groups move to satisfy the slightest whim. Their possessions are so few and are so easily carried that movement is no problem…. Because the Hadza do not join in groups to assert exclusive rights over portions of land, or other property, because they do not unite to defend either resources or their own persons, because they cooperate very little with each other in their subsistence tasks, there is little to bind individuals to specific other individuals. People do depend on obtaining meat from other people, but they are entitled to a share of meat simply by being in a particular camp at a time when a large animal is killed there and do not have to rely on specific categories of kin or other specific individuals to supply them.” –James Woodburn (Stability and Flexibility in Hadza Residential Groupings) Tribes allow for militarization, this seems to be the main reason for Israel’s tribalism, their status as oppressed people surrounded by hostile neighbors. Self-preservation, strength in numbers, Tribalism allows for a more complex social structure composed of laws, hierarchy, chiefs, big men etc (the Book of judges is a Biblical example of this), but this is in no way the original preference. It is a concession. This is the point Hiebert and the agrarian agenda misses completely, While Yahweh is interacting with farmers, Yahweh is not ordaining agriculture, domestication or the resulting warfare, patriarchy, and civilized death urge which go along with it. As Gottwald puts it, “In specifically Israelite terms, we must view its tribalism as a form chosen by people who consciously rejected Canaanite centralization of power and deliberately aimed to defend their own uncentralized system against the effort of Canaanite society to crush the budding movement. Israel’s Tribalism was an autonomous project which tried to roll back the Zone of political centralization.” (p. 325, Tribes of Yahweh). Basically what we’re talking about is anarchist resistance to repressive socio-political forces. Tribalism amongst the ancient Israelites seems to be a necessary step to maintain their cohesive vision of hunter- gatherer/ band origins in the midst of oppressive cultural/ domesticating/ civilizing forces. “All the evidence for early Israel points to its tribalism as a self- constructed instrument of resistance and of decentralized self rule…Israel’s tribalism was politically conscious and deliberate social revolution and more loosely, a civil war in that it divided and counter posed peoples who had previously been organized within Canaanite city states.” (Tribes of Yahweh) I submit that the tribalisation of ancient Israel replete with its mixed agrarian-pastoralist economy was spurred on by the deep rooted memory of band society and a lived state of anarchy. I would further conjecture that this is the basic model of Eden and consequently JudeoChristian origins. Evan Eisenberg’s book, Ecology of Eden lends support to this idea via a mix of midrash recollections about the wild origins of Eden. Indeed the Jewish mystics reveal virtually no hint of a god ordained agrarian understanding of Genesis origins myths. David Abrams book The Spell of the Sensuous looks to the Jewish Kabbalist tradition for a deep rooted spiritual understanding of nature. Within these mystical Jewish traditions Eden is most frequently located on a Mountain, the essence of wild untamed creation. Similarly the term Garden seems to be an invocation of God’s place, God’s garden is more appropriately understood as the whole earth, Adam and Eve as the most basic substrata of band society, man and woman, hunter and gatherer. Sabbath and Jubilee disrupt agrarian practices in order to reorient the people to their undomesticated origins. The domesticators war is still being waged against the wild origins of the Judeo-Christian faith. But wildness cannot be killed, it will always rise from the dead. sections from: The Tribes of Yahweh: “Israel’s enemy was a sociopolitical system to be abolished.” “Israel’s enemies were particular persons in various socioeconomic and political
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