1:1-2:5 Introduction. Efforts at occupation and settlement in Canaan by separate and isolated tribes, with emphasis on the successes of Simeon, Judah and the house of Joseph.

2:6-16:31 The work of the judges. A collection of narratives originating for the most part independently of one another among tribal groups in Canaan later embraced in Israelite monarchy - a collection wrought and edited by DH (Deuteronomic historians responsible for the substantial present form of Deuteronomy-Kings).

17:1- 21:25 An appendix of assorted components.

The process by which any record and memory of the past is preserved inevitably involves some screening of the past. This is especially true of history that is predominantly maintained cultically, when past event is the occasion for present praise of God and the celebration of his role in the life of a people. The basic cultic formula, Out of Egypt, into this land, unquestionably rests upon past events, but it is a past marvelously screened and filtered.

Now it is the genius of ancient Israel that she knew this. We have already noted in the stories of her fathers (the patriarchs) and her founder (Moses) the irrepressible quality of realism which frustrates all efforts to describe existence - any existence - in ideal terms. In her joyous cultic celebrations she rehearsed the fundamental theological scheme of Yahweh's initiating Word, Israel's response of faith, and the resultant redemption from slavery into freedom; but at the same time she knew (and found herself compelled to record) that the Word is fulfilled always with characteristic imprecision, and in tension and anguish. She insists at once on the truth of the theological scheme and on what she also knows to be the facts of existence. Such is the testimony of the Joshua-Judges record.

We could call the theological scheme the cult-myth if the term were not so easily misunderstood. The cult-myth is the true theological essence of the event. It is what faith decrees to be the essential structure and meaning of the event. The myth, then, is historicized, that is, its true essence is clothed with a story which purports to make history of theology. In this case, the account of Canaan's acquisition as told, for the most part, in Joshua represents the historicizing of the cultic confession. Yahweh gave the land. It was the conquest of the people under Joshua, total, complete, easy, and sometimes, as at Jericho, Josh. 6, wrought not at all by force of arms but hy potent formula revealed by Yahweh.

So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb [the land stretching south of Canaan into the reaches of the desert] and the low-land and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as Yahweh God of Israel commanded. And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen [an unidentified but obviously Palestinian, not Egyptian Goshen], as far as Gibeon. And Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because Yahweh God of Israel fought for Israel. (Josh. 10:40-42)

In another conspicuous feature, the story confesses its adaptation to the two-member theological scheme, Out of Egypt, into this land. The two members of the faith-formula take on a striking parallelism: the Joshua-Canaan epoch is seen as a kind of antiphonal response to Moses-Egypt.

1.Spies dispatched:
especially to the Jericho area. Josh. 2.
to the Hebron area in the south. Num. 13:22 ff.

2.The dry crossing:
"All Israel went into the midst of the [river] on dry ground." Josh. 3:14 ff.
""Israel crossed the sea on dry ground." Ex. 14: 21ff.

3.Circumcision:
Ex. 4:24-26; [of Moses' son] cf. 12:48 "No uncircumcised shall eat of it."
"Circumcise the people of Israel again the second time." Josh. 5:2 ff.

4.Passover: Ex. 12 Josh. 5:10 ff.

5.Commission:
"Put off your shoes. . ." Ex. 3:lff.
"Put off your shoes. . ." Josh. 5:15.

6.The potent gesture:
Moses held up his hand against Amelek. Ex. 17:8 ff.
"Stretch out the javelin that is in your hand . . ." against Ai. Josh. 8:18ff.

7.Law-giving:
at Mount Sinai "Moses wrote all the words of Yahweh." [Ex. 24]
At Mount Ebal (Shechem) Joshua "wrote upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written." Josh. 8: 32.

8.Cities of refuge:
anticipated by Moses. Num. 35:9 ff.
Appointed and named by Joshua. Josh. 20.

9.Covenant-making:
at Sinai, at Shechem, "all that Yahweh has spoken we will do." Ex. 24.
"Yahweh our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey." Josh. 24.

To a considerable extent, the book of Joshua historicizes the first and fundamental proposition of Israel's faith: Yahweh brought us out of Egypt and gave us this land. It is theology which determines the major theme. But we also observe that etiology has been freely employed, here as in Genesis, to voice and define the theological meaning of names and events which figure prominently in the "history," for example, circumcision and Gilgal, 5:8 f., and Achan and the Valley of Achor, chapter 8.

In view of all this, it is impossible to reconstruct any firm, full outlines of the concrete structure of events. Nor is archaeology as helpful here as some of the popularizing archaeologists would have us think. The most recent and competent spade work at the site of ancient Jericho returns the verdict that no trace of Israelite violence in the thirteenth century is to be found. Ancient Gilgal may have been located - the identification is not yet certain - but yields nothing significant on the period of Israel's early occupation. Excavations at Ai indicate that the city was already in Joshua's day a long-dead ruin (the attack of the invaders may well have been upon nearby Bethel); Ai, meaning "ruin," may easily have become the object of attack in the story as it circulated in later generations. Shechem is another matter, of course; but here light is cast chiefly on the times both prior and subsequent to the first entrance of the Joshua group.²

Of course, it is not impossible that an initial, decisive conquest of Canaan under Joshua was effected and the gains largely lost in the generation following his death.³ But the present book of Joshua warns strongly against its own idealizing tendencies (see, for example, 15:63; 16:10; 17:11-13) and records a notable instance of accommodation (with the Gibeonites, ch. 9). The book of Judges reflects a process of occupation, settlement, and accommodation stretching over a number of generations involving numerous mutually independent tribes and resulting ultimately in the amalgamation of Canaanite and "Israelite" into the people of Israel, under covenant to Yahweh. We do not mean to suggest that the process was always without violence: conquest of sorts there surely was, but it was largely localized, involving skirmishes between older and more recent settlers of the land.

The Joshua group (or the Benjamin-Joseph-Ephraimite tribes;⁴ and was it also, earlier, the Moses group or have we two originally separate, but now collated, traditions?) occupied a territory in the sparsely settled central hill country of Canaan bounded on the cast by the Jordan, on the west by the coastal plains, and on the north and south by strong Canaanite city-states. In the small scattered settlements of this area the inhabitants were distantly or more closely related to the occupying Israelites. They were descendants of Amorite settlers who had moved into Canaan from the fringes of outlying deserts some six to eight centuries earlier; or indeed, some of these may well have come out of tribes originally closely related to the group which went into Egypt and now, some centuries later, made its return to the land.

There is some suggestion that perhaps Simeon (Judg. 1:1-3), with the Kenites (Judg. 1:16), the Calebites (Judg. 1:12-20; Josh. 14:13), and perhaps as a separate but closely related tribe, or clan, the Othnielites (Judg. 1:12-15) occupied the southern hill country of Canaan to the south of the powerful Canaanite fortress-city of Jerusalem earlier and independently of the occupation of central Canaan by Yahweh-worshipers of the tribes of Judah.

This thesis is supported by the narrative of Genesis 38 (the story of Judah and Tamar) which strongly suggests Judah's early and permanent occupancy in this area, as well as by the presupposition of some of Israel's earliest beginnings - and even before (Gen. 4:26).

North of the plain of Esdraelon and its defensive chain of strong cities - Megiddo, Taanach, Ibleam, Beth-shan (see Judg. 1:27) - the "conquest" was again an originally separate story involving tribes having no historical association with other tribes ultimately involved in the entity "Israel" until the campaign of Deborah, Judges 4-5. Thus, the entity Israel, formed out of a process of tribal confederation leading to monarchy, has a highly complex, heterogeneous prehistory now understandably simplified and idealized. The ultimate unity of the twelve tribes is imposed upon traditions relating originally to the separate tribes; and most strikingly, the Yahweh-faith which dominates confederation and monarchy appears to have been historically the moving, cohesive quality in the long process.

"Judge" is a poor term but since we cannot change it, we must understand that it is not merely an ancient counterpart of our judge. The judge in Israel's tradition is a charismatic (from Greek charisma meaning gift, endowment) tribal leader usually responsible for the achievement of at least a temporary respite from harassment or subjugation at the hands of a nearby enemy. In the Old Testament the word shpht, "to judge," and its derivatives are not exclusively juridical terms nor do they necessarily connote negative action.

"Judging" is the total task in varied capacities of setting right the wrong and reordering the disordered. As a "history" wrought by the deuteronomic historians, the Book of Judges is obviously and rigidly under theological control. Israel's peaceful, ordered existence in the land promised and given by Yahweh is continually frustrated by Israel's defiance of the giver. The promised life of fulfillment in the land becomes a life of abysmal unfulfillment, an anarchistic existence, because Yahweh is ignored. "You have not given heed to my voice" (Judg. 6:10).

The deuteronomic historians - we will use the symbol DH for them - set all of this in a four-member formula by which the individual stories of the judges are introduced and linked to one another. The formula appears in full for the first time in 3:7 ff. It envisages the long epoch of tribal occupation-settlement-confederation as revolving in the cycle of apostasy, punishment, penitence and finally, through the instrument of the charismatic judge, the restoration of peace. Israel forgot Yahweh who in anger "sold" her into subjection to an alien power; Israel came back in penitence to Yahweh who then effected salvation through the judge.

DH has employed tribal stories from all over Canaan without regard for sequence, if, indeed, the sequence was known to DH; and while we do not presume to reconstruct from this a history of Canaan in the twelfth and eleventh centuries, we nevertheless gratefully acknowledge DH's contribution to our understanding of the character of a period which was, for whatever reasons, predominantly an anarchy. And I, at least, must further acknowledge what appears to me to be beyond dispute; that in an internal sense, DH is right; in the Canaanite setting, the Yahweh-worshiping tribe, whether alone or in confederation, achieved order and fulfillment and maintained meaningful entity and self-respect only in the force of its Yahweh-faith.

DH no doubt aimed to include twelve judges, one for (but not from) each of the tribes, although with Deborah and Abimelech (neither is called a judge) there are fourteen. The most important figures are Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson.

The Othniel "judgeship" (3:7-11) has often been regarded as spurious. We doubt the historicity of several figures: Shamgar "who killed six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad" (3:31, and created out of whole cloth from the reference in 5:6); Jair who "had thirty sons who rode on thirty asses; and they had thirty cities" (10:4); Ibzan who "had thirty sons; and thirty daughters he gave in marriage outside his clan, and thirty daughters he brought in from outside for his sons" (broadminded, anyway; 12:8); Abdon who went old Jair one better gifted in the old game of upmanship: he had "forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy asses" (12: 14). Is Othniel no more substantial than these, or Tola (10:1) of whom not even an anecdote is told (except perhaps that he is the son of Puah, the son of Dodo), or Elon, who simply judged, died, and was buried (12:11-12)? In Othniel's case, the brief narrative consists almost entirely of the DH formula; and we know nothing else of a Syrian (Aram) king named Cushanrishathaim (the name is etymologically suspect). Othniel is a tribal designation, certainly; but is the episode of judges 1:11-15, in which Othniel figures ostensibly as an individual, anything other than a tribal encounter, reduced and idealized in terms of personal relationships? Such skepticism may be justified, yet we find ourselves wondering whether DH has not in fact preserved here the very ancient but real encounter of free-ranging Syrian forces with the Yahweh-tribes (notably the Othnielites) inhabiting southern Canaan in the general area south of Hebron.

The story of Ehud's dispatch of Eglon, king of Moab, is one of antiquity's finest examples of graphic, brilliant prose description (3:15-30). Traces of its composite construction still show (vv. 19 and 20, e.g., appear to be duplicates) but its impact on the reader is unified and powerful and its disclosure of the life of Canaan in the twelfth century bold, true, and uninhibited.

