Town and Country: Jephthah, Gilead, and the Preservation of Late Bronze Age Politics

Abstract In the book of Judges, there are a handful of cases where the narrative includes people, places, or events from the lands east of the Jordan River. Jephthah’s tale stands out as unique, as the narrative happens entirely in the eastern highlands. The earliest version of the Jephthah material has its origin in this eastern arena. Furthermore, within this early version, the political activity of the city of Gilead with Jephthah and his gang of “worthless” men shares significant parallels with the city politics of the Late Bronze Age Levant. Jephthah behaves as an ʿapiru , and Gilead, the city, operates within a system of collective governance similar to cities from the Amarna period. I argue that the oldest layer of the Jephthah story assumes social and political structures that not only echo the Late Bronze Age but could remain as practices into the Iron Age, east of the Jordan.