ABSTRACT
Reframing our conceptualization of the economy of ancient Judah allows for a more holistic understanding of goods and products and their exchange and circulation within, and between, late Iron Age polities in the southern Levant (ca. 10th–6th centuries BCE). Evidence to aid our reconsideration comes from a case study of Tell en-Naṣbeh, a fortified village site north of Jerusalem. Our approach, based on these data, needs to be flexible enough to imagine subsistence economies, marketing economies, and tributary economies not only coexisting but intersecting and complementing one another, perhaps even competing with one another, held together by a web of overland and maritime exchange routes. Re-envisioning how various components of these southern Levantine segmentary, agropastoral societies functioned within differing, yet overlapping local, regional, interregional, and international exchange systems allows us to begin the important work of remodeling and reconstructing various economic foundations of the House of David.