The Song of Deborah (Judg. 5) is in every respect the finest treasure preserved in the book of Judges. Without significant dissent scholars have long regarded it not only as the oldest extant poem of any considerable length in the Old Testament, but also as the work of, if not an eye-witness, then one who was nevertheless close to the event and intimately informed about it. It is one of the world's great literary documents. But it is also of incomparable historical value. From no other single narrative of such antiquity do we learn so much of the tribes of Israel in the twelfth century. The Song records what must have been the first significant effort at a confederation of the tribes of Israel against a Canaanite alliance.

The prose account of the same event (Judg. 4) lacks the vigorous authenticity of the poem and is certainly a considerably later creation. Estimates of the poem's age differ but we are surely not far wrong if we take the round number of 1100 B.C. We note several matters of the utmost significance. If the words Yahweh and Israel are not later interpolations (that is, insertions by later editors), which seems hardly tenable, then there already existed a conceptual, ideological (if not a formal political) Yahweh-worshiping entity known as Israel. This entity consists already not only of the six tribes which "offered themselves willingly" (5:2,9) but also - since their failure to join Deborah is implicitly deemed to be a breach of integrity - four tribes which are specifically rebuked (and in such exquisitely poetic language, vv. 15b-17).

Certainly by the turn of the first full century of occupation by the central tribes of Benjamin, Ephraim, and Joseph/Manasseh (whatever the length of occupation of related or subsequently confederated tribes north and south), a confederation of ten tribes at least is already in existence, embracing roughly the full territory of later monarchic Israel on both sides of the Jordan, but exclusive of the area south of Jerusalem (still a Canaanite stronghold) later identified as the land of Judah.

We note further the Song's recollection of Yahweh's especially potent self-disclosure in the Kadesh area and of Sinai's location there (vv. 4-5). We commend the poet's consummately sensitive powers of identification with participating leaders and people; with recalcitrant as well as with responding tribes; with the whole natural environment of the event, poetically clothed with vital purpose and depicted as a glorious participant (vv. 20-21); in some sense with the enemy, Sisera himself; and of course profoundly, if also with conscious irony, with Sisera's mother.

Most notable is the role of Yahweh in the Song. As emphatically as in the story of the exodus event, or any other comparable Old Testament event, the Song is created in praise of Yahweh, as a confessional recitation on the theme of his living impingement on history. This is another in his series of performances on behalf of a people in quest of a land. It is composed, so it would seem, in the immediate excitement and heat of the encounter between Israelite and Canaanite. In the flush of an astonishing victory, the winner exuberantly calls down a fate like Sisera's on all Yahweh's enemies. But it is more than simply a song of victory, for here, as always. it acknowledges the faith that this is Yahweh's world, history, and people, and that victory is meaningful only in terms of Yahweh's purpose.

^{So perish all your enemies, O Lord!
But your friends be like the sun as he rises in his night. (v.31)}

Although from Israel's point of view this was nor a time of unrelieved anarchy, during these years of occupation, settlement, skirmish, and consolidation respite from severe harassment was at best intermittent. In awareness of this and hard-put to rationalize a "gift" of Yahweh so agonizingly achieved, DH finds Israel's prevailing unfaith (not only now but in the subsequent monarchic period as well) the cause of the persistence of disorder and chaos in an existence which Yahweh would bless with meaning and fulfillment of life if only Israel would appropriately respond.

The DH formula in Judges repeatedly takes the form of what appears to be an almost crude religious superstition: When Israel did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh, he gave them into the hand of Aram or Moab or Sisera or Midian (Gideon: 6-8) or Ammon (Jephthah: 11-12), or the Philistines (Samson: 13-16). But this is nothing more nor less than the faith of DH that Israel is a covenant people, that to violate the covenant is to make chaos of the life of the people and that to keep the covenant is to fulfill Israel's creation in order and meaning.

The life of faith in any time and in any variety of acknowledged covenant-existence under God finds itself perennially confronted by the essence of DH's formula. In its unceasing tension with the varied and eminently rational claims of positivism, causality, and aggressive agnosticism. the life of faith must always not merely confront, but confront with decision, the fundamental proposition of the deuteronomic (and on the whole, biblical) faith that human life, the gift of God, is meaningfully fulfilled only in acknowledgment of the reign of God in history and in a relationship of response to him.

In a sense, the book of Ruth and the latter portions of Judges point toward the monarchy, which would both unify and divide the Israelite nation

Whatever the relationship of the little book of Ruth to the actual life and history of ancient Israel it stands as a superb example of classical Hebrew prose narrative and as an inspired editorial stroke. In the midst of the brutal, violent chaos of premonarchic Canaan, it brings a moment of warm relief.

Ruth is a Moabite woman whose sojourning Israelite husband dies in Moab. She returns with her mother-in-law to Bethlehem in Judah, and there wins love and marriage with Boaz, a kinsman of her deceased husband. With the almost certain exception of 4:18-22 and the possible, even probable, exception of 4:7, the story is a unit, a skillfully and beautifully told tale.

As an artistic creation, Ruth is commonly ranked with the greatest short stories in the literature of the world. Composed around that shamelessly abused theme of they-lived-happily-ever-after, it is the genius of the tale that it successfully avoids what even then must have been the prevailing prostitution of the theme in banal sentimentality. The story of Ruth exploits some of the noblest qualities of human character - tenderness, loyalty, compassion, love - without anywhere sounding noble, without anywhere becoming cloying. And as is true of all classical Hebrew prose, it is a narrative spun with consummately skillful economy and simplicity.

Read aloud now the first seventeen verses of the story. This is as it should be rendered, since it was created (whether originally in oral or written form) for the ear rather than the eye, to be heard rather than read. The familiar lines of verses 16-17 are abused in their appropriation to the category of erotic love in popular song or cheap fiction: these are lines all the more magnificent in conveying the love of a younger for an older woman, a Moabite daughter for an Israelite mother!

The book of Ruth presents two problems. What is the date of its composition and what is its purpose? Not uncommonly a late date, the fifth century, has been argued on the grounds, in part, that in the Hebrew canon, Ruth takes its place in the third and latest collection of writings finally incorporated. The story of the canon cannot be precisely reconstructed, but the three divisions, Law, Prophets, and Writings, did come in that chronological order to the status of canonical, holy scripture between about 400 B.C. and the decisive Council of Jamnia, about A.D. 90.⁵

The present Hebrew canon looks like this:

I. Law, [Torah]: Genesis to Deuteronomy.

II. Prophets, [nebi'im]:

A. Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, I and 11 Kings, counted as four books.
B. Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and, reckoned as one book, the Book of the Twelve, Hosea-Malachi in RSV. These four, with the four former prophets, total eight books in the prophetic Canon.

III. Writings, [ketubim]: I and II Chronicles (one book), Ezra-Nehemiah (one book), Esther, job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Daniel, and Ruth - a total of eleven books.

Now, it might be assumed that a relatively late date for the book of Ruth is supported by this division, since, admittedly, the Writings by and large are, in their present form, relatively late. As a matter of fact, however, the original Hebrew Canon comprised not, as above, twenty-four books, but only twenty-two books (this is the count given by the Jewish historian, Josephus, in the first century A.D.). Ruth was then a part of Judges, and Lamentations was attached as one book to Jeremiah. And we suspect that the argument from canon to date would in any case be indecisive, since there is late and relatively early material in all three divisions.

We doubt, then, that the story is postexilic. A number of distinguished scholars of the Hebrew language have insisted that on the grounds of style, vocabulary, and the form and syntax of the language, it cannot be dated later than the ninth-seventh centuries. In its present form, of course, it can hardly be dated earlier than the tenth century, since it envisages a measure of order in Canaan as well as cordial Moabite-Israelite relationships which were hardly possible before the time of David. And we suspect, too, that it is more in the nature of fiction than history (observe the typological meaning of the names: Mahlon, "sickness"; Chilion, "wasting"; Orpah "stiff-necked"; Naomi, "my sweetness"; and Ruth, a shortened form of a word meaning "companion ).

Indeed (to turn to the second question) it has been proposed that the story of Ruth came into existence chiefly as a genealogical narrative - to preserve or comment upon the ancestry of King David: Ruth is David's great-grandmother (4:17; it is the fuller genealogical table of 4:18-22 that appears alien and secondary to the original story). The story then is hardly earlier than the tenth century age of David-Solomon.

On the question of date one can say little more than this. The postexilic daters have claimed support in the fact that the ritual of the shoe (4:8) is at odds with the prescription in Deuteronomic law (Deut. 23:3), a fact recognized and commented upon apologetically in the preceding verse 4:7. But that, we suspect, is a postexilic comment added to the story. The custom recounted in the performance of levirate marriage in Ruth 4:8 (by which the brother or the next closest male kin takes the wife of the deceased relative) is, we should judge, considerably earlier than Deuteronomy.

As to the story's purpose, we are confident that it is not (as some remarkably allege) a subtle piece of fiction describing in fact the practice of a Bethlehem fertility cult. Ruth is a lesson in tolerance, but we doubt that it was first created in response to the crusading spirit of the Israelite Society for Moabite Friendship. Nor could it have been produced simply to make concrete some rumor of David's more distant Moabite blood. And we even doubt that the early support and elucidation of levirate marriage was its purpose, although if specific motivation must be assigned, this presents perhaps the strongest claim. We tend to concur in the wise comment that "if the author had an ulterior motive, he concealed it more successfully than is common to story-tellers who write with a purpose"; and, from another source, that the writer "set out to tell an interesting tale of long ago, and he carried out his purpose with notable success."

Gideon [6-8]

Gideon's activities (6-8) center in Ophrah, a site unknown to us, but evidently near Shechem (see 9:1 ff.). His tribe is Manasseh and his problem is that of the age-old incursions into central Canaan of seminomadic Bedouin raiders (6: 3, "Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East ). The story may well be composite, as witness the two names, Gideon and Jerubaal, and occasional duplicates such as 8:1-3 and 8:4-9. It is nevertheless an exciting and instructive episode in the life of one of the tribes soon to become a part of the nation Israel. Gideon is a charismatic figure, endowed with the spirit of Yahweh. He moves first against the apostate worship of Baal within his own immediate community. By clever stratagem he routs the Midianite enemy with the meager forces of his own clan, Abiezer, and captures and slaughters Midian's two chiefs, Zebah and Zalmunna, in the conventional act of blood-revenge to compensate and set right the loss of life inflicted by them. He takes bitter, but again no doubt conventional, revenge against the towns Succoth and Penuel for the taunting refusal of aid. He makes out of the spoils of battle an ephod, an object in the paraphernalia of a priest (not an image, as a later editor in verse 27 would have it). The ephod was sometimes an apron, but hardly here since it weighs about 65 pounds, and was employed for divining, that is, determining the will of Yahweh. He rejects the popular response to make of him a monarch in language which no doubt was subsequently put to political use (or perhaps the precise language was only then created in the story?) by the Yahweh loyalists and other dissident members of monarchic Israel who deemed the institution of king to be itself an act of apostasy against Yahweh:

^{I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you: Yahweh will rule over you! (8:23)}

Abimelech [Judg. 9]

Gideon's son, Abimelech, does not share the sentiment attributed to his father and establishes himself for a brief period as king over the city of Shechem. The story of his aggressive rise preserves the exceedingly choice and ancient Fable of the Trees, or Jotham's Fable. The Fable is probably a contemporary commentary on one man's consuming ambition played out perhaps sometime around 1100 B.C. in the central hill country of ancient Palestine.

