Professor Christine
Hayes: We were talking last
time about the establishment of
the monarchy or kingship in
Israel and I want to say a
little bit about some of the
features of Israelite kingship,
and today I'll be coming back
frequently to the Israelite
notions of kingship and royal
ideology.
But to start off:
one of the most important
things to realize is that the
king in Israel was not divine,
as he was in Egypt,
or even semi-divine.
 
Occasionally,
he offered sacrifice but he
didn't play a regular role in
the cult.
Israelite royal ideology was
heavily indebted to Canaanite
royal ideology.
You have similar language
that's applied to the kings of
Israel.
The king is said to be
appointed by the deity or
deities to end wickedness,
to enlighten the land,
he is the channel of prosperity
and divine blessing for the
nation.
All of this is true of
Canaanite kings as well,
and the king,
as we've seen,
is spoken of as God's son.
That doesn't imply divinity.
 
It's a metaphor,
the metaphor of sonship.
It was used for the Canaanite
gods as well,
and it expressed the special
relationship between the king
and the deity.
It was the same relationship as
was found between that of a
suzerain and a vassal,
and in our suzerainty treaties,
also, the vassal is the son of
the suzerain.
It's a kind of adoption,
and what it means is that the
one who is metaphorically the
son is to serve the father
loyally,
faithfully, but is also
susceptible to chastisement from
him.
And that's what we saw in
Nathan's statement or
pronouncement or prophecy to
David last time.
Michael Coogan points out that
the notion of the sonship of the
king was revolutionary.
It was a deliberate effort to
replace an earlier understanding
according to which the entire
nation of Israel was God's son.
You remember during the plagues
in Egypt when God refers to
Pharaoh as having oppressed His
son, Israel, His firstborn.
As Yahweh's son,
the king now is standing
between God and the people as a
whole.
And we're going to return in a
moment to this new royal
ideology and what's really going
to be a very tense juxtaposition
with the covenant theology.
 
But first I want to say a
little bit more about the
characters of David and Solomon
before going into the way royal
ideology was later developed.
 
In the Bible,
David is second only in
importance and in textual space
to Moses;
the amount of space that's
devoted to him,
is second only to Moses.
 
There are three characteristics
of David which stand out,
and the first is that he's
described as being quite
proficient in music and poetry
and so we'll see that later
tradition is going to attribute
to him not only the invention of
various instruments but also the
composition of the Book of
Psalms.
It seems to make sense that he
would be the composer of the
Book of Psalms in that he has a
reputation for poetry and music.
 
He is also credited with great
military and tactical skill and
confidence.
He deploys his army on behalf
of Israel but he also,
once he is king,
deploys his army within Israel
against his rivals.
Third, he is depicted as a very
shrewd politician.
And it was David who created
permanent symbols of God's
election of Israel,
God's election of David
himself,
God's election of David's house
or line or dynasty to rule over
Israel in perpetuity.
It is said that he conceived
the idea of a royal capital.
He captured the city of Jebus,
Yebus--it was a border town so
it was free of any tribal
association.
I guess it's sort of like
Washington, D.C.;
it's not located really within
any one tribe;
and he captured this and built
it up as the city of David.
The city was going to be
renamed Jerusalem and it would
become understood as the chosen
city,
the place where God caused His
name to dwell:
as Deuteronomy said,
there would be a place where
God would choose to cause His
name to dwell.
And so Jerusalem becomes a
symbol of God's presence,
it becomes a symbol of Israel's
kingdom, the monarchy;
it becomes a symbol of the
dynasty of David.
It is referred to as the City
of David.
David transfers the Ark to this
city and so he makes it the home
to the ancient witness of the
covenant, the Sinaitic Covenant.
The added implication is that
the Davidic dynasty has
inherited the blessings of the
covenant.
It is somehow fulfilling the
promise to the patriarchs,
which is also associated with
the nation of Israel at Sinai.
He planned a temple that would
become the permanent resting
place for the ark and a cultic
center for all Israel but the
building of this temple was left
to Solomon so we'll discuss it
and its symbolism when we get to
Solomon.
But according to the biblical
record it was still David who
made the chosen dynasty,
the chosen city,
what would eventually be the
temple, into permanent and
deeply interconnected symbols of
the religion of Israel.
And it's really with David that
the history of Jerusalem as the
Holy City begins.
 
Now the biblical assessment of
David is initially relatively
positive, and this changes
shortly after his ascension to
the throne.
Beginning in 2 Samuel from
about chapter 9 to 20 and then
on into the first couple of
chapters of Kings,
you have a stretch of text
which is often referred to as
the Court History or the
succession narrative of David.
 
The critical question that
drives this particular
historical fiction is the
question of succession:
who will succeed David?
 
He has many children but one by
one his sons are killed,
or they're displaced or
disqualified in one way or
another, until finally there is
Solomon.
There are lots of wonderful
major and minor characters in
this drama.
It's a very complex drama,
lots of intrigue and passion,
but the material in this
section also presents a rather
unusual portrait of David.
He's weak, he's indecisive,
he's something of an anti-hero.
He stays home in the palace
while other people are off
leading battles and fighting the
wars.
He enters into an illicit
relationship with a married
woman, Bathsheva (or Bathsheba).
 
He sees to it that her husband
is killed in battle to cover up
his affair.
It's this combined act of
adultery and murder that earns
him a sound scolding from
Nathan,
the prophet Nathan--we'll come
to that when we talk about
prophets next week.
But God punishes him with the
death of his son.
And it's really from this point
on in the story that we see
David losing control over events
around him;
his control declines.
 
