Social and political upheaval that occurred throughout the Levant in the late second and early first Millennium BCE culminated in the formation of new socio-cultural identities and new political entities. The most known of these is “Ancient Israel”, which stimulated the imaginations of scholars, artists and politicians throughout history. The problem is, that it is never clear enough what exactly are we talking about when we talk about “Ancient Israel”: was it an ancient people? Maybe just some tribal alliance, or a social group identified by its unique religious perception (monotheism)? What is the exact relationship between “Ancient Israel” as a group of people or as a religious group to the ancient kingdom that bare the same name “Israel”? These questions will stand at the focus the course in an attempt to reconstruct the origin, formation and development of “Ancient Israel”. Such reconstruction depends, first and foremost, on the gap between the biblical narrative, which depicts an organic process in which a family (the ancestors) grew to be a people (in the Exodus story) and eventually formed a political entity (the kingdom of Israel), to historical reality in which the link between social and political identity is not straight forward and was constantly changing. The examination of historical and biblical sources in light of the archaeological data and in light of social theories will be utilized in order to “fill” that gap and to reconstruct ancient Israel.