Jair, Jephthah and the Shibboleth [Judg. 10-12]

Although the years prior to Canaan's consolidation in political monarchy cannot be reconstructed in historical detail, the stories of Judges do afford a remarkably vivid impression of the tone and character of the age, as well as insight into Israel's later interpretation of the anarchic period. Above all we have the realistic portrayal of a crude and bitter existence, but an existence given persistent light, relief, and meaning by the Yahweh-faith and the (consequent?) redeeming quality of human love. Jephthah is as rough and tough a package of male humanity as one will find anywhere, destined to act out his years in reaction to a human environment with which he always found himself at odds. Yet here he is, remembered and sung for his exploits on behalf of Israel (in Canaan's tribal confederation, however loose, one tribe's victory over a common enemy is other tribes' boon), fighting from the tribe and territory of Gilead east of the Jordan against Ammon. And here the term "shibboleth" (meaning a decisive test or snare) was coined in Jephthah's interconfederation feud with Ephraim (12:1 ff.). The most memorable and poignant feature of the Jephthah story is his tragic vow (but so thoroughly in character) and its genuinely moving sequence (whether interpreted as literal occurrence or as cult-myth). While we spontaneously react in revulsion to the theology of this kind of vow (by no means in principle a thing of the past), we must understand the character of that epoch: this is Jephthah; this is premonarchic Canaan and preprophetic Yahwism; the victory, dear to Jephthah, is only Yahweh's to give, and if he gives it, he must receive in return some commensurate sacrifice. It may seem crude and misconceived by our standards, but our standards may not be imposed on that epoch more than three thousand years ago. All of which may (or may not) justify the comment that, at its highest and purest, the sincere sacrifice was (and is, properly conceived) a rite of communion between man and God, and a satisfying means by which the creature pays his debt of gratitude and love to the creator.

The Samson stories continue to appeal to the reader who reads the Bible simply as he reads the Iliad and the Odyssey. Samson is not a "judge," since his remarkable exploits are purely personal in character. There may have been a real man back of these stories, but what we have is a well-integrated collection of highly exaggerated hero tales. Samson is ancient Israel's Hercules or Paul Bunyan. This is not to say that elements of the Samson saga are not old: the riddles especially convey that age of anarchy, reflecting the ancient delight in the riddle, rough ( out of the strong came something sweet" 14:14) and, shall we say, ready ( If you had not plowed with my heifer you would not have found out my riddle" 14:18).

From Ambrose in the fourth century A.D. to Thomas Hayne and John Milton in the seventeenth century, there have been repeated attempts to maintain a proper "biblicity" for Samson by means of allegorical interpretation. Thus, James Calfhill in 1565 made Samson's victory with the jawbone of an ass an allegorical figure of "how Christ . . . hath overthrown the adversary Power; hath by one death destroyed all the enemies of life." Henoch Clapham, confusing New Testament Galilean Nazareth with the Hebrew term nazir and the dedicated Old Testament order of Nazirite declared in 1596: "A Nazarite he was, and a figure of our Nazaret anointed." Thomas Hayne saw, among other points, the following allegory early in the seventeenth century:

And while Milton made no overt allegory in his Samson Agonistes, 1671, it is probable that he and his readers assumed this kind of allegorical reading and "that this duality was part of - perhaps the center of - the meaning which the poet intended the tragedy to have."⁶

Such allegorizing is, of course, out of the question for us; and beyond this kind of literary-allegorical pursuit of the Samson saga we are able to find nothing. We cannot even appropriate for ourselves the kind of piety which produced this weak effort at salvage: The important point in the Samson stories is Samson's radiant certainty that his strength, and his successes, were due to Yahweh, who filled him with His divine energy.⁷

We reject the sun-myth theory that Samson (Hebrew shemshon meaning "little sun ) represents the survival of an ancient sun-worshiping cult. Whatever Samson is in the stories he is because of Yahweh and not the sun; but we find nothing of a "radiant" faith, nor anything else worthy of even the earliest Yahwism in central Canaan. The stories do have some historical importance in that they betray the expanding power of the Philistines in the eleventh century. And this is surely the editorial justification for Samson's place as the last of the "judges." It was, in the final analysis, the Philistine harassment which forced upon the tribes of Israel and the rest of Canaan a change from loose tribal confederation to monarchy.

And since there is no king in Israel, it is a time when every man does what is right in his own eyes. This is the theme of these chapters (see 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, and the final verse, 21:25). In a story preserving a sizable nucleus from the purported age (chs. 17-18), the tribe of Dan migrates from the central coastal area (near the Philistines, and beyond a doubt forced out by the Philistines) to north Canaan, demonstrating en route the power of any bully to act as he would (see especially Judg. 18:21-26).

The story of Dan and the story of Gibeah and Benjamin (19-21) remind us of the kind of treasure the Old Testament is. It is the story of a people's life and no one denies that any such story, told by any people of themselves, will have its fictional aspects, its idealized accretions, its modifications of episodes and persons in the interests of pride, pretense, and piety. And the self-preserved past will always also undergo an unconscious, psychological screening. It remains nevertheless - and we know that this is repetition - one of the Old Testament's qualities of greatness that the real past is withal preserved, not always in detail, not always in sequence, and certainly not always with any external precision.

We will probably never be able to vouch for any given, specific detail of the marvelous array of stories brought together in the book of Judges. But in reading them all, we can confidently affirm that we are there, that this is the time the color, the smell, the feeling of the age. This is Israel and Yahweh when Israel was still becoming Israel and when Yahweh was not yet "the Holy One in your midst" who brought up Israel and the Philistines and the Syrians (Amos 9:7), who loved and created not only Israel but Egypt and Assyria as well (Isa. 19:25). And this is the land of Canaan before it was the land of Israel. It is the land of Canaan in anarchy, and in the story of its essential nature there is no mincing of words.

We see certain qualities which have been realistically preserved and recreated - this utterly non-euphemized story of the sojourning Levite and his concubine, the degenerate townsmen, the women's tragic fate and the unhappy mores which dictated the circumstances (cf. Gen. 19), the Levite's shockingly dramatic response, the attrition of Benjamin, and the episodes of that tribe's very meager reconstitution [was Benjamin in fact depleted by Philistine massacre over the years?].

On this sorry foundation faith was able to build the emergent prophetic Yahwism of Israel; or better, prophetic Yahwism was able to come intact through this hard moral and political debacle with resurgent power even yet beneficial to human existence.

1. Cf. Ps. 83.

2. For bibliography and a summary of the problems and answers of archaeology in this period, see John Bright, A History of Israel, Philadelphia, 1959, pp. 118ff.

3. See G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, Philadelphia, 1957, pp. 69ff. Cf. B. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1957, pp. 81 ff.

4. M. Noth argues convincingly that the basic account of Joshua 2-9 is the history of the Benjamin tribe, augmented by accounts of the related movements of Joseph and Ephraim. See his History of Israel, trans. S. Godman (from Geschichte Israels, 2nd ed.), New York, 1958, pp. 74 f., 93.

5. The best brief summary of the origin of the Old Testament canon is in German, O. Eissfeldt, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 2nd ed., Tubingen, 1956, pp. 695-707. See also A. Bentzen, Introduction to the Old Testament 2nd ed., Copenhagen, 1952, vol. I, pp. 20 ff.; N. H. Gottwald. A Light to the Nations, New York, 1959, pp. 29-36; and R. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, New York, 1958, pp. 50 ff.

6. See further M. Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition, Princeton, 1949, especially pp. 119ff.

7. Cf. W. A. L. Elmslie, How Came Our Faith, New York, 1948, p. 161.

Originally one book, and presenting a relatively poorly preserved text, the books of Samuel include:

1 Sam 1-15 The fortunes of Samuel, Eli, and the Ark; and Saul to the point of his rejection by Samuel.

1 Sam 16-2 Sam. 8 Narratives of Saul and David.

2 Sam. 9-20 Events of David's reign (with 1 Kings 1-2).

2 Sam. 21-24 An appendix - a collection of miscellaneous pieces.

We are by now familiar with the "literary" phenomena of a composite text which meet us again here, betraying both the plurality of underlying sources (we shall simply use the symbols A and B for relatively early and late material) and the strong editorial hand of the deuteronomic historian(s), DH, responsible for the unified structure of the block, Deuteronomy-Kings. We are not surprised, then, by duplicate and even triplicate episodes: the fall of Eli's house, 2:31 ff. and 3:11 ff.; Samuel's anointing Saul once privately, 9:26 ff., and twice publicly, 10:17 ff. and 11:15; Saul's double rejection by Samuel in theological but not circumstantial duplicate narratives, 113, 15 and 20:42b the repeated episode of David's sparing Saul's life, 24:3 ff. and 26:5 ff.; the duplicated account of his seeking refuge from Saul with the Philistine Achish, king of Gath, 21:10 ff. and 27:1 ff.; the account of Goliath's dispatch by David, 1 Sam 17, and again by Elhanan, one of David's distinguished soldiers, 2 Sam. 21:19 (the Chronicler in 1 Chronicles 20:5, seeks to harmonize the contradiction by adding to the account of Elhanan's exploit the words Lahmi the brother of Goliath). And the hand of DH will be recognized: we know something of the character of his piety and we shall see evidence now of his strong bias in favor of the southern, Judean half of the short-lived united monarchy.

The story of the making of monarchy is introduced with the somewhat idealized account of the birth and early years of Samuel [1 Samuel 1-3.] This is the most appropriate beginning since it is he who plays the role of king-maker in Israel. In the utterly tragic figure of old Eli and in the loss of the ark, the symbol of God's presence, from the central sanctuary at Shiloh (probably destroyed by the Philistines in this time), we are further prepared for the establishment of monarchy in Israel: it was Philistine aggression, far too powerful to be checked by the resources of a loose tribal confederation, which precipitated the chain of events leading through Saul and David to a unified and extensive, if short-lived, Israelite kingdom.

We do not know the ultimate point of origin of the Philistines. They must have settled sometime around 1200 B.C. in the coastal plain between the Mediterranean and the Judean hill country. There is some evidence of their earlier more or less temporary residence in the Aegean Islands and Asia Minor; and they, or related "maritime people," actually threatened twelfth-century Egypt, as we know from records of Ramses III (c. 1175-1144 B.C.). It is clear in any case that during the twelfth and eleventh centuries they formed a powerful pentapolis made up of the five tightly coordinated city-states of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath (the last not yet identified), which ultimately gained control of most of Canaan west of the Jordan. The name Palestine is derived from their name, Philistine.

Do not fail to note the theme of these chapters. Unlike the conditions prevailing earlier, the various tribes of Israel are now all reduced by the same enemy; and it is this external threat which ultimately leads to the Israelite monarchy. Philistine control was in some respects minimal and relatively unoppressive, and therefore the threat was not to their existence but to their peace in the full sense of that word - their fulfilled existence. Note also in this prelude to kingship, 1 Samuel 1-8, the following features of the narrative.

"The Song of Hannah" in 2:1-10 is later than its context (the institution of monarchy is assumed already in verse 10) and can be removed without injury to itself or the story. In this respect, and others, it compares remarkably to the Magnificat of Mary in Luke 1:46-56. The presence of both of these psalm-like pieces in present context simply testifies again to the faith of the believing community that the life of God impinges on the course of human events with power, purpose, and compassion.