He is indecisive on the whole
question of succession and that
leads to all kinds of resentment
and conflict as well as revolts.
There's one revolt,
which is a revolt in support of
his son, Absalom.
 
That's a revolt that the
Deuteronomistic historian also
indicates was a punishment for
his affair with--for David's
affair with Bathsheba.
 
But during this revolt David
flees from his enemies,
he's stripped of his crown,
he's degraded.
When Absalom is killed David
weeps for his son uncontrollably
and this only angers his own
supporters who fought so
earnestly against Absalom in his
defense;
it's a very poignant moment.
 
But by the end of the story,
David is almost completely
impotent, and senile even.
 
The prophet Nathan and
Bathsheba plot to have
Bathsheba's son,
Solomon, named the successor of
David and there really is no
point at which there's any
divine indication that Solomon
has won divine approval,
no divine indication that he is
the one.
It happens through palace
intrigue, particularly with
Bathsheba and Nathan.
 
But the northern tribes--there
are signs throughout the story
of the hostility of the northern
tribes and that's a warning
sign,
that's a warning sign of future
disunity.
This whole court history is
just a wonderful,
masterful work of prose.
You're going to be reading
something from a book by a
fellow named Meir Sternberg,
which is I think just a
wonderful study of the Bathsheba
story.
Some speak about all of this
unit as being authored by the J
source.
You need to know that source
theory has undergone so many
permutations.
There really isn't any standard
view but I think the idea that
the sources J,
E, P and D extend beyond the
Pentateuch is now generally no
longer accepted so you will
sometimes see people talking
about the J source as going all
the way through the end of
Second Kings and being in
fact--J is the author of the
court history.
But for the most part I think
most people think of the source
theory as applying to the
Pentateuch,
and beyond that we talk about
the Deuteronomistic historian
redacting older earlier sources.
 
I'll talk a little bit more
about some of those sources as
we move through the later books,
the books of the former
prophets.
The court history has an array
of very richly drawn characters.
 
They act out all sorts of
scenes of power and lust and
courage and struggle.
 
There's crime,
there's tender love.
It's a very realistic sort of
psychological drama.
It's also striking for its
uncompromising honesty.
We don't see anything like that
really in the work of any
contemporary historian.
 
David is depicted in very,
very human terms.
The flattery and the
whitewashing that you find in
other ancient Near Eastern
dynastic histories is lacking
here.
The flattery and whitewashing
that we get for example in
Chronicles, the books of
Chronicles,
are really just a retelling of
the material here in the former
prophets and they clean up the
picture of David.
 
There's no mention of Bathsheba
in there.
So you do have that kind of
whitewashing as part of the
historiography of the Book of
Chronicles, but it's lacking
here.
All of the flaws,
all of the weaknesses of David,
a national hero--they're all
laid bare.
Implicitly perhaps,
that is a critique of kinship.
 
It is perhaps a critique of the
claim of kings to rule by divine
right.
The author here seems to be
stressing that David and,
as we shall see,
Solomon (he's quite human,
Solomon's quite human)--they
are not at all divine.
 
They're subject to the errors
and flaws that characterize all
humans.
As we move out of Samuel now
and into 1 and 2 Kings,
we see that these books,
Kings, contain the history of
Israel from the death of King
David until the fall of Judah in
587,
586, and the exile to Babylonia.
 
These books also appear to be
based on older sources.
Some of them are explicitly
identified.
They will refer sometimes to
these works, which evidently
were subsequently lost but
they'll refer to the Book of the
Acts of Solomon or the Book of
the Annals of the Kings of
Israel,
or the Book of the Annals of
the Kings of Judah.
 
Annals and chronicles were
regularly maintained in royal
courts throughout the Ancient
Near East.
There's no reason to think that
this wasn't also done in a royal
setting in Israel.
 
These annals generally listed
events, important events in the
reign of a given king.
 
They tended not to have much
narrative to them and the
beginning of the first 16
chapters of 1 Kings has that
kind of feel,
not a lot of narrative,
and really reportage of events.
 
Beginning in 1 Kings 17:17-22,
and the first nine chapters of
2 Kings, there's a departure
from that annal style,
annal genre the reporting of
events in the reign of a king.
You have more developed
narratives in those sources and
these narratives generally
feature prophets.
So it's going to lead very
nicely into our study of
Prophets beginning on Monday.
 
Some of the narratives
evidently would have circulated
independently,
particularly the stories,
probably, about Elijah and
Elisha, these zealous
Yahweh-only prophets.
 
They were probably local heroes
and these stories circulated
independently,
but they've come to be embedded
in a framework that conforms
those sources to the ideology
and religious perspective of the
Deuteronomistic historian.
1 Kings 2 is the death scene.
 
It has David's deathbed
instructions to his son,
Solomon.
He tells Solomon to kill all of
his rivals and opponents and in
verse 12 we read,
"And Solomon sat upon the
throne of his father,
David, and his rule was firmly
established."
And it seems that at this point
the three crises that we noted
in the Book of Samuel,
at the opening at 1 Samuel,
the three crises we noted are
resolved.
The crisis in succession is
resolved.
David is succeeded by his son,
Solomon, and all of the kings
of Judah for the next 400 years
in fact,
until the destruction in 586,
all of these kings will be of
the line of David.
 
