on Israel and Judah. From the analysis of these texts, he deduces a threefold transformation of the form of memory in relation to the temples and the cult. The first concerns a contrastive reshaping (Philistia and other neighbouring political entities), the second an external (Israel) and the third an internal (Judah) silencing of the actual form of religious practice in the Iron Age.

New results and interpretations challenging the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Ancient Western Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200–900 BCE) presents select essays originating in a two-year research collaboration between New York University and Paris Sciences et Lettres. The contributions here offer new results and interpretations of the processes and outcomes of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in three broad regions: Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Together, these challenge the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by the regeneration of political powers. Current research on newly discovered or reinterpreted textual and material evidence from Western Asia instead suggests that this transition was characterized by a diversity of local responses emerging from diverse environmental settings and culture complexes, as evident in the case studies collected here in history, archaeology, and art history. The editors avoid particularism by adopting a regional organization, with the aim of identifying and tracing similar processes and outcomes emerging locally across the three regions. Ultimately, this volume reimagines the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition as the emergence of a set of recursive processes and outcomes nested firmly in the local cultural interactions of western Asia before the beginning of the new, unifying era of Assyrian imperialism.