Note the starkly portrayed tragic dimension in old Eli shamed by his sons, 2:22 ff., in broken relationship to Yahweh, 2:27-36, and dying in the anguished knowledge that his sons have been killed and the ark stolen by the Philistines. There is tragedy also in the very words of Philistine to Philistine, 4:9, and in the bitter scene of the birth and naming of the child Ichabod, Eli's grandson, 4:19-22. It is not an unrelieved sense of tragedy: Israel records with humor and glee in 1 Samuel 5-6 the humiliation, in the presence of the ark, of Dagon, god of Philistia, and the humiliation by a plague of the Philistines themselves, regarded as a result of having the ark in their midst. Note also the realistic ancient conviction of taboo reflected in the story of the ark's return to Bethshemesh (6:19 ff.; not to Shiloh because, we suspect, the Philistines had already destroyed it).

Finally, note in these and subsequent chapters the dual, if not conflicting, representations of the person and role of Samuel and of the whole concept of monarchy. Predominantly in chapters 7-8, and also in 10:17-25 and chapter 12, Samuel is a gigantic figure, possessing the greatest attributes of Moses, Joshua, and the most distinguished of the Judges; he is himself adequate for the needs of Israel. This view of Samuel goes naturally hand in hand with a totally negative judgment of the monarchy, a judgment which regards it as a grave mistake perversely instituted by sinful Israel against the will of Yahweh and contrary to the judgment of Samuel.

According to a second point of view (predominantly, 9-11 and 13-14), Samuel is a seer, a clairvoyant - we might call him a professional occultist. Correspondingly, the monarchy is seen as the will of Yahweh, declared and implemented through Samuel. This representation of the immediate premonarchic time no doubt draws from originally older and more intimately informed narrative strands from what we have called the "A" stratum. We are nevertheless sure that the present composite narrative constitutes a fuller and even more accurate history. There is every reason to believe that Samuel was in fact a man of many roles - seer but judge; clairvoyant but also prophet; and at the same time king-maker of ambivalent feeling and motivation.²

There is every reason to believe that while subsequent disillusionment with kingship in Israel is reflected in the "B" strands of the narrative, an element of sheer realism is also preserved: that is, that there were contemporaneously in Israel Yahweh loyalists, prophets, and others who regarded monarchy as a pagan innovation borrowed from and patterned after the related but generally estranged kingdoms of Moab and Ammon and as such a flagrant rejection of the traditional ways of the tribes of Israel and of Yahweh himself. And on the essential point of faith, the composite narrative is at one with itself; consenting or disapproving, honored or aggrieved, it is Yahweh and Samuel who are directly responsible for Saul's quasi-kingship and David's ultimate creation of full monarchy. In Israel's ancient faith, Yahweh does not impose his will arbitrarily upon his covenant people in the midst of history's course, but in the course which they elect, he effects by one means or another his own historical purposes for them. He may approve or disapprove of the monarchy which they will have; but he will take it and use it successfully for his own ends.

The whole deuteronomic history of Samuel-Kings is a remarkably varied story on a single theme. For his own purposes, Yahweh created a people, as he created a world, out of chaos. The intention of divine purpose and meaning was frustrated by pride, by the rejection of given order. And the order which Yahweh would create and sustain becomes thus reduced again to the chaotic out of which, however, Yahweh will nevertheless effect his covenant purpose. This is the theological theme repeatedly sounded throughout Samuel-Kings - in the narratives of Israel under the Philistines, of Saul, of David, of Solomon, and of the succession of the kings of Israel, North and South, to the tragic closing of Israelite monarchy.

See this portrayed vividly and with doubled emphasis in the Samuel-Saul cycle. Saul is surely one of history's greatest and most tragic men. By his courageous heart, his valiant leadership against Philistia, and his faith that he is Yahweh's man, he achieves a position of strength and prominence among most of the tribes of Israel quite exceeding that of any previous "judge" but clearly short of full kingship. In chapters 13 and 15 (theological but not precisely episodical duplicates) he is publicly rejected by Samuel-Yahweh; and with the traumatic knowledge that his cause is no longer Yahweh's cause or that Yahweh's cause is no longer his cause, that magnificent man, the courageous heart, the valiant leadership are seen to shrivel, disintegrate, and atrophy. Who can say whether the theological judgment is "right" or "wrong"? We who read of him are nevertheless moved to repeat the lines of David's lament mourning Saul's death - "How are the mighty fallen!" (2 Sam 1:19, 25, 27)

At Yahweh's behest Samuel anoints David in a strictly private ceremony: this is Samuel's (and therefore Yahweh's) man for the future (16:1-13, B). Saul, deprived of Samuel's support and no doubt aware of his own inadequacy and Israel's against Philistine aggression, suffers from severe depression and ironically finds the antidote to his illness only in David's musical gifts (16:13-23, A). David comes to Saul with an incomparable recommendation - "skillful in playing, a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence"; and as if this were not enough, the further word that "Yahweh is with him" (16:18). This is of course no incidental comment. This is the point of the narratives: Yahweh is with David. All that is recounted in the progressively deteriorating relationship of David and Saul is intended to illustrate this theme. This is true of the tale of David's conquest of Goliath (in this clearly composite work, David is quite unknown to Saul in this chapter, 17). The theme that David is Yahweh's man dominates the David-Jonathan relationship and, with greater or less direct control, determines the editor's selection of available narratives which deal with the intricate and tragic Saul-David relationship.

The story is its own best commentary. The greater part of the second half of 1 Samuel is assigned to A, which is simply to say that, by and large, we suspect that these episodes in the lives of Saul and Jonathan and David are accurately informed. They are certainly brilliantly narrated and take the point of view which holds David to be Yahweh's man, the man on whom the Yahweh-blessing firmly resides. Some modern interpreters feel that every move of this uncommonly gifted man was calculated in terms of its political expediency in achieving his own ambitious ends.³ Certainly David was ambitious. Undeniably he was a man of almost uncanny political astuteness. Nor do we doubt that some of his acts of magnanimity were also calculated to his own advantage. The total political accomplishment of David still stands as a nearly incredible feat, and let no one be so naive as to suppose that this kind of performance is carried out anywhere, in any time, by unadulterated goodness and nobility of character. These biographical notes on the life of David acknowledge and illustrate David's moral ambivalence and even duplicity, and yet at the same time present a man who, as the sons of men go, is superior not only in the qualities of winsomeness and shrewdness, but also in the solid virtues that issue from a dominant integrity.

Saul's death (1 Sam 31) hardly warrants the term suicide unless the narrative deliberately falsifies the facts in order to spare the reputation of Saul - and this is unlikely. He and his sons, including Jonathan, die in a cause they know to be doomed even before that final battle with the Philistines begins; and Saul, this figure of stark tragedy drawn in heroic dimensions, makes his exit from Israel's history with his essential stature of greatness still intact. If the moving lines of the lament (2 Sam. 1:19 ff.) over the death of Saul and Jonathan are in fact David's (as appears to be probable) it becomes more difficult to maintain the interpretation of David as a man of unmitigated, calculating ambition. These words are more than a lyrical garland tossed toward Saul's adherents in an effort to win them (although we do not suppose for a moment that David was unaware of the positive political implications of his public and phenomenally articulate grief). Genuine sorrow and a profound sense of personal bereavement are undeniable in the lines of the lament; David's love and affection for father and son are unmistakably attested.

We repeat that the narratives here are their own best commentary. This is the unimpeachable stuff of history, history at its best - history articulated and shaped by the very participants in the narrated events and unabashedly interpreted from an internal and involved standpoint, from a position within the history. The participants - David and his contemporaries in Israel - believe that David is Yahweh's man, coming now to the leadership of Yahweh's people, in Yahweh's land, to form Yahweh's kingdom, and (always implicitly at the core of the Yahweh faith) to fulfill Yahweh's purposes in history. Such a record requires no commentary but only an alert, sympathetic, and sensitive hearer-reader. David, endowed of Yahweh, possesses in these years and through these episodes a kind of Midas-touch. The Philistines, with whom he has earlier been allied, stand confidently by while this old friend is elevated to tribal kingship in Hebron over the small confederation of southern tribes (2:1-4). Internal events in Israel all operate, by accident or manipulation, in David's favor (chs. 2-4). Now the northern tribes request that David assume rule over them; and a narrator gives us his own and what he obviously believes also to be David's interpretation of the whole astonishing sequence of events:

David perceived that Yahweh had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel. (5:12)

The last major Canaanite (Jebusite) city-fortress, Jerusalem, is taken (5:6-10) and the Philistines, asleep on their feet or successfully lulled by the political charm and machinations of David, suddenly come to (5:17-22). Now the ark is brought to the new capital of Jerusalem (6:1-16: this reminds us of the narrative of the ark's earlier potent taboo during and following its Philistine sojourn) and David secures Saul's daughter Michal, this time surely in an act predominantly politically motivated. The editor adds, from the B complex of narratives, the David-Nathan-Yahweh conversations over the question of a temple in Jerusalem (8:1 ff.; cf.1 Chron. 28:11-19).

This remarkable section on David's full accession to political kingship over the tribes of Israel and the land of Canaan is summed up and also favorably judged in the words of 2 Sam. 8:15:

So David reigned over all Israel; and David administered justice and equity to all his people.

The block of chapters 2 Samuel 9-20, with its original conclusion in 1 Kings 1-2, has been justly described as the prose masterpiece of the Hebrew Bible. This is the written work of a highly articulate, gifted, and informed historian who shared as colleague and participant the days of David's mature years. In this remarkable biography every detail is authentic and unimpeachable. And yet, as tends to be true of Old Testament history, this is obviously written not merely for the sake of preserving a history of the life of David, the King, but in order to extract from the history its essential meaning in the Yahweh-faith. The historian himself passionately believes that the sequential events in these years of David's reign are fundamentally shaped by the covenant fact of Yahweh's decisive involvement in the life of Israel and his efficacious impingement upon the life of history. In this sense, therefore, this too is in the nature of prophetic history, that is, history in which the historian, wittingly or involuntarily, acts as spokesman for and interpreter of the Yahweh-faith. Here as in the Saul cycle of stories the historical turning-point is theologically conceived: both Saul and David are seen to suffer anguished reversal of fortune not in terms of causality, not as the result of mere circumstance, not as blind historical accident, but precisely as the judgment of Yahweh, the negative response of Yahweh to the mis-response of the king to the covenant Lord of Israel. Saul is expelled from the kingdom for what is twice represented as an act of unwarranted pride (1 Sam. 13 and 15); the theological "plot" is closely parallel to the story of the Garden in Genesis 3. David's reversal takes the form of alienation within his own communities - family, city, and kingdom - as a result of this violent desecration of community (2 Sam. 11); and here the theological scheme parallels that of the story of the Brothers in Genesis 4. We shall see in the next section that the reign of Solomon is similarly interpreted as turning on an act - apostasy - in violation of the Yahweh-faith (1 Kings 11), in response to which Yahweh brings to violent, tragic rupture the unity of Israel. And this too has its parallel in the Yahwist's prelude to the Old Testament in the story of the Tower, Genesis 11.

And so, for all the intimacy and accuracy of the present record of David, this is not what we would call "objective" history, since the decisive force is without question deemed to be outside and above the plane of history, in the person of Yahweh, who, although effectively involved in history, is himself suprahistorical.