The military crises seem for
now to have been resolved.
We've had lots of military and
diplomatic successes and Israel
seems to be secure.
 
And also the religious crisis
that we mentioned is resolved.
The Ark was retaken from the
Philistines, it's been brought
to Jerusalem,
it's been installed in
Jerusalem,
and now a magnificent temple is
planned that will house the Ark
and be a site for the central
worship of all Israel.
 
But the resolution of these
crises came at a cost.
They produced fundamental
changes in Israelite society.
From a loose confederation of
tribes--however idealistic that
picture was--but from a loose
confederation of tribes united
by a covenant,
we've now got a nation with a
strong central administration,
it's headed by a king.
And that king seems to enjoy a
special covenant with God.
Rather than charismatic leaders
who rise as the need itself
arises and then fade away,
we now have permanent kings
from a single family.
 
And preserved in the biblical
sources is a tension,
a tension between the old ideas
of the covenant confederation,
what we might call covenant
theology, and the new ideology
of the monarchy.
This new royal ideology
combines loyalty to God and
loyalty to the throne,
so that treason or rebellion
against God's anointed is also
apostasy,
it's also rebellion against God
Himself.
The two become conflated.
There's a scholar named Jon
Levenson, I've talked about him
before in connection with the
covenant at Sinai,
but in this wonderful book
called Sinai and Zion he
really juxtaposes these two
ideologies.
He points to this deep tension
between the covenant theology
and the royal ideology.
 
In covenant theology,
Yahweh alone is the king.
He's got a direct
suzerain-vassal relationship
with the people.
So Israel is the subject of
covenant theology.
 
The covenant theology therefore
implies almost automatically a
somewhat negative view of the
monarchy and that's what we've
seen here and there,
in the Book of Judges and in
Samuel.
Monarchy is at best unnecessary
and at worst it's a rejection of
God.
Nevertheless,
despite that resistance or that
critique, monarchy,
kingship, is established in
Israel,
and Levenson sees the royal
ideology that developed to
support this institution as a
major revolution in the
structure of the religion of
Israel.
Where the Sinaitic Covenant was
contracted between God and the
nation, the Davidic covenant is
contracted between God and a
single individual,
the king.
The covenant with
David--another scholar,
Moshe Weinfeld,
whom I've mentioned before as
well,
he describes the covenant with
David as a covenant of grant.
This is a form that we find in
the ancient Near East also.
It's a grant of a reward for
loyal service and deeds.
And so God rewards David with
the gift of an unending dynasty.
It's a covenant of grant.
 
He grants him this unending
dynasty in exchange for his
loyalty.
And the contrast with the
covenant at Sinai is very clear.
 
Where Israel's covenant with
God at Sinai had been
conditional--it's premised on
the observance of God's Torah if
there's violation,
then God will uproot the
Israelites and throw them out of
the land --the covenant with
David,
by contrast,
with his dynastic house (and by
implication with David's city
and the temple atop Mount Zion),
that covenant will be
maintained under all conditions.
 
Remember the passage that we
read of Nathan's prophecy last
time.
So the royal ideology fostered
a belief in some quarters,
and we'll see this in the next
few weeks,
a belief in the inviolability,
the impregnable nature of,
David's house,
dynasty,
the city itself,
the chosen city,
the sacred mountain,
the temple.
We'll return to this idea in
later lectures.
So you have this deep tension
lining up Israel's covenant at
Mount Sinai, which is
conditional,
on the one hand,
with God's covenant with David,
which is centered on the temple
and palace complex at Mount
Zion,
and which is unconditional and
permanent.
Scholars have tried to account
for these two strands of
tradition in Biblical literature
in different ways;
the covenant theology with its
emphasis on the conditional
covenant with Moses contracted
at Sinai;
the royal ideology and its
emphasis on the unconditional
covenant with David focused on
Mount Zion.
One explanation is
chronological--that early
traditions were centered around
the Sinai event and the covenant
theology.
They emphasize that aspect of
the relationship with God,
and later traditions under the
monarchy emphasize royal
ideology.
Another explanation is
geographical.
The northern kingdom,
which if you'll recall and
we'll talk about in a moment,
the northern kingdom is going
to break away from the southern
kingdom (Davidides will not rule
in the northern kingdom) so the
assumption is that the northern
kingdom,
which rejected the house of
David--they de-emphasize a royal
ideology and its focus on Zion
and the house of David,
and they emphasize the old
covenant theology and the Sinai
theology.
And by contrast the southern
kingdom, in which a member of
the house of David reigned right
until the destruction,
the southern kingdom emphasized
Zion and its attendant royal
ideology.
Well, Levenson rejects both of
these explanations.
 
He says it isn't that one is
early and one is late,
it isn't that one is northern
and one is southern.
We find the Sinai and the Zion
traditions in early texts and
late texts.
We find them in northern texts
and in southern texts.
 
In the south,
David's house was criticized
just as roundly as it was
criticized in the north,
and emphasis was placed on the
Sinai covenant over against the
royal ideology in the south as
well as in the north.
So the two traditions he said
coexisted side by side,
they stood in a dialectic
tension with one another in
Israel.
And eventually they would come
to be coordinated and work
together, we'll see that more
towards the end of the lecture.
 
