Celsus

After the exile yes, but Hasmonean? Where does that leave Chronicles? After Jesus?

Joel

spin

Well, can you give me a better contextualisation? Would priests write and maintain it? At least the last part of Kings was written after the exile (again, by whom?). Why does Josiah seem like John Hyrcanus (or vice versa)?

Smile as you wish, but it was probably the last book finished!

It got a fragment 9:3ff which was also used when Nehemiah was compiled from earlier works (see 11:4ff). Josephus knew only the Nehemiah Memorandum and a book of Ezra which included Neh 8 at its end (as seen in the Greek 1 Esdras). Nehemiah reached its final form after the time of Josephus, using material also incorporated in Chronicles, so Chronicles was probably from a similar time, as the material was not recognized as "canonical" at the time.

And numerous other pointers indicate that Chronicles is very late (eg, it alone in the HB uses Satan as a name).

Apikorus

Josiah also seems like Moses. What correspondences are you pushing between Josiah and John Hyrcanus?

Cross argued decades ago for a double redaction of the Deuteronomistic History. Certainly the end of the story is post-exilic. Given how badly Daniel mangles Persian period history, I'm a bit skeptical on the claim that Kings is also of Hasmonean provenance.

spin

How about a king the pulling down of the high places and then destroying Samaria?

With that much agreed, what makes you think that any of it was written before the exile? How do you think the people were taken off to exile? Were they allowed to take their five favourite books? When do you really think Hebrew became a literary language? Was the court of Jerusalem during or after the reign of Hezekiah able to support a scribal school for literature?

How much Judean history was there to mangle? OK, we've definitely got from Hezekiah to Zedekiah and we know who Hezekiah's father was. What else have we got that we can safely call historical in some sense?

Kings, if Hasmonean, was written with the auspices of the same powers that caused 1 Maccabees to be written. This was a court situation with Greek learning. Daniel was written sixty years earlier in a difficult time for edification, not history.


spin

Apikorus

Inasmuch as extirpation of aberrant ritual and war against neighboring regions were hardly uncommon, this strikes me as a rather weak parallel. If Josiah is a refracted image of Hyrcanus, where's the fact that the Hasmoneans unified priesthood and kingship in 2 Kgs?

I hardly think it tenable to presume that Judah emerged ex-nihilo at the time of Hezekiah. Kings recounts the parallel history of both Israel and Judah, and for Israel we have a fair amount of extrabiblical evidence, going all the way back to Omri (9th c. BCE). Assyrian records from Shalmaneser III, Adad-Nirari III, Tiglath-Pileser III, et al. refer to various rulers and battles mentioned in Kings.

First of all, I doubt that Daniel was written by a single author. I presume that much of Dan 1-6 was early Hellenistic (ca. 300 BCE), while Dan 8-12 is clearly Hasmonean. (Dan 7 is complicated.) At any rate, I'm fine with the author of 1 Maccabees getting the Hasmonean history right. I'm quite skeptical that another author in that period would have managed to get all the synchronisms between Kings and the Assyrian annals right.

All good questions, of course. We do have documents such as the Ammonite Deir 'Alla inscription, which is a poem about Balaam bar Beor (also mentioned in Num 22-24), dated to ca. 700 BCE. This doesn't directly bear on Judaean scribal traditions, but it does suggest that literary activity was present even in minor kingdoms. I presume that the Babylonians valued those things upon which the Judaeans placed value, and carted off records and books along with the upper class of Judaean society.

Doctor X

Wow! Interesting stuff!

I will just delurk to address this:

In Chronicles he is a figure that acts independently:

This is the Chronicler's way to "soften" the problem of YHWH ordering David to do something so he can be punished for it--he introduces our "stumbling block" as an independent agent. Someone can argue that he only acts at the behest of YHWH, but that is not in the text. In Job he is clearly an agent or subordinant--at best equal, though I think that a stretch--to YHWH.

With Zech:

here he is also subordinant to YHWH--he accuses and YHWH tells him to stick it.

Good discussion gang!

--J.D.

Apikorus

That Satan acts independently in Chronicles does suggest that the text is later than, say Job 2, the provenance of which is itself debated. I presume that ha-satan transmogrified into Satan sometime after Judaism's encounter with Zoroastrian dualism. In and of itself, this suggests a 5th c. BCE terminus post quem. To push it down to the Hasmonean era will require significantly more.

Doctor X

It has been a long time since I visited the dating of Chronicles, so I really do not know . . . certainly the characterization of Satan is late and the Chronicler "apologizes" for David and Solomon in comparison to one of his sources, Kings-Samuel.

However, he only uses Satan as an "excuse" once--he does not have Old Scratch wandering about "tempting" various kings to error. This makes me wonder how "solid" the idea of an independent adversary was at the time of the Chronicler.

Of course, "what" the Chronicler(s) believed may not have been what "da people" believed! Nevertheless, since other texts do not refer much to Satan at all--other than the passage quoted above--I have to wonder.

--J.D.

Celsus

This thread is split from Rain/vapour in Genesis (from Defending Genesis thread). Discuss the date of the book of Kings here, not how to get a royal dinner.

Joel

spin

Hardly, in the context of a destruction of Samaria by the Judean king. John Hyrcanus's action was clear: he was carving out a kingdom and justifying his actions by showing a book saying this is what has already happened. This seems parallel to a supporter of Simon the Just building a wall around the temple, producing a book about Nehemiah having already done it for Jerusalem. Or the hardship of the return from Babylon with that of a return from Egypt....

David is the combination of the two roles.

Given that Jerusalem was a tiny state until Hezekiah's time and that Lachish was a much bigger city, and almost certainly the bigger the city the more important it was in ancient times, suggests that Jerusalem didn't reach back very far before Hezekiah's time at all.

I have no doubts about the basics of the kingdom of Israel. We don't actually have too much historical material about it though in Kings, mainly formal literary structures and the odd recollections. There is almost nothing about Omri in the biblical account, yet we have the idea from the side views in the Assyrian literature of someone with greater stature, the founder of a house.

I'm not sure that Daniel was written by a single author either. The statue made of different metals, with the legs representing the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires, was clearly well into the third century BCE, which is sufficiently before Dan 7-12.

The only problem for Dan 7 is when the text was translated into Aramaic. Chapter 7 has strong affinity with the rest of the second half, clearly referring to the Seleucid elephant as the fourth beast and its little horn as Antiochus IV, the central figure of most of the rest of the work.

Although there are prayers at Ebla (MB1) there is nothing that one could really call literature, a few treaties, and almost nothing else. Lots of accounts and transactions.

Why would you think that? The idea of translocation was to sever a people from its context, so as to be more inclined to do the bidding of the translocators.


spin