Gottwald, Norman K. The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. The Social Revolution Model has emerged in the last two decades with the theory that Israel was composed in large part of native Canaanites who revolted against their overlords and joined forces with a nuclear group of invaders or infiltrators from the desert (the exodus Israelites). This model draws on key elements of the other two major models and rearranges them to form a fundamentally new conception of Israel's rise to power. Revolt theorists see an important dimension of armed conflict in Israel's emergence and see the exodus Israelites as the final catalyst to a long-brewing social revolution among depressed and marginated Canaanites. The immigration model is used in the claim that the formation of Israel was a coalition of many groups with separate prehistories and cultural backgrounds. This model sees the change as taking place over a long period of time, and it was during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when warfare among the city-states increased while population declined. Peasants and pastoral nomads were drawn toward closer cooperation and alliances to fend off the control of the city-states. It was probably with the arrival of the exodus Israelites that the religion of Yahweh became the socioreligious ideology and organizational framework that would serve to bring together these rebellious peoples and forge them into an effective revolutionary movement (Gottwald 272-273). This "peaceful infiltration" model was developed by German archaeologists as early as the 1920s and 1930s. The theory was based on an advance beyond the earlier, strictly literary criticism of the materials in Joshua-Judges and moved to a new method called "form criticism" or "tradition history." The Germans stressed what they called the "life setting" of each literary form of the Hebrew Bible, and they looked to the setting in the community and culture in wh |