But he says that the Zion
ideology will take on some of
the aspects of the legacy of
Sinai.
Mount Zion will soon be
associated with the site of
God's theophony or
self-revelation;
it will become a kind of Sinai
now permanently in Jerusalem.
It would become the site of
covenant renewal.
It will be seen as the place
where Torah goes forth,
and that's an idea of course
originally associated with
Sinai--that's where God's
instruction or Torah went first.
But all of these features will
be collapsed or telescoped or
brought into Mount Zion and the
temple complex.
But eventually,
he says, it's not simply that
the Sinai covenant theology was
absorbed into the royal ideology
and Mount Zion,
because the entitlement of the
house of David will eventually
be made contingent on the
observance of God's Torah.
 
The king himself,
we will see,
is not exempt from the covenant
conditions set at Sinai.
And even though he would never
be completely deposed for
violating the Sinaitic Covenant
he will be punished for his
violations.
The two will work in tandem.
It's an idea that we'll return
to.
We'll see it more clearly as we
get towards the end of this
lecture.
But for now keep in mind that
the two are going to be held in
tension and work together to
check one another.
 
Now David's son,
Solomon, is given mixed reviews
by the Deuteronomistic
historian.
He ascends to the throne
through intrigue,
as I said, there's really no
indication of a divine choice or
approval,
but he's said to reign over a
golden age.
His kingdom is said to stretch
from Egypt to the Euphrates.
 
He made political alliances and
economic alliances throughout
the region.
He would seal these alliances
with marriages.
He married a daughter of
Pharaoh.
He married the daughter of the
king of Tyre in Phoenicia and so
on.
The text claims that he built a
daunting military establishment:
he put a wall around Jerusalem,
there were fortified
cities--Hazor,
Megiddo, Gezer--these were
bases for his professional army.
 
It's said that the army
featured a very expensive
chariot force.
He also had accomplishments in
the realms of industry and
trade.
He exploited Israel's natural
position straddling the
north-south trade routes and was
able to bring great wealth to
the state in that way.
 
The daily supplies that were
needed to maintain Solomon's
very lavish court are detailed
in 1 Kings,
so it seems to have been an
extraordinarily elaborate court.
He developed a merchant fleet.
 
He seemed to work closely with
the Phoenicians and the
Phoenician King Hiram in
developing a merchant fleet and
exploited trade routes through
the Red Sea.
All sorts of exotic products
are listed as coming in to
Jerusalem from Arabia and the
African coast.
We have the famous story of the
visit of the queen of Sheba.
This could possibly be the
Sabean territory in South Arabia
and there may be some basis in
fact given these trade routes
and how well traveled they were
at this time.
And of course he is known for
his magnificent building
operations.
Many scholars assume that given
this tremendous wealth this
would have been a time for a
flowering of the arts,
and so it's often been
maintained that this would have
been the time for the early
traditions,
biblical traditions,
early traditions of the nation
to be recorded,
perhaps the J source.
 
People date it to the tenth
century, the time of Solomon.
But we should be a little
skeptical of this grand picture
because archaeologists have
found that Jerusalem was a small
town;
it was a very small town really
until the end of the eighth
century suddenly it absorbed
many refugees from the fall of
the northern kingdom.
Remember Israel is going to be
destroyed in 722,
so refugees fleeing southward
will greatly expand Jerusalem;
we have archaeological evidence
of that.
But there are very few material
remains that attest to a
fabulous empire on a scale
that's suggested by the biblical
text.
Hazor, Megiddo,
and Gezer, the three places
that are mentioned as fortified
military bases,
these have been excavated.
They do show some great
gateways and some large
chambers, even some stables,
but archaeologists differ
radically over the dating of
these lairs.
Some date them to the time of
Solomon, some see it as later.
Most concur that Israel was
probably at this time the most
important power in its region,
but still it would have been
small and relatively
insignificant compared to,
say, Egypt or Mesopotamia,
some of the great civilizations
at either end of the Fertile
Crescent.
But it would have been the most
important state in that area and
probably was able to have some
dominance over some neighboring
areas as well.
I just want to mention three
things about Solomon,
things that he's noted for.
One is that he's praised for
his wisdom and because,
again, the biblical text
praises him for his wisdom later
tradition will find it
convenient to attribute the Book
of Proverbs to him as well as
the Book of Ecclesiastes.
These are two works that belong
to the genre of wisdom
literature we'll be talking
about later in the semester.
Second, in addition to being
praised for his wisdom,
he's praised for constructing
the temple and in fact the
primary focus of all of the
biblical material,
or the biblical story of
Solomon, is the building of the
temple, the dedication of this
temple for the Ark of the
Covenant in Jerusalem.
 
He continued the close
association of the cult and the
monarchy, the religious and
political leadership,
by constructing this
magnificent new temple within
the palace complex and he
himself appointed a high priest.
So the juxtaposition of the
house of the king and the house
of the deity on Mount Zion was
quite deliberate.
And this hill,
even though geographically it's
very small, becomes in the
mythic imagination of Israel,
this towering and impregnable
mountain.
Levenson again argues that Zion
came eventually to take on the
features of the cosmic mountain.
 
The cosmic mountain is a mythic
symbol that we find in the
ancient Near East.
 
