In all fairness, much of Dever’s analysis relies on the work of Harvard’s Lawrence Stager, especially his “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985). (Stager’s article won a Biblical Archaeology Society 1986 Publication Award for one of the most significant articles relating to archaeology and the Bible. The judges described Stager’s article as “a brilliant synthesis of archaeological and textual evidence concerning the social structure of early Israel and changes introduced in it by the establishment of the monarchy.”) Dever fully acknowledges his debt to Stager. It is when Dever goes beyond Stager that he gets in trouble.