8.1.1. Lack of Royal Inscriptions

A phenomenon that was acknowledged but only little discussed in the past is the lack of royal inscriptions in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. We have noted that the territories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were excavated to a much larger extent than any other polity in the region, and have indeed yielded much larger quantities of finds of various sorts. Thus, Israel and Judah produced more ostraca than any other state in the region (e.g., Ahituv 1992). When one examines the quantity of royal inscriptions, however, the situation changes dramatically. Although not abundant in any polity, all polities in the region yielded such inscriptions (e.g., Gitin et al. 1997; Biran and Naveh 1993, 1995; McCarter 1996, pp. 84–96, and many others), with the exception of Israel and Judah (e.g., Na'aman 2002,

<sup>19</sup> This ethos was seen as expressed in various biblical laws (like the law of the king, I Samuel 8: 7–18), passages and stories (like the story of Abimelech, Judges 9), and institutions (like the Edah; see Wolf 1947 for references).

p. 94; Hallo 2003, pp. xxiii–xxvi; Rendsburg 2007).<sup>20</sup> We are witnessing a strange pattern, in which the polities that were excavated much more intensively than all the others, and whose finds are much more numerous, are lacking royal inscriptions.21

This pattern cannot be an accident, as the large number of excavations indicates. I believe that in accordance with the other traits discussed in this section, the Israelite society did not generally approve of this genre (see also Stein 1994; Blanton 1998, p. 162 for a similar interpretation in a different context).<sup>22</sup>
