spin

Sorry, if I gave that impression. I didn't mean to shoot the messenger.

Y(WR is still unexplainable and that it is given as qere doesn't necessarily mean that it was a later attempt at clarification, but that it could well have been a minority reading of even longer standing. Its explanatory force simply isn't there, so I prefer to see it as a lectio difficilior to be dealt with.


spin

andrewcriddle

David Aune wrote a book Kings without Privilege (or via: amazon.co.uk) arguing that Samuel-Kings and Chronicles both go back to a common source with much of the material in Samuel but not 1 Chronicles being an addition to this common source by the author of Samuel-Kings rather than an omission by the Chronicler.

Andrew Criddle

John Kesler

Could the Chronicler's use of these names be because ba'al had come back into favor as an epithet for Yahweh by the time the Chronicler wrote? I don't know that that's the case, I'm just asking if we have any evidence one way or the other.

spin

Wouldn't that suggest a source which had the Ba'al theophoric? I can't see how a writer would reinsert it ad hoc.


spin

Ben C Smith

Hi, spin. Thanks for taking the time to go into it.

One thing that has pestered me for some time is how Samuel and Kings fail to show centralized worship. They seem to require it, but the stories they tell have prophets and kings sacrificing almost wherever they see fit. By the time we reach NT times, at the very latest, sacrifices seem irretrievably limited to the temple. Would this, in your judgment, help us place the writing of this work in time?

Also, do you think it makes any difference that Kings made it into the prophetic books while Chronicles got placed amongst the writings? I have often read that Daniel, which we like to think of as a prophetic book (and see Matthew 24.15), got lumped in with the writings instead because the prophetic books were already seen as somewhat closed by Maccabean times, while the writings were still open, as it were. If you place the closing (so to speak) of the prophetic section later than Maccabean times, how do you account for Daniel?

Ben.

spin

Probably not to your satisfaction, but the notion of stabilizing the cultus is an important one for Kings. How often did a king do right by putting away temple prostitutes or doing away with the high places or sundry other good cultic acts for someone else to come along and mess it all up again? We really have to wait until the time of Josiah to get it right right. In fact, the writer supplies a prophecy that Josiah was the guy in 1 Kgs 13:2 who would do it right.

Notwithstanding, de Vaux (Ancient Israel, 1961/1994, p.285) tells us that there was a high place in operation at Malhah, which is now within Jerusalem (I think there's a large shopping mall there), in the seventh and sixth centuries, yet Josiah, we are told in 2 Kgs 23, took permanent steps to eradicate high places and various other cultic problems to the centralized Jerusalemite religion. Malhah is a bit too close to home just at the wrong time to take the story of Josiah simply.

It was of course John Hyrcanus who centralized the Jewish cult at Jerusalem, destroying Samaria and thus putting an end to the opposition Jewish temple on Gerizim (2 Macc 6:2 confirms the Jewish nature of Gerizim). The Hasmoneans naturally had an interest in centralizing the cultus under their control, being both rulers and high priests, and a centralized cultus put all Jews under the control of Jerusalem. John Hyrcanus merely emulated the acts of his royal forerunner and his religious reform that centralized the religion in Jerusalem. In so doing he ended a conflict that had been going on for perhaps 200 years when "breakaway" priests went off and "set up" a new temple in Samaria.

None of this means that a lot of the material in Kings is not ancient.

The placement is a little strange to me, but then so is the notion of Kings being in the prophets. And Samuel is there only because of the fact that it was thought to have been written by the prophet? There is a general problem of categorization of the historical books with Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah along with Chronicles in the writings. This perhaps suggests that the use of the three categories is artificial and to my mind perhaps a leftover from an earlier era, when the three categories were more meaningful, ie the histories weren't even considered and thus didn't stretch the categories. When earlier writers talked of the law, the prophets and the writings (or David), they had a more literal understanding.

But still why Sam/Kgs is in the prophets and not in the writings is not transparent. That for me is more interesting than why Chronicles is in the writings. Wouldn't it be more coherent?

I think Daniel is seen as prophetic in the same way as the main stream prophets only by christians. Daniel isn't typical of approach or methodology as the prophets but belongs to a later genre reflected in Esther and Tobit of diaspora type literature, the Jew who makes good in a foreign context -- one might include the Joseph novella and the apocryphal Moses stuff where he is a successful general in the Egyptian army.


spin

Gamera

As I said, exegesis is a particular type of textual analysis, but I see you don't understand the term. Read some Augustine, Gregory, Origen, and get back with us.

spin

Oh, so you'll redefine the term so that it excludes prior exegesis. If you can't get where you want by argument, you'll do it ad hoc through excluding what doesn't interest you.