[Avodah] The Bronze Age Collapse

[Chesky Salomon via Avodah]

On 2016-09-20 4:37 PM, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:
> Seems that somewhere around 1207 - 1177 BCE (judging from Egyptian
> records), there was a widespread collapse of Bronze Era civilations. To
> quote wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse>:
<snip>
> The obvious question: By most chronologies, this ould be late Yehoshua
> early Shofetim. (As for the Sea People theory, the Pelishtim take over
> Azza in 1100 BCE or so.)
> 
> Is there anything in Tanakh about this? Could this be the reason why
> we fractured from centralized authority (Yehoshua) to lots of local
> cheiftans (Shofetim)?

There’s some interesting discussion of this topic on a thread titled
“The First Dark Age” and saved at Jerry Pournelle’s site:
<http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/firstdark.html>.

There’s nothing I recall from Yehoshua, Shofetim, or Shemuel which
directly points to any sort of regional collapse.  I wonder whether the
collapse might have occurred during the 40 years wandering the
wilderness, and that our re-encounter with regional powers was in a
post-collapse world so we just assumed that was “normal”.

I also find it intriguing that this collapse allowed Benei Yisrael to
establish themselves in a part of the world otherwise of all-too-much
interest to empires.

—Chesky Salomon