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settled rural societies with a mix of sedentary and pastoral populations are often organized in what anthropologists describe as “dimorphic” chiefdoms, denoting a single community stretching over a significant territory, in which two forms of subsistence, farming and herding, exist side by side. They generally rely on a kin-based political system in which the settled villagers and mobile herders are loosely ruled by a chieftain or a strongman, who resides with his small entourage in a central stronghold.
    The characterization of early Judah as a dimorphic chiefdom has some suggestive historical confirmation in an era several centuries before David’s time. A collection of almost four hundred cuneiform tablets was discovered by chance in the late nineteenth century by local peasants digging at the site of el-Amarna in Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo. Written in cuneiform script in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, they form part of the diplomatic correspondence between Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV (the famous Akhenaten), on the one hand, and rulers of Asiatic states and Canaanite city-states, on the other, in the fourteenth century BCE . At this time the Egyptians administered all of Canaan as a province and maintained garrisons in a few major cities, but left most of the country under nominal local control. The lowlands were divided between a number of relatively densely settled territories ruled from city-states, while the highlands comprised much larger but sparsely inhabited territories. The information contained in the Amarna archive conforms quite closely with the archaeological evidence, and its personal and political details offer us a unique glimpse at the structure of society and its inner tensions in the area that would later be called Judah—and that would some centuries later become the scene of David’s rise.
    In the time of the Amarna archive, Jerusalem was ruled by a certain Abdi-Heba. The six letters he dispatched to Egypt and the letters of his neighbors provide valuable information on his city, his territory, and his subjects. The territory under his control stretched from the area of Bethel, about ten miles to the north of Jerusalem, to the Beer-sheba Valley in the south, and from the Judean Desert in the east to the border between the hill country and the Shephelah in the west—a rough approximation of the core area later controlled by the kingdom of Judah. This area contained a small number of villages and groups of pastoral nomads—called Shosu, or “plunderers,” in the Egyptian records—who were found in all parts of the country but were especially dominant in the relatively empty regions of the steppe and the highlands. On the basis of the archaeological evidence, we can assume that they formed a relatively large portion of the population of Abdi-Heba’s realm.
    Abdi-Heba’s activities and influence extended over a much larger area—all the way to the Jezreel Valley in the north. A particular flash point of tension was the border with the more populous city-states in the lowlands to the west. In light of possible comparisons to the time of David, it is significant that control of the crops and lands of the border towns located between the hill country and the Shephelah was a matter of constant contention between Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem and his rival Shuwardata, the ruler of the city-state of Gath.
    Jerusalem, mentioned in the Amarna letters as Abdi-Heba’s seat of power, could not have been more than a small village located on the same ridge that David’s Jerusalem later occupied. Over a century of modern archaeological investigations in Jerusalem have revealed no significant remains from Abdi-Heba’s era. Only isolated tombs and a few Late Bronze pottery sherds have been found on the ridge of the later City of David—especially in the vicinity of the city’s only permanent source of freshwater, the Gihon spring. Abdi-Heba’s Jerusalem was