The Situation: 2 Sam. 21-24; 8-10

David has attained the pinnacle. His achievement, we think, is the work of a devoted man - devoted certainly to David, but also in uncommon and laudable measure to Israel and to Yahweh. We do not try to maintain that he has reached the summit utterly clean and quite untarnished. Narratives constituting an appendix to the books of Samuel (2 Sam. 21-24, interrupting the original unit of 2 Samuel 9-20 plus 1 Kings 1-2), remind us of the degree to which David was a product of his own time, and a full-fledged member of the political race (see, respectively, 2 Sam. 24 and 21:1-4). Both stories are authentic, and come from David's earlier years. The former describes how David incurs the active displeasure of Yahweh by taking a census. It is useless to speculate on the "why" of this episode - are population figures deemed to be nobody's business but Yahweh's, or is there implicit condemnation of the possibly sinister ends of census-taking, namely, heavy taxation and conscription? In any case the story reminds us again of the strong sense of group solidarity in the ancient East and specifically in ancient Israel. In the narrative of 2 Samuel 21:1-14 even the most ardent supporter of the winsome David must read with suspicion David's consent to and implementation of the slaughter of the surviving males of the house of Saul (save only one, to whom we will come in a moment). Equally suspect is the rational for this purge (designed, of course, to put David above political reproach), and David's calculated gesture of rapprochement with the adherents of Saul in the final disposal of all the mortal remains of the male Saulides (2 Sam. 21: 12-14).

David's variously motivated ambition is attained. He has trained and fought with a mighty band of warriors (geborim), some of whom on occasion have saved his life (21:15-17) or tilted with Philistine giants (21:18-21); and once, in a moving episode of mutual loyalty and admiration between men and leader, three of their number risked seemingly probable death to answer David's longing for the cool water of Bethlehem's well (23:13-17). Philistia on the coast and Moab across the Jordan are subdued (8:1-2), and more remote potential enemies are unable to offer David any serious threat (8:3-14). The sole male survivor of Saul and Jonathan is, in a gesture at once magnanimous and politically astute, brought into the king's household, to "eat at the king's table," live on the king's bounty - of course under the constant surveillance of the king's staff (ch. 9). With the situation thus in hand both without and within the kingdom, the narrative of chapter 10 adds the advice, and brilliantly illustrates it, that in the person of Joab, David has a commander-in-chief not only of fabulous competence, but possessing an admirable quality of Yahweh-faith in the bargain (see 10:12).

What a beautiful day David has had!

Spring Night in Jerusalem: 2 Sam 11-12

"It happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch. . ." (11:2). It is spring, "the time when kings go forth to battle." But David has sent Joab against the Ammonites while he, the king, "remained at Jerusalem" (11:1).

There is no combination of situation and season comparable to Jerusalem in the spring. Other cities of renown have laid claim to pre-eminence in this regard (e.g., "Paris in the spring ); and we have met personally the ravishing coincidence of April or May in Athens and Rome, Washington and New York, in Atlanta and San Francisco, in Cairo and Damascus, in Munich and Berlin, in Nanking and Shanghai and Kobe and Yokohama. Each of these has its peculiar excellence under spring's invasion, but nothing exceeds the intoxication of Jerusalem in early April, a condition lyrically and erotically memorialized by an uncommonly articulate resident of Jerusalem some centuries after David:

An idle, aging king in the heady, evening air of a Jerusalem springtime; the beautiful Bathsheba and her incorruptible husband Uriah; the king's prompt, efficient, confident steps to cover the results of his lustful intoxication; Uriah's integrity as soldier and his unwitting and ultimately fatal frustration of David's self-protective scheme merely by the virtue of his extreme loyalty to his compatriots still in the field; David's unhesitating but premeditated resort to murder; the complicity of Joab, always intensely, blindly loyal to David; and continuing this picture of the king's total moral collapse in steps of progressive deterioration, David's calloused words of reassurance to Joab, "Do not let this matter trouble you . . ."; and at last the consummation of the whole sorry episode when Bathsheba is added to David's harem and another son added to his progeny. Here, too, one might murmur, "How are the mighty fallen!"

Such behavior by the king in ancient oriental monarchy was nor, we think, so common as is sometimes alleged. On the other hand, it appears certain that the total historical response to this in Israel, and, particularly, within Israelite Yahwism, was unprecedented and unique. It remains one of the distinctive aspects of Israelite monarchy that it was not deemed to be absolute. In Israel the only absolute is Yahweh, and repeatedly Yahweh's spokesmen, the prophets, assume in Yahweh's name a role of authority above even the king's authority to rebuke, condemn, and declare judgment upon the king.

"The thing that David had done displeased Yahweh" (11:27); and the prophet Nathan is Yahweh's instrument for checking and containing the swollen pride of David (ch. 12). David's response to the prophet's incisive, devastating parable is not the response of a monarch to a brash subject or courtier, but, in this case in full contrition, of a covenant man to the Word: "I have sinned against Yahweh!" The sentence of death, which David himself has meted out, is removed; but the faith which gives form to the biography regards the harassed remainder of David's life as the fulfillment of an irremovable and unalterable judgment. For lust, arrogance, covetousness, adultery, calculated competence iii compounding wrong, for deliberate murder, and for highhanded indifference to this wholesale shattering of covenant commandment - for all this, you shall know now the kind of violence you have perpetrated on Uriah, and the same loss of sexual prerogatives which you inflicted upon him. All this evil will come against you out of your own house! see 12:7-12).

The child conceived in that spring night in Jerusalem did not live, and something of the strength of the old David is heard in his courageous response to the death (12:20-23). This sequence, which is the turning point in David's reign, closes with Solomon's birth to David and Bathsheba (12:24), and David's triumphant "conquest" of the Ammonite capital across the Jordan, a farce set up by the loyal Joab (12:26 ff.).

The Grotesque Triangle: 2 Sam 13-14

David is to be succeeded by his (and Bathsheba's) son Solomon, whose despotic, ostentatious reign (contrary to the still glowing Solomonic legends) leads directly to the rupture of the united Israelite kingdom. But, at least in the understanding of David's historian, the real turning point, not merely in the life of David but in the life of the kingdom, is in the center of David's reign. Ultimate responsibility for the collapse of the united monarchy must fall upon David, whose failure is seen as essentially a failure of faith, a moral failure in the broad sense - a failure to act according to covenant faith and in covenant righteousness. And again, the order and meaning which Yahweh would impart to Israel is reduced to chaos by the failure of faith, by the response of unfaith.

The anguish that is now David's - an anguish produced out of his own house - is at least as profound as that of the tragic Saul. There can be no doubt (at least I do not doubt) that, in his encounter with the prophet Nathan, David felt the full force of his own despicable role in the David-Bathsheba-Uriah triangle. But if time began to ease his guilt, it was a short-lived reprieve, for in the intimate circle of his own children the primary components of his own heinous behavior are enacted. Amnon, David's oldest son and heir-apparent, vents a sexual aggression more rampant than his father's not upon another man's wife but upon his own half-sister Tamar, David's daughter and the full-sister of Absalom. Not only does David see his own sexual arrogance manifested in one of his sons, but he must also witness in another son that driving political ambition which he had held in check to some degree. But in Absalom it becomes a ruling and ultimately uncontrollable passion. In a grotesque modification of the triangle in which David played so wretched a role, these traits in his sons lead to the same bleak end - murder. In the Amnon-Tamar-Absalom triangle, David's son Amnon is both the perpetrator of incestuous rape and the victim of homicidal passion - he is, then, David and Uriah. David's daughter Tamar plays the role of violated woman, the victim of her brother. And David's son Absalom re-enacts David's role of murderer, unleashing against a brother the same calculated passion of David against Uriah. Amnon blocked Absalom's way to the throne: in both cases, then, the victim threatened the aggressor. Amnon-Tamar-Absalom: "evil out of your own house."⁵

Son with a Chariot: 2 Sam 15-20

The winsomeness of the younger David is incarnate now in Absalom. The deep hurt which Saul knew from his "son" David (see 1 Sam. 24:11,16), David knows in full bitter measure. Absalom is utterly without scruple, a man in whom the vile passions against which David had certainly struggled are in full control.

And he is David's son. Were David and his advisers at any time unaware of Absalom's intentions? The structure of David's court may have been relatively simple (2 Sam 20:23-26 and 8:16-18), but it was obviously an exceedingly competent organization. If David's normally shrewd and sensitive political faculties were stupefied by his doting love for Absalom, we can hardly expect the same of his advisers, one of whose gifts in counsel is boldly likened to the very oracle of God (2 Sam 16:23). Under the circumstances, we can only suppose that David's evacuation of the capital, Jerusalem, before Absalom's advance from Hebron in the south (a shrewd choice by Absalom: it was from Hebron that David had earlier moved the capital) must have been voluntary and, we suspect, imposed by the king arbitrarily upon a strongly disapproving Joab and army, and indeed the whole of David's staff.

One may repeat here yet again that the text is its own superb commentary. We do not miss the loyalty of David's mercenary troops (15: 19-21); the narrator's conviction of the mature quality of David's faith (15:25 f.; 16:12); the essential gentleness of David in these most wretched hours (16:5-14); the brilliant, carnal symbol of Absalom's irrevocable usurpation (16:20-22) and its portentous recall of the David-Nathan encounter (2 Sam 12:11-12); the arch Old Testament realist, the remarkable pragmatist Ahitophel (17: 1-23); Joab, who always acts like Joab (18:10-15; 19:1-7; 20A-13); David's pathetic concern, implicit throughout, for the defiant son (18:1-5); the moving grief of a father's utter brokenness in the loss of his son (18:33); the reassertion in this critical time of the old and always fundamental north-south cleavage (19:11, 41-43); David's profound and probably chronic annoyance with the crude, brash, "muscular" ways of Joab and his brothers, the sons of Zeruiah (16:10; 19:22; see also 3:34b; 3:38 f.); and finally, in a kind of pausal summary before the last scene of David's reign in 1 Kings 1-2, the statement of David's very modest bureaucracy (20:23-26; cf. the extensive elaboration of this structure under Solomon, 1 Kings 4:1 ff.).

This is the brilliant story of David's mature reign in which order becomes chaos in the form of evil out of David's own house. We, who stand outside the covenant faith of ancient Israel, may want to question or to alter the historian's interpretation of these episodes and events in the king's life, but we must first acknowledge his interpretation: the king, the kingdom, and the reign - all these that might have been but for the violation of the covenant community, the Yahweh faith, and Yahweh himself. What might have been was not, because of the failure of faith.

For David's sake. 1 Kings 11:12

We looked in the preceding section at three of the component pieces in the appendix to the book(s) of Samuel. In addition to these (census, 24; blood revenge upon the house of Saul, 21:1-14; and the water of Bethlehem's well, 23:13-17) we find two lists of David's geborim, his mighty men, the most distinguished of his soldiers (Uriah is one of them, 23:39), in 21:15-22 and in 23:8-39, of which the third episode just mentioned is a part. These two lists were no doubt originally a unit, broken by the insertion of two psalm-like pieces attributed to David.

The second of these, 23:1-7, appears to be a late composition and purports to be the last words of David. The first, chapter 22, also appears, with a few minor differences, as Psalm 18.That it cannot be in its present form a composition of David is on every hand agreed; but whereas most scholars of preceding generations confidently assigned the psalm to a much later age (some as late even as the second century B.C. there is now strong support for the view that this psalm had its original formulation (subsequently expanded, to be sure) if not from David, then from the time of David or very close to David's time. It takes its place among a considerable number of psalms which may be called Royal Psalms, setting forth (as, for example, Ps. 72) the ideal of righteous kingship under Yahweh which had its origin and, always in tradition, its supreme expression in the Davidic covenant.⁶

The Acts of David's Dotage: 1 Kg 1-2

This is the continuation and conclusion of that superb performance of the historian's art, 2 Samuel 9-20. Not in the Old Testament nor anywhere else have we anything comparable to this intimate, eloquent, profoundly moving tragedy of three thousand years ago.

The opening episode (1 Kings 1:1-4) is emphatically not in deference to popular taste for smutty or racy details from the life of a public figure. The narrator brilliantly conveys the senile condition of the king and at the same time introduces the innocent figure of the warm-bodied, beautiful young woman whose strong appeal to Adonijah precipitates Adonijah's death and secures his younger half-brother Solomon's accession to the throne.