The cosmic mountain has these
powers or potencies that are
universal and infinite and we
find it in the religion of
Israel as well,
specifically in connection with
Mount Zion.
The cosmic mountain in ancient
tradition was understood to be
the meeting place of the gods
like a Mount Olympus,
for example–it's a cosmic
mountain.
But it was also understood to
be the axis mundi,
that is to say the juncture or
the point of junction between
heaven and earth,
the meeting place of heaven and
earth, the axis around which
these worlds met or were
conjoined.
In Canaan--in Canaanite
religion the Mountain of Baal,
which is known as Mount Zaphon,
was conceived precisely in this
manner.
And Levenson points out
tremendous commonalities of
language and concept in
connection with the Mountain of
Baal,
the Mountain of El,
and the Mountain of Yahweh.
In fact, the word "Zaphon,"
Mount Zaphon is used to describe
God's mountain in the Bible in
one particular passage.
So the temple on Mount Zion
came to be understood as sacred
space much like the cosmic
mountains of other traditions.
It's described as a kind of
paradise sometimes,
almost a Garden of Eden.
 
It's described as the place
from which the entire world was
created.
It's also viewed as a kind of
epitome of the world,
a kind of microcosm,
an entire microcosm of the
world.
It's also seen as the earthly
manifestation of a heavenly
temple.
The temple came to represent an
ideal and sacred realm.
 
And we also see it as the
object of intense longing.
Many of the Psalms will express
intense longing:
if I could just sit in the
temple,
if I could just be in that
space, that sacred space--we see
it in the Psalms.
 
In a passage describing the
dedication of the temple–it's
in 1 Kings 8--Solomon explains
that the temple is a place where
people have access to God.
 
They can petition to Him and
they can atone for their sins.
It is a house of prayer,
he says, and it remained the
central focal point of Israelite
worship for centuries.
So his great wisdom,
his great virtue in
constructing the temple
notwithstanding,
Solomon is very sharply
criticized for,
among other things,
his foreign worship.
His new palace complex had a
tremendous amount of room for
his harem, which is said to have
included 700 wives.
Many of them were foreign
princesses, many of them would
have been acquired to seal
political alliances or business
alliances, noblewomen.
 
700 wives and 300 concubines,
as well as various officials
and servants.
Now of course these numbers are
likely exaggerated,
but Solomon's diplomatic
alliances likely necessitated
unions that would of course have
been condemned by the
Deuteronomistic historian.
He is said to have loved
foreign women,
from the nations that God had
forbidden and he succumbed to
the worship of their gods and
goddesses,
which is really the key point.
 
The whole fear of a foreign
spouse is that one will be led
to or will support the worship
of foreign deities,
and so Solomon is said to have
built temples for Moabite gods
and Ammonite gods.
 
This all may point to a general
tolerance for different cults in
Jerusalem in the tenth century
and in the ninth century.
This may not have been an issue
in Jerusalem in the tenth and
ninth century,
but it's an issue for the later
Deuteronomistic editor.
 
They have no tolerance this.
 
So Solomon's primary flaw in
the Deuteronomistic historians'
view is his syncretism,
which is prompted by his
marriages to these foreign women
who brought their native cults
to Jerusalem.
His religious infidelity is
said to be the cause of the
severe problems and ultimately
the division of the kingdom that
will follow upon his death.
In order to support this
tremendous court and harem,
as well as the army and the
bureaucracy,
Solomon did introduce heavy
taxation as well as the
corvée,
which is forced labor or
required labor on state
projects.
So you have this developing
urban structure,
complex developing,
bureaucratic urban structure
that's now being superimposed on
the agricultural life,
and that leads to all sorts of
class distinctions and class
divisions between officials,
bureaucrats,
merchants, large-scale
landowners who are prospering
perhaps, smaller farmers and
shepherds who are living at more
of a subsistence level.
 
So you have divisions between
town and country,
between rich and poor.
 
And this is a great change from
the ideals of the tribal
democracy, some of the ideals
that some of you looked at when
we were talking about legal
texts,
where there seemed to be these
economic blueprints for bringing
about economic equivalence
through sabbatical years and
jubilee years and so on.
 
In short, the list of social
and economic ills that were
enumerated by Samuel (in 1
Samuel 8,
when he was trying to persuade
the people from establishing a
monarchy), that list of
ills--you'll have a standing
military,
a standing army you'll have to
support, you'll have to do labor
for the state,
you're going to have all kinds
of taxes and special levies,
you're going to be virtually
enslaved--many of these things
seem to have been realized,
the Deuteronomistic historian
would like us to believe,
in the reign of Solomon.
Moreover, as we've already
seen, the very institution of
monarchy itself didn't sit well
in some quarters because
centralized leadership under a
human king seemed to go against
the older traditions of Hebrew
tribal society,
united by covenant with God,
guided by priests,
prophets, occasional judges
inspired charismatically.
So already before Solomon's
death, the northern tribes were
feeling some alienation from the
house of David.
They're resenting what they
perceive to be Solomon's
tyranny.
So let me give you a brief
timeline of what happens from
the death of Solomon down to the
destruction.
And on one of the earlier
handouts I gave you,
there is a list of the kings
north and south.
This is not something you need
to memorize and I'm certainly
not going to stress it,
but if you want to keep score,
that's a list that you can
refer to.
So, when Solomon died in 922
the structure that had been
erected by David and Solomon
fell into these two rival states
and neither of them of course is
going to be very strong.
 
You have the northern kingdom
of Israel and the southern
kingdom referred to as Judah,
each with its own king:
Jeroboam in the north,
Rehoboam in the south.
Sometimes they're going to be
at war with one another,
sometimes they're going to work
in alliance with one another,
but 200 years later,
from 922 down to 722,200 years
later the northern kingdom of
Israel will fall to the Assyrian
empire.
The Assyrians come down to the
border of the southern kingdom,
to Judah, and Judah remains
viable but it is reduced to
vassal status.
It is tributary to this new
world power.
Finally, Judah will be
destroyed about 150 years later
--about 587,586.
The Babylonians,
the neo-Babylonian empire,
they have conquered the
Assyrians and they assume
control over the ancient Near
East and take the southern
kingdom.
Now the story of the northern
kingdom, Israel,
that is presented in Kings,
is colored by a Judean
perspective,
and it is highly negative and
highly polemical.
 
So Solomon was succeeded by his
son, Rehoboam,
but the ten tribes of the north
revolted when he refused to
relieve their tax burden.
 
They came to him and asked if
they could have some relief and
he answered them very harshly,
so they revolted and a separate
kingdom was set up under the
rule of the Israelite Jeroboam,
just at the end of the tenth
century.
So divided now into these two
kingdoms, they begin to lose
power, probably losing any
control they may have had over
outlying territories.
 
So let's focus first on the
northern kingdom of Israel.
The area was more divided by
tribal rivalries and religious
traditions than Judah.
 
You have ten tribes in that
region.
Jeroboam didn't seem to be able
to establish a very stable rule.
1 Kings 12 tells us of
Jeroboam's effort to break the
connection with the traditional
religious center of Jerusalem in
the south.
He establishes his own
government at Shechem--that was
a place that was already revered
in Hebrew tradition.
 
This is where we have the
covenant renewal ceremony by
Joshua, so it's already a
somewhat sacred site.
So he establishes his capital
in Shechem, and then he
establishes royal shrines,
one in the southern part of
Israel and one in the northern
part of Israel;
on each of the borders,
north and south of the kingdom,
in Dan and Bethel (Bethel in
the south and Dan in the north).
A golden calf is placed in each
shrine according to the text,
and this is viewed by the
Deuteronomistic historian as a
terrible sin.
Indeed the story is written in
a manner that deliberately
echoes the story of the golden
calf that was made by Aaron in
Exodus 32.
There are linguistic echoes
that make it very clear that we
are supposed to view this as a
sin as great as the sin of
Aaron.
It may well be that if Jeroboam
did in fact do this that he was
a good Yahwist and was just
trying to establish alternate
sanctuaries for Yahweh that
would rival Jerusalem's.
 
But the Deuteronomistic
historian wants to see this as
another instance of idolatry,
and therefore,
deliberately echoes the
primordial cultic sin of the
golden calves when talking about
Jeroboam's activity.
It brands his cultic center as
illegitimate idolatry.
Jeroboam is represented by the
biblical writer as having made
unacceptable concessions to
Canaanite practices of worship,
and so he is criticized for
this.
Despite his best efforts,
his kingship is fairly
unstable, and in fact in the
200-year history of the kingdom,
the northern kingdom of Israel,
we will have seven different
dynasties occupying the throne.
 
There was great material
prosperity in the northern
kingdom.
I've just picked out a few
kings to highlight so these are
not to be understood to be
necessarily in order,
I've just picked out a few
highlights, but the rule of Omri
was a time of some material
prosperity and his son,
Ahab.
Ahab was the first part of the
ninth century.
Omri is an interesting person
because he's the first king from
either kingdom to be mentioned
in sources outside the Bible.
We have a large stone referred
to as the Moabite Stone and in
this stone, which boasts of a
military defeat,
there's the boast that Omri of
Israel was defeated.
Omri bought and fortified
Samaria as the capital of the
northern kingdom of Israel,
and archaeology does reveal
that this was in fact quite a
magnificent city at this time.
But again the Deuteronomistic
editors are going to judge him
as evil.
He's disobeyed God.
His son, Ahab,
also comes in for bad press.
Ahab is also mentioned outside
the Bible.
We have an inscription of an
Assyrian king who describes a
coalition of Israelites and
Aramaeans who fought against the
Assyrians,
and Ahab is mentioned in that
inscription.
Omri and Ahab were clearly very
powerful and influential in the
region.
They are even mentioned outside
the Bible.
Ahab and his Phoenician wife,
Jezebel, seem to have
established a very extravagant
court life in the capital of
Samaria,
and for this they are also
going to be condemned by the
Deuteronomistic editors.
Jezebel was Phoenician and when
Jezebel tried to establish the
worship of her Phoenician Baal
as the official cult of Israel
(she built a temple to Baal in
Samaria) the prophets Elijah and
Elisha preach a kind of holy war
against the monarchy.
Now we're going to come back to
these very zealous Yahweh-only
prophets of the north when we
talk about prophecy next time.
Ahab and Jezebel meet a very
tragic end and there will be a
military coup.
A military coup led by an army
general, Jehu,
in about 842.
These are all kind of
approximate years,
you know--different books will
give the--they'll differ by five
years one way or the other but
it's our best effort at
reconstructing things based on
some of these outside
extra-biblical references that
give us a firm date and then we
can kind of work around those.
 
So the army general Jehu in
about 842 led a military coup.
He was anointed king by the
prophet Elisha and he had a very
bloody revenge on Jezebel.
 
Jezebel and the priests of Baal
were all slaughtered,
the text says,
as well as every worshipper of
Baal in Samaria;
they were all slaughtered.
By the eighth century you have
the new Assyrian empire on the
rise, and in 722 the Assyrian
king Sargon reduced Israel to
the status of a province.
 
And we have an inscription by
Sargon that confirms the
biblical report of this defeat.
 
And in this inscription Sargon
says, "" Samaria "…led away as
prisoners [27,290 inhabitants of
it….
[The town I]
re better than (it was) before
and therein people from
countries which myself quered."
So: population transplanting.
 
"I placed an officer of mine as
governor over them and imposed
upon them tribute as (is
customary) for Assyrian
citizens".
So there's a basic agreement
between this and the biblical
account.
Many of the governing class,
the wealthy merchants,
many tens of thousands in all,
were carried off to northern
Mesopotamia and they were lost
to history.
These are the ten lost tribes
of Israel.
There would have remained
behind some Hebrew farmers and
shepherds, they would have
continued their old ways,
but as was consistent with
their policy,
the Assyrians imported new
peoples to repopulate this area
and to break up any local
resistance to their rule and
this would then become the
province of Samaria.
And this ethnically mixed group
would practice a form of
Israelite religion,
but the Deuteronomistic editor
does not view it as legitimate
and ultimately these Samaritans
were going to be despised by the
Jews of the southern kingdom,
the Jews of Judah.
 
They were seen as foreign
corruptors of the faith.
They were always ready to
assist Judah's enemies against
Judah, so they felt very little
kinship and very often the
Samaritans would join against,
those attacking Judah.
So there was tremendous rivalry
between the Jews of Judah and
the Samaritans.
Hence, the New Testament story
makes sense--this was a hated
person, this good Samaritan.
So if we turn our attention now
to the southern kingdom of
Judah: Judah was comprised of
the two remaining tribes of
Judah and Benjamin,
and it enjoyed internal
stability for the most part.
 
It remained loyal to the house
of David ruling in Jerusalem.
Shortly after Israel fell in
722 to the Assyrians,
the Judahites--whose king at
that time was King Hezekiah,
so the king Hezekiah had to
agree to terms with Assyria.
They became subject allies or
vassals of Assyria.
But Hezekiah began to prepare
for rebellion,
began to make alliances with
neighbors and this prompted the
Assyrians to march in and lay
siege to Jerusalem.
This would have happened about
701, and this siege is described
in Assyrian sources,
so we have independent records
of this from Assyrian sources.
 
We read there:
"As to Hezekiah,
the Jew,"--of Yehud,
right?
the Jew--"he did not submit to
my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of
his strong cities,
walled forts," etc.
"I drove out…200,150
people….
Himself I made prisoner in
Jerusalem, his royal residence,
like a bird in a cage" .
 
But eventually the Assyrians
actually withdrew the siege,
Judah was able to withstand the
siege, preserve their own
kingship.
The Assyrian empire is going to
fall in 612--this is the fall of
Nineveh you may have heard of at
some point--and they will fall
to the rising Babylonians,
the neo-Babylonian empire.
 
It's the neo-Babylonian empire
that will succeed in felling
Judah under Nebuchadrezzar of
Babylon in 587 or 586.
The walls of Jerusalem are
dismantled, many members of the
governing classes,
wealthier classes,
are going to be carried off
into exile in Babylonia.
And that the Hebrews didn't
fade into oblivion after the
loss of political independence
and their geographical base,
is due in large part to the
interpretation of events
provided by the Deuteronomistic
school.
So we need to talk a little bit
about that ideology and why it
had the historical effect that
it had.
As I mentioned before,
Deuteronomy isn't just the
capstone of the Pentateuch's
narrative, it's also the first
part of a longer literary
history.
Martin Noth was the German
scholar who first argued for
this, argued that the
composition and authorship of
Deuteronomy has more in common
with what follows in some sense
than what precedes it.
 
And he argued that we should
understand this to be a unit,
the product of a particular
School.
Since this Deuteronomistic
School is looking back at the
history of Israel up to and
including the defeat and exile
of the Israelites in 587 or 586,
the final form of the work of
the Deuteronomistic School--the
final form must be post exilic.
It's post-586,
but there are of course various
layers within that larger work
that we can't really date with
precision.
I just want to say something
about the scholarly methodology
that led to the conclusion that
there is such a thing as a
Deuteronomistic School.
That method is redaction
criticism.
And we've already discussed the
goals and the methods of other
types of criticism:
source criticism or historical
criticism.
We've talked a little bit about
form criticism and tradition
criticism.
But redaction criticism grew
out of a kind of weariness with
some of these other forms of
biblical criticism and their
constant fragmentation of the
biblical text into older sources
or into older genres or into
older units of tradition in
order to map out a history of
Israelite religion.
These other methods seem to pay
very little attention to the
text in its final form and the
process by which the text
reached its final form.
 
So redaction criticism rejects
the idea that the person or the
persons who compiled the text
from earlier sources did a
somewhat mechanical scissors and
paste job,
didn't really think too much
about the effect they were
creating by putting things
together.
Redaction criticism assumes and
focuses on identifying the
purpose and the plan behind the
final form of the assembled
sources.
It's a method that wants to
uncover the intention of the
person or the persons who
produced the biblical text in
roughly the shape that we have
it,
and what was intended by their
producing it in the shape that
we have.
So redaction criticism proceeds
along these lines and this is
how it first developed.
 
First you can usually identify
linking passages,
that is to say passages that
kind of join narrative to
narrative or unit to unit,
in an attempt to make the text
read more smoothly or just to
ease the transition from one
source to another.
 
And these linking passages are
assigned to R for redactor.
Also assigned to R are any
interpretative passages.
That means passages that stand
back to comment on the text or
interpret the text in some way.
 
Any place where the narrator
turns to directly address the
audience.
So for example,
when you have a verse in which
the narrator turns and says,
"That was when the Canaanites
were still in the land,"
that would seem to be from the
hand of a redactor putting the
sources together.
 
When you have an etiological
comment, that is to say a
comment of the type,
"And that is why the Israelites
do such and such ritual
observance to this day,"
that also seems to be written
from the perspective of a
compiler of sources,
someone who's putting the text
together.
There are also some passages
that vindicate or justify or
otherwise comment on what's
about to occur,
or passages that summarize and
offer an interpretation or
justification of what has just
happened.
We'll see that in 2 Kings 17;
we also saw that in the Book of
Judges.
We had this prospective summary
saying: this is what's going to
happen--there's going to be sin,
they're going to cry out,
there'll be,
you know, God will raise up
someone,
they'll deliver them and then
they're going to fall back into
sin again.
So these are comments that are
looking forward to tell us what
it is we're about to read and if
you join all such passages
together and assign them to R
you very often find that there
are tremendous stylistic
similarities in these passages.
They use the same rhetoric over
and over again or you'll see the
same point of view and it's very
often a point of view that isn't
in the source materials that
they're linking together.
And this is how one arrives at
some understanding of the role
of the redactor in the final
production of the text,
how the redactor has framed our
understanding of the source
materials that he has gathered.
 
And the Deuteronomistic
historian who is responsible for
the redaction of Deuteronomy,
Joshua, Judges and so,
1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2
Kings, provides not just a
history in the sense of
documenting events as they occur
(as if there's ever
documentation without
interpretation) but provides a
strong interpretation of
history,
a philosophy of history.
He's trying to ascertain the
meaning of events,
the larger purpose and design,
something we've called a
historiosophy.
And we find the Deuteronomists'
interpretation of Israel's
history in the preface to the
Book of Deuteronomy,
we find it in editorial
comments that are sort of
peppered throughout Joshua
through Kings,
and we especially find it in
the summary of the entire unit
that is contained in 2 Kings 17.
Before we read that passage we
need to think about what it was
that prompted the Deuteronomist
to adopt a particular
interpretation of Israel's
historical record.
The Deuteronomistic historian
was attempting to respond to the
first major historical challenge
to confront the Israelite people
and the Hebrew religion.
 
And that was the complete
collapse of the Israelite
nation, the destruction of God's
sanctuary,
and the defeat and exile of the
people of the Lord and God of
history.
The calamitous events of 722,
but especially 587,
raised a critical theological
dilemma.
God had promised the patriarchs
and their descendants that they
would live in His land.
He had promised that the house
of David would stand forever but
here the monarchy had collapsed,
the people were defeated and
they were in exile.
 
So the challenge presented by
this twist of history was really
twofold: Is God the god of
history,
is he omnipotent,
is he capable of all,
can he in fact impose and
effect His will,
and if so then what about his
covenant with the patriarchs and
his covenant with David?
 
Had he faithlessly abandoned it?
 
Well, that was unthinkable.
 
Then if he hadn't faithlessly
abandoned his covenant with his
people and with David,
he must not be the god of
history, the universal lord of
all.
He wasn't able to save his
people.
Neither of these ideas was
acceptable to the
Deuteronomistic school.
 
It was a fundamental tenet of
Israelite monotheism that God is
at once the god of history,
capable of all,
whose will is absolute,
whose promises are true and at
the same time a god of
faithfulness who does not
abandon his people,
he is both good and powerful.
So how could the disasters of
722 and 586 be reconciled with
the conviction that God
controlled history and that He
had an eternal covenant with the
patriarchs and with David?
The historiosophy of the
Deuteronomistic school is the
response of one segment of the
Israelite community,
we'll see another response when
we turn to the Prophets,
but the basic idea of the
Deuteronomistic School is that
God's unconditional and eternal
covenants with the patriarchs
and with David do not preclude
the possibility of punishment or
chastisement for sin as
specified in the conditional
Mosaic covenant.
So you see how both ideas are
going to be important to hold in
dialectic tension:
both theologies,
the covenant theology as well
as the patriarchal and royal
theology.
So this is because although God
is omnipotent,
humans do have free will,
they can corrupt the divine
plan.
So in the Deuteronomistic
history the leaders of Israel
are depicted as having the
choice of accepting God's way or
rejecting it.
God tries to help them.
 
He's constantly sending them
prophets who yell at the kings
and tell them what it is God
wants of them,
but they continue to make the
wrong choice.
They sin and ultimately that
brings about the fall,
first of Israel and then of
Judah and it's the idolatrous
sins of the kings that does it.
 
With the deposition and the
execution of the last Davidic
king, Zedekiah,
the Deuteronomistic school
reinterpreted the Davidic
Covenant in conditional terms on
the model of the Sinaitic
Covenant,
the Mosaic Covenant,
according to which God's favor
toward the king depends on the
king's loyalty to God,
and in this way the fall of the
house of David could be seen as
justifiable punishment for
disobedient kings or rulers like
Manasseh.
(We'll come back to him.)
Remember the Davidic Covenant
that Nathan proclaimed in 2
Samuel 7 explicitly said that
God would punish and chastise
his anointed.
That's what it means to be a
son, to receive correction,
discipline and punishment.
I'll have to finish this these
thoughts on Monday and see
specifically how they interpret
and understand the history of
what happened in a way that
enabled certain segments of the
population to see this as in
fact proof of God's strength and
faithfulness.
And then we'll turn to prophecy
on Monday.
 
