第十四講。申命記的歷史。對災難的反應(王上和王下) (Lecture 14. The Deuteronomistic History: Response to Catastrophe (1 and 2 Kings))

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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.