As always it is the genius of this narrative that it leaves the reader quite on his own in the assessment of motives and the interpretation of details. Tradition vastly magnifies Solomon, the successor to David; and it is easy to assume the illegitimacy and/or the "wrongness" of opposing claimants. Adonijah sounds and looks like another Absalom but with the significant exception that his father's life is finished and that he has no intention of usurping his father's place. And he is the next in line (1:6). It is a point in his favor that he enjoys the support of Joab and Abiathar the priest: it is difficult if not impossible to think that either of these would have supported him if David himself were on record in support of another candidate. We doubt, then, that the Solomon conspiracy of Nathan, Bathsheba, Zadok, and Benaiah had David's support as they claimed (1:13). David's senility is successfully put to their uses, and Solomon, son of Bathsheba, is made king. It may be significant that Nathan, who masterminds the plot and its execution, is not here represented as acting at the behest of the Word of Yahweh as twice earlier he is (2 Sam. 7:4 ff. and 12:1 ff.). If David authorized the bloody purge to remove all real and potential threats to Solomon's position, it was "authorization" from the surviving body of the already departed David, from the irresponsible lips of an old man in advanced senility.

One must recall in chapter 2 that verses 3-4, 10-12, and 27 are editorial additions from the hand of DH (that is, the deuteronomic historians who fashioned the block Deuteronomy-2 Kings from numerous sources). Otherwise, it is a calculating and merciless Solomon whose "hatchet-man" Benaiah dispatches in cold blood first Adonijah, then Joab, then Shimei. We are not reading too much into this remarkable narrative of 2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings l-2, when we read the present concluding line, "So the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon."

The Solomon Legend: 1Kg 3-10

Negative evidence against Solomon and his reign is overwhelming. All the more remarkable, then, the persistence and extravagance of what may be called the Solomon legend. The unknown author whose distinguished work of history we have been reading leaves us now. This is material from a variety of other sources. Chapter 3 gives us a highly idealized and stuffily pious account of the wisdom of Solomon. This hard-fisted "fascist" who in the preceding chapter wipes away his potential opposition in a smear of blood appears now a Jekyll to his previous Hyde. To put it mildly, 3:7-9 is out of character: . . .I am but a little child: I do not know how to go out or come in"(!). Even more out of character are God's words (perhaps significantly not Yahweh's) in verses 11-14: . . . none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you . . . no other king shall compare with you all your days." One could believe that Yahweh might speak so in irony! And one could then also read a meaning certainly not intended by the legend in the following verse: "And Solomon awoke, and behold it was a dream."

But so that we, the readers, will know that this is a dream of substance, the story continues with the famous illustration of the King's wisdom in the disposition of the case of the disputed baby. This legend intends to portray not only the king's wisdom but his accessibility to the meanest of the population - a claim for Solomon, we suspect, even further from the truth. And the essential Solomon legend now moves in a gusty crescendo to its fabulous climax in 4:20-34.

The Solomonic legend continues to be sounded through the more reliable accounts of his prowess as builder and patron of the arts. Solomon was ambitious for the kingdom - of Solomon; and relative to anything ever known in Israel, at least, his public works' program was incredibly lavish and, no doubt to the discerning, ostentatious and pretentious. Under Solomon Israelite art and architectural forms were largely nonindigenous. His alliance with Hiram king of Tyre (in reality, kin of all Phoenicia), provided Solomon's Israel with the resources of a people singularly advanced both economically and culturally; and Solomon's costly but no doubt magnificent building program, including the Temple, employed Hiram's architects, designers, and engineers. Two great pieces of prophetic composition lyrically extol the superior virtues of Tyre, the capital and symbol of Phoenician culture (Isa. 23 and Ezek. 27).

The legend of Solomon is not without foundation in fact, as we shall see in a moment; and some of the legend's accretions are superb creations, instructive to the life and faith of Israel and emanating from deep within it. Such is the character of the long speech and prayer put on Solomon's lips on the occasion of the dedication of the Temple (1 Kings 8:12-61). This is the work of DH at DH's best, drawn in part from the living liturgy and prayers incorporated in the whole Temple institution. If the language of the speech and prayer sometimes appears crassly materialistic by our standards, we must not miss the sensitivity, the depth, and, in the best sense of the word, the sophistication of the theology especially apparent in verses 27-50. Tradition is right in ascribing this to the Solomon of the legend, since indeed such a Solomon might well have prayed for the future of his own people that in every evil contingency Yahweh would hear and would forgive, renew, and restore the life of the people.

Solomon and the Kingdom of David: 1 Kg 3-11

David's problems emanated largely from the very considerable community of his own household. David was at his weakest and most inept in these relationships. But the vast structure of the kingdom - indeed, the empire - was securely maintained throughout his reign by his brilliant capacities as political administrator and, of course, by the superior military establishment under Joab. Solomon possessed neither. He conspicuously lacked the political comprehension and sensitivity of David; and while he elaborated the physical facilities of the Israelite military,⁷the fundamental security of the Davidic kingdom was critically undermined, probably early in Solomon's reign, by a resurgent Edom under Hadad to the south (1 Kings 11:14 ff.), the establishment of incipient Syrian power in Damascus under Rezon to the north (11:23 f.), and, from the very center, the early insurrection of the Ephraimite Jeroboam (11:26-28) who, upon Solomon's death, played a leading role in the North's secession from Israelite union. The kingdom survived Solomon's reign intact and may even have appeared stronger and more extensive than under David's administration. But Solomon permitted the foundations of the kingdom to deteriorate while he built upon them a spectacular superstructure.

David was content with the limits of the old Jebusite city of Jerusalem. Solomon extended the city to the higher hill immediately to the north where he constructed his own extensive royal residence and its probably incorporated royal temple, the renowned Temple of Solomon. It was built over or upon a great rock, sacred from time immemorial and held in tradition to be the scene of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac - a rock now enclosed in the magnificent Arab Dome of the Rock in today's old walled city of Jerusalem.⁸

Solomon's ambitious and far-flung building programs were, of course, terribly costly - one might say, fatally costly. The personnel, equipment, and maintenance of the royal establishment became exceedingly heavy and elaborate (see 1 Kings 4:1-28). Legends of Solomon's vast wealth and wisdom are based upon fact. As an avid patron of the arts, Solomon collected in Jerusalem priceless treasures from all over the world (10:14-25), many of them no doubt transported in ships of his own fleet (9:26-28 and 10:11 f.). His "wisdom" consisted, we suspect, in his profligate and ultimately self- flattering sponsorship of native and imported "wisdom" artists - articulate writers and reciters of a kind of prephilosophical moral philosophy current in the Near Eastern world of the tenth century and preserved, in essential character at least, in Proverbs, in many of the Psalms, and, in a different vein, in the Prologue and Epilogue of job (Job 1-2; 42:7-17).

All of this had to be paid for out of Israelite pockets, with Israelite sweat and blood and tears. The pious statement 9:22 belies itself - it is the protest which confirms the reality of what is denied:

But of the people of Israel Solomon made no slaves; they were the soldiers, they were his officials, his commanders, his captains, his chariot commanders and his horsemen. This has always been a great dream - an army made up entirely of officers, a construction gang composed only of overseers, an enterprise employing only executives. But, all Israel paid, and paid dearly, to satisfy Solomon's prideful ostentation; and in paying so dearly, the original kingdom of David was destroyed.

The Solomon story is very different in kind from the David story. The sources are more impersonal, further removed, and sometimes ill-informed. The embellishment of legend is incomparably greater. The final history is an editorial creation in which a work called "The Book of the Acts of Solomon" (11:41) is no doubt the source of reports of Solomon's varied administrative actions, but which freely incorporates long current lore about that fabulous reign, and here and there the candid editorial judgment of DH. Nevertheless, Yahwism's theological judgment and interpretation of the reign are no less apparent here than in the stories of Saul and David. Unsuppressed by glowing legends of unqualified Solomonic utopia, it is both the explicit and implicit conclusion of the whole Solomon story that Solomon was apostate: by his total performance as king he repudiated the Yahwism of Israel and of his father David. David's kingdom, so runs the perceptible judgment of the Old Testament texts, remained the covenant kingdom of Yahweh. For all his acknowledged weaknesses, David remained to the end a Yahweh man, the Israelite leader of covenanted Israel. But the Solomon story is the Babel story all over again, the story in which Yahweh is repudiated in grossest fashion ignored: . . . let me build myself a city and Temple, and let me make a name for myself . . ." Solomon's sin is apostasy, as the strongly editorial lines of chapter 11 make clear. And consonant with the immutable position of Yahwistic prophetism, whose primary proposition is always the effective impingement of divine life upon history, the meaning of Solomon's reign and of events subsequent to it is discerned in the scheme of sin and judgment: like Babel, apostasy results in the rupture of human community. The same Yahweh faith which in Genesis 11 historizes the myth, here clothes history with the myth. Israel's Yahwism understands the failure of the Davidic kingdom to hold together all Israel as a failure of faith. Israel (of course, always in the person of her king in whom all Israel is embodied) must be a Yahweh-covenant people or no people, she will be a Yahweh-community or a Babel, she will be what Yahweh created her to be or chaos.

1. Cf. 1 Chron. 15; Ps. 132.

2. Samuel's ambivalence is discerningly portrayed in D. H. Lawrence's play, David, available in Religious Drama I, M. Halverson, ed., Living Age Books, New York.

3. Cf. M. Noth, History of Israel, trans. S. Godman (from Geschichte Israels, 2nd ed.), New York, 1958, pp. 178 ff.

4. Cf. Ps. 13.

5. For a fuller commentary on this, and other narratives of the united Israelite kingdom, see B. D. Napier, From Faith to Faith, New York, 1955, pp. 108-155. The most distinguished, now classic, study in this area is L. Rost, Die Ueberlieferung von der Thronnachfolge Davids, Stuttgart, 1926.

6. Cf. A. R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel,Cardiff, 1955, p. 15 also E. Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament, New York, 1958, pp. 234-239.

7. The builder Solomon was at work as far south as the Gulf of Aqabah at the port city of Ezion-geber, as we know from 1 Kings 11:26 and from excavations of his copper mines there. His extensive stables at Megiddo, one of his fortified cities (1 Kings 9:19), have also been uncovered. See further Noth, op. cit., pp. 206 ff.; G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, Philadelphia, 1957, pp. 129 ff.

8. Any precise reconstruction of the temple is impossible, although Ezekiel 41 may offer tangible assistance where 1 Kings 6 is deficient. See G. F. Wright's attempt at reconstruction and his vivid description in Biblical Archaeology, op. cit., pp. 136 ff.

32

Form and Nature of the Book of Kings

It is time now to look, if briefly, at the form and nature of the book of Kings. Here is a simple, three-part outline of the contents:

1Kg 1-11 Solomon.

1Kg 12-2Kg 18:12 The two kingdoms, North and South, to the North's demise in 722-721.

2Kg 18:13-25:26 The South to its own destruction in 587. (The brief narrative of Jehoiachin's release from prison in Babylon some years later, 2Kg 25:27-30, is a subsequent postscript to Kings.)

Deuteronomist History and the Sources

Kings is the editorial work of DH, perhaps a school of theologians-historians thoroughly impressed with and largely controlled by the perspectives and even the language and style of Deuteronomy. As we shall see later, the bulk of Deuteronomy appears to date from the seventh century. The total DH work, Deuteronomy to 2 Kings, is probably a sixth-century product as it stands; but Kings may well have been formulated before the fall of the South in 587, since a number of passages suggest the historians' ignorance of that enormous catastrophe. On the other hand, the story carries through the bitter narration of Jerusalem's collapse and destruction, and elsewhere betrays editorial knowledge of this tragic end. We assume, then, the probability of two "editions" of Kings, both Deuteronomic, that is, both DH, one edition prior and another subsequent to the final termination of Israelite monarchy.

The most conspicuous structural feature of Kings is the repeated use of a formula defining and summarizing in brief, rigid categories the reigns of the various kings. It appears first, in an abbreviated form, at the end of 1 Kg 11, to mark the close of the narrative of Solomon's reign. The first full use of the formula is in its application to Rehoboam, 1 Kg 14:21-24. The formula appears (with elements here and there omitted, e.g., the name of the king's mother) in the case of all kings, North and South, as an introductory formula, or a concluding formula, or both. It presents two problems in particular. The length of reign of the king in question is characteristically correlated with the reign of the king in the sister kingdom, e.g., "in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam [North], Abijam [South] began to reign" (I 15:1). This exclusively internal synchronism makes absolute dating exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, although our margin of error even at the upper extreme of dates now hardly exceeds more than a few years. The second problem concerns the formula's categorical judgment of each king - a sweeping judgment of the king based, however. on only the single item of the king's relationship to the cultus of the Jerusalem Temple. In the sense of the formula, the good king is the faithful king, faithful to the Temple institution. Now it follows, of course that without exception every king of the North is condemned: under the circumstances not one of them could, even if he would, support the South's royal Temple. And as a matter of fact, DH's terms being exceedingly demanding, most of the Southern kings are castigated. Hezekiah (2 Kg 18:3-7) and Josiah (2 Kg 22:2) alone are completely exonerated. The praise of four other kings of the South (Asa, 1 Kg 15:11 15; Jehoash, 2 Kg 12:2-3; Azariah, 15:3-4; and Jotham, 15:34-35) is qualified only with the phrase, "but the high places were not taken away."

Inevitably, of course, our own historical sensibilities are sometimes appalled by this parochial and arbitrary basis of judgment. Perhaps the strongest single illustration in Kings is the case of Omri. He inaugurated the North's strongest dynasty. He was able to effect and maintain peace during his reign by various means including sheer strength of arms. He possessed the wisdom and strategic sense - and the resources - to purchase and begin construction of a capital city on the shrewdly chosen hill of Samaria. A hundred years after his reign an Assyrian historian, an official recorder for the then world-ruling power, termed the whole territory of Palestine "the land of Omri."¹Yet aside from the usual formula, which rates him as "more evil than all who were before him"' (I 16:25 ff.), DH includes only one verse (16:24) to inform us of the twelve-year history of his reign.

It is apparent that DH has employed a number of sources in compiling Kings. We have already cited the Book of the Acts of Solomon mentioned in 1 Kg 11:41. DH elsewhere assumes that the reader of Kings has at his disposal the Books of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (I 14:19) and of Judah (I 14:29). (Incidentally, the name Israel is now commonly applied to the North, while the South reverts to the older tribal designation, Judah.) What an incredibly exciting find any one of these ancient works, apparently forever lost, would be! They must have contained detailed and highly diversified material relating to the history of these two kingdoms. For example,

Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel. (I 14:19)

Now the rest of the acts of Zimri, and the conspiracy which he made, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel? (I 16:20)

Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the ivory house which he built, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel? (I 22:39)

In addition to these three named sources, we suspect the existence of others: perhaps a History of Ahab, comparable to that of Solomon, since we have more material on Ahab than any king since Solomon; almost certainly an Elijah story since one unique hand appears to be responsible for the bulk of 1 Kg 17-19,21; maybe a collection of stories about Elisha in 2 Kg 1 ff.; and almost certainly the official Temple Records.

Yahwism, Secession, and Division: 1 Kg 11-16

No comment is called for here on the basic conditions of the North's secession. DH provides us with an uncommonly adequate narrative in 1 Kings 12. The Northern tribes, now designated Israelite, gather at Shechem, which has served from the beginning as their real, if informal, capital. They gather with the serious intention of making Rehoboam king (12:1) - already established in Jerusalem in the place of his father Solomon. But they are smarting still from Solomon's oppressive measures and when arrogantly assured that these will be in the future only more severe - "My little finger," says Rehoboam, "is thicker than my father's loins" (12:10) - the old cry (cf. 2 Sam. 20:1), "What portion have we in David" (1 Kings 12:16), is heard again, and the one Yahweh-covenant-community becomes two.

Prophetic Yahwism plays again the crucial political role - even if we are unable to assess that role precisely. The function of the prophet Ahijah is primary through the episodes of the catastrophic event of political rupture (Ahijah dominates the narratives of 1 Kg 9:9-39; 12:1-32; and 14:1-18). The mighty protest of the North in which Jeroboam figures centrally is inspired if not led by prophetic Yahwism in the person of Ahijah. Jeroboam is again, like the judges, like Saul and David, a charismatic figure, endowed by prophetic declaration and demonstration with the spirit of Yahweh. It is prophetic Yahwism, in the North at least, which prefers the chaos of a broken people to the chaos of a united people under abusive and anti-Yahwistic monarchy,

For roughly the first three-quarters of the tenth century all the tribes of the unified Israel participate in the reigns of David and Solomon. Now, for a half century - the last quarter of the tenth and the first quarter of the ninth - the larger, stronger North and the smaller but more compactly integrated South know a relationship if not of war, at least of unceasing armed bickering over disputed common boundaries (14:30; 15:7,16). And while they quarrel, the Syrians of Damascus, the Egyptians under Pharaoh Shishak I (1 Kings 14:25-28), and even the old and vastly weakened Philistine enemy make life hazardous for one or the other segment of the broken kingdom. The high hopes of prophetic Yahwism are dashed again. Two prophetic narratives "predict" Jeroboam's failure. One, 1 Kg 13, is a relatively late legend of a prophet led into disobedience of Yahweh after proclaiming the fall of Jeroboam. It is apparently inserted here to underscore the South's negative view of Jeroboam. In 1 Kg 14, the story of Jeroboam 's wife's visit to Ahijah, we have a narrative, late to be sure in its present form, which may well be an expansion of an old narrative better preserved in the Septuagint version. Jeroboam's wife goes to Ahijah before Jeroboam is king; Ahijah is not blind, and she is not disguised since she is not yet queen and therefore needs no disguise; Ahijah, giving no reasons, simply foretells the death of the child and the fall of the house of Jeroboam. The point is that both of these prophetic narratives, the one late and Southern, and the other older and out of the North, express prophetic disillusionment with the very course of prophetically inspired events.

This is, of course, the recurring theological tragedy in ancient Israel. Yahweh created Israel (and the world) for purposes totally frustrated. Yahweh brought Israel into a land and an existence free and redeemed from slavery, again for purposes of his own which Israel successfully frustrated. Yahweh made a covenant in that land with David on behalf of all Israel, only to have his covenant intentions frustrated again. Now, Yahweh's intent to salvage order from the chaos of Israel in the person of Jeroboam also comes to the same frustrated end; and prophetism, which had inspired every significant event of Israel's history, once more must declare void the movement in which faith and hope inhered briefly.

The singular fact is that prophetic faith and hope nevertheless persisted. Prophetic Yahwism - the sustaining force in ancient Israel - never abandoned the quest for and expectation of the fulfillment of covenant. Yahweh, together with Israel in some recognizable form, will fulfill the purposes of Yahweh's creation and covenant.

We know very, very little of the fifty years from Jeroboam to Omri in the North, from Rehoboam to Jehoshaphat in the South. In Israel - we shall now use that term for the Northern kingdom - it was then, as it was throughout her history, far more turbulent politically than in Judah where the Davidic line held fast (with the single brief exception of Athaliah). Israel gained previously unprecedented internal security, and Israel and Judah an appreciable measure of concord, with the reign of Omri and the establishment of a short-lived but strong four-member dynasty in the second decade of the ninth century (from c. 876-842?).

But the greatness of the Old Testament people in the ninth century B.C. centers not in Omri or any other of her kings, but again in prophetic Yahwism and particularly in the persons of her distinguished prophets.

The history of the Old Testament is for the most part transmitted to us through the eye and mind of prophetic Yahwism, a phenomenon to be sharply distinguished from the popular Yahwism of the Old Testament people. Indeed prophetic and popular Yahwism were in unceasing tension, for Israelite prophetism always found its message and action determined by what was deemed to be the prostitution of Yahwism in its popular conception and practice.

In Part III of this book, we shall discuss ancient Israel's most notable development and her finest, most widely appropriated legacy to us and the world - classical prophetism. Prophetic Yahwism, certainly already in existence and creatively at work in the whole exodus event of the thirteenth century, attains its full identity and character in the classical prophets of the eighth to the sixth centuries, most notably in Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah of the eighth century; in Jeremiah and Ezekiel of the seventh-sixth century; and in the so-called Second Isaiah of the sixth century. But it is important to recognize an essential prophetic Yahwism, a preclassical prophetism, present in Israel from her earliest beginnings and maintained in an unbroken but fluid continuum from Moses to Amos.

The classical prophets from Amos to Second Isaiah strike ancient Israel, and continue to impress all of us, with freshness, vigor, and originality. Indeed, individually and collectively these classical prophets are unique. But in emphasizing a tradition of prophetic Yahwism never significantly broken from Moses in the thirteenth to Malachi in the fifth century, we intend to insist that the classical prophet, albeit proclaiming the new, was nevertheless debtor, and consciously debtor, to this core tradition. And we will, of course, understand classical prophetism better in awareness and knowledge of that tradition of prophetic Yahwism.

Prophet and Prophetism

The Hebrew word for prophet is nabi' (p1., nebi'im). It is a common noun, employed more than three hundred times in the Old Testament to designate a remarkable range of characters from an Aaron (Ex. 7:1) to an Elijah, from the "true" to the "false" (e.g., 1 Kings 22), from the relatively primitive (e.g., 1 Sam. 10) to the relatively sophisticated (the Isaiahs, for example), from the highly visionary (e.g., Ezek. 1-2) to the concretely ethical (e.g., Nathan in 2 Sam. 12 or Elijah in 1 Kings 21), from the seemingly objective perspective (of an Amos) to the intensely participating attitude (of a Jeremiah).

What does nabi' mean? The etymological pursuit is vain: we do not know and cannot now determine the original meaning of the Hebrew root. One strong hypothesis sees it as related to cognate Accadian and Arabic words meaning "to call" or "to announce." In the light of what we know the prophet to be this commends itself to us. The prophet of the Old Testament is "an announcer" or "the one who announces" the force and meaning of the impinging divine Word and life. Or, taking this etymological hypothesis in the passive sense, the prophet is the recipient of the announcement of Yahweh, he is "the one who is called."

And how may we define essential prophetism? It may be broadly defined as that understanding of history which accepts meaning only in terms of divine concern, divine purpose, divine participation. Of course, by this definition the bulk of biblical record is emphatically prophetic in its understanding and interpretation of history. In a narrower sense, prophetism refers to the particular succession who are called prophets and who in some real sense fulfill the role of prophet. But in essence, whether referring to person or concept, prophetism presupposes the decisive impingement of Yahweh upon history. This constitutes the basic prophetic character. Where this sense of effective relationship of Yahweh to history is absent, prophetism is also absent. Where this sense of the interrelatedness of history and deity is present and where its role is decisive to the utterance or the person, or to the understanding of historical event or human relationship there is prophetism.

Prophetism in these terms was an ingredient of core Yahwism from Israel's earliest days. But the word nabi', "prophet," probably did not come into current use in Israel before the tenth or even the ninth century. 1 Samuel 9:9 recalls that "he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer." The role and function and particular identity of the prophet is a development of monarchic times influenced not only by the older institution of "seer" (a professional role illustrated in the Samuel of 1 Sam. 9) but by the Canaanite phenomenon of organized, contagious prophecy.

In that same, relatively old narrative of 1 Samuel 9:1-10:16; we see that kind of prophetism native to Canaan. This is the first recorded instance of its appropriation among the tribes of Israel, by Israelites. We remember this narrative. Saul, with a servant, consults the seer Samuel in his efforts to recover his father's lost asses. Samuel, "seeing" the animals, reassures Saul and then anoints him "to be prince over his people Israel" (10:1, with RSV and the Septuagint). Samuel informs Saul of what is about to take place, and sure enough,

When they came to Gibeah, behold a band of prophets met him; and the spirit of God [the word in Hebrew is not the name, Yahweh, but the general term for deity, 'Elohim] came mightily upon him, and he prophesied among them. And when all who knew him before saw how he prophesied with the prophets, the people said to one another, "What has come over the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets

Therefore it became a proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" (10:9-12)

1 Samuel 19:18-24 repeats the proverb in a more dramatic setting, with even stronger emphasis on the contagious nature of the seizure and with a fuller description of its manifestation. Saul, this time in pursuit of the outlawed David, sends a company of men to take him forcefully from his position of refuge with Samuel and a band of prophets, who, though perhaps Israelites, exist in the fashion of ecstatic Canaanite bands of prophets. When Saul's men saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as head over them, the spirit of God [again 'Elohim] came upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. (19:20)

Two subsequent squads are dispatched by Saul, neither returning since both companies are seized by the same contagion. Now Saul himself comes, and the spirit of God ['Elohim] came upon him also, and as he went he prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah. And he too stripped off his clothes, and he too prophesied before Samuel, and lay naked all that day and all that night. Hence it is said, "is Saul also among the prophets?" (19:23 f.)

We cannot be sure of the relationship between these two narratives in 1 Samuel 10 and 19. In literary-critical judgment, it has been common to see the second as a duplicate, and perhaps an historically dubious explanation of the proverb, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" We ourselves see no reason why both passages may not be deemed to portray the phenomenon of Canaanite prophetism as in that form it began to be appropriated by Israelites. We shall see how radically the Canaanite institution is transformed in its final adaptation in Israel.

For the sake of comprehending that very transformation, we will do well to understand this form of the Canaanite institution. We note first that the phenomenon of prophecy is induced. Samuel says to Saul, "You will meet a band of prophets coming down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre before them. prophesying" (10:5). Secondly, it produces a total transformation of personality. "You shall prophesy with them and be turned into another man" (10:6). It is further, created and sustained as a group phenomenon; and to "prophesy" (from the same root as nabi') primarily denotes ecstatic behavior, if this state or action of prophesying is initially induced, it is capable of spread by contagion. And it is popularly interpreted as indicative of seizure by the deity: the prevailing (but not exclusive - 10:6 reads "spirit of Yahweh ) term is 'Elohim.

This kind of prophesying indigenous to Canaan's culture (we will meet it again in the ninth century brilliantly described in the Elijah narratives) is certainly among the antecedents of the classical prophetism which emerges out of prophetic Yahwism. The roots of the great Yahweh prophets are sunk even deeper into the broad culture of the ancient Middle Fast. Prophet-like persons appear in the Mari texts from the middle Euphrates in the eighteenth century B.C. - a thousand years before Amos. But . . .even if we assume a historical connection between the messenger of God in the Mari texts and the prophet of the Old Testament, there is a clear difference between the two. This difference lies not in the manner of the appearance, but in the content of that which is announced as the divine message. At Mari the message deals with cult and political matters of very limited and ephemeral importance. Any comparison with the content of the prophetical books is out of the question. The prophetic literature deals with guilt arid punishment, reality and unreality, present and future of the Israelite people as chosen by God for a special and unique service, the declaration of the great and moving contemporary events in the world as part of a process which, together with the future issue of that process, is willed by God.²

What Israel freely borrows from all her environment she radically transforms. The distant antecedents at Mari as well as the more immediate antecedents in ecstatic, contagious Canaanite prophetism differ from the prophets of Israel drastically. And the root of the difference is, of course, Yahweh, in whose name Old Testament prophetism always speaks, "who alone disposes of the great powers of world history, and whose will all powers and movement of history serve."³

Premonarchic Prophets

Five prominent figures from premonarchic times are awarded the title of prophet by tradition - Abraham (Gen. 20:7); Aaron (Ex. 7:1); Miriam and Deborah (both nebi'ah, the feminine form of the noun nabi', Ex. 15:20 and Judg. 4:4); and of course Moses (Deut. 34:10, 18:18; cf. Num. 11:26-29 and 12:5-8). A brief look at why these five were so designated increases our understanding of the place, function, and nature of the prophets in the history of the kingdoms.

The patriarchal saga, as we have seen, imputes to Abraham a sense of divinely ordained history which in Israel could only he postexodus. As the person of this first patriarch tends in tradition to take typological form, Abraham is able to accept in faith (Gen. 15:6) the divine promises of Genesis 12:1-3,7. He is seen in the maturing tradition as acutely aware of Yahweh's purposive impingement on history. And more than this, he is himself called to play an essential role therein. It is inevitable that in Israel such a figure should be given the ascription "prophet."

The case of Aaron is perhaps less significant, but it instructs us no less in comprehending the nabi' of monarchic Israel-Judah.

Yahweh said to Moses, "See I make you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet." (Ex. 7:1, P)

Again, tradition's linking of an early name with a subsequently developed Israelite role presupposes an understanding of prophetism in primary terms of Yahweh's participating. purposive relationship to history. This instance further defines the prophet as one who articulates and proclaims the sense and meaning of the divine impingement, a definition further confirmed in Exodus 4:14 ff. (E) when Yahweh responds to Moses' objection that he is no speaker:

Is there not Aaron. . . . I know that he can speak well. . .And you shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth.

. . .He shall speak for you to the people; and he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall be to him as God.

Miriam and Deborah (see Ex. 15:21 and Judg. 5) come to acquire the designation because both play eloquent and dramatic roles in celebration of what Yahweh is doing in concrete relationship to the historical existence of Israel.

It may be significant that Moses is never called a prophet in the J-work, the tenth century Yahwist's creative, but largely editorial, composition; and on this continuing question of primary "documents" a reiterative, summary word is in order. We have consistently regarded J as a concrete entity, the (probably) written work of an individual. Adequate grounds have never existed for the repudiation of D (Deuteronomy, plus the work of DH) and P as for the most part identifiable strata produced, however, corporately as the work more of "schools." And E, we submit, continues to require symbolization, whether or not it ever existed originally as a separate and roughly parallel narrative source to J, as simply that hexateuchal material later than J, earlier than D or P, and reflecting the provenance of the Northern kingdom.⁴

The term prophet certainly was in use in the Yahwist's day (as witness, again, the authentic, "Saul" proverb, 1 Sam. 10:12 and 19:24), but the function and practice of prophetism remained still by and large alien, that is, Canaanite. It is, of course, another matter in E, which reflects the period about 850-750, and betrays every evidence of stemming from Israel's early prophetic circles.⁵ In the various E material Moses consistently appears not merely in the role of prophet, but prophet par excellence:

And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and wonders which Yahweh sent him to do in the land of Egypt . . . and for all the mighty power and all the great and terrible deeds which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel. (Deut. 34:10 ff., E)

The prophetism which Moses represents is of a special sort [as understood by E]; he is much more the performing prophet, actively intervening in events. . . In the last analysis, indeed, Moses towers above all other prophets (Num. 12:7 f.). His charisma was so powerful that even a part of it, and that itself further divided among seventy elders, threw the recipient out of his normal senses and transferred him into a state of ecstasy (Num. 11:25ff.). Even mediation and the intercessory is here (Ex. 18:19; 32:11-13; Num. 12:11); but again we see this quality heightened, augmented in the extreme: in order to save Israel, Moses was prepared to become anathema for the people (Ex. 32:32: cf. Rom. 9:3).⁶

In the deuteronomic perspective Moses is the model prophet. Here is Moses reporting what Yahweh has told him:

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. (Deut. 18:18)

In the century or two separating E and D a marked change has occurred in the function, and therefore the concept, of the prophet in Israel: by the seventh century, emphasis has passed from the prophet's deed to the prophet's word. The basic character of prophetism, however, remains the same - that is, concern with and the demonstration of the critical impingement of divine life upon human history. If E and D perpetrate a terminological anachronism in ascribing to Moses the title of prophet, the essential identification is nevertheless sound. Prophetism was - and always is- to confront man with God-in-history. Timelessly, prophetism is the bringing of Israel up from Egypt into existence under God.⁷

Sometime in the second half of the eighth century, but before the destruction of North Israel (722-721), the prophet Isaiah envisaged a catastrophic event to be inflicted upon Judah by the might of Assyria. Contemplating that tragedy (and Judah was in fact severely ravaged by Assyria just before the turn of the century), Isaiah declared to King Ahaz of Judah,

Yahweh will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah! (Isa. 7:17)

Israel's loss of order and meaning began in the very structure of the David-Zion covenant; took explosive, catastrophic form "the day that Ephraim departed from Judah"; and was climaxed, in seeming hopelessness, first in the North's and subsequently the South's (587) destruction.

We have the story only as the story was understood and interpreted in core Yahwism, in what we have broadly called prophetism. This is how, in the Yahweh faith, the whole tragic sequence was comprehended. The order which Yahweh would create out of the people Israel is made chaos by Israel's rebelliousness, by her obstinate refusal to assume the form and character and identity of the Yahweh covenant. That which Yahweh purposed for Israel from of old was thus frustrated but not Yahweh himself, not his power and his Word. Israel's unfaith brings her back again to the formless and the void, to the meaningless and the chaotic. She knows at length a figurative "return to the land of Egypt" (Hos. 11:5). But all of this deterioration of form, this negation and destructive judgment, is seen as the positive work of Yahweh's word toward that original purpose - the creation of a covenant people and through them the blessing of all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1 ff.)

The Yahwist as Prophet

We very briefly surveyed the premonarchic prophets in the preceding section. Among early prophets of the united kingdom, the Yahwist surely has a place. We have already presumed to place the Yahwist within rather narrow limits - somewhere between David's mature years and the death of Solomon. We predicate in the Yahwist a prophetic historian who addressed himself to the question of the existing form and significance of the entity, Israel. But to comprehend this entity of Israel as she is, and to give expression to her meaningful existence, he must articulate all in her past that he deems relevant to the present, and indeed (he does this, of course, in rare, almost involuntary bursts) he must also speak of that to which the present meaning of Israel ultimately points (so, again, Gen. 12:3).

We recall that the creative prophetism of the Yahwist inheres in his still discernible basic organization of the Hexateuch. We assess and affirm his role as prophet not from what is conveyed biographically, since there is not a single word about him, nor from the content of his independent utterances, since no oracles or commentary of his is preserved, but exclusively from his inspired selection, juxtaposition, and broadly conceived arrangement of varied existent materials. By means of this fundamentally editorial process, the Yahwist prophetically proclaimed Yahweh's critical impingement on history, and brilliantly delineated Israel's form and meaning in terms of her emergence from Egypt into existence under God.⁹

The judgment is surely wrong that "it was Hellenism that created the idea of ecumenical history."¹⁰The Greek language and hellenistic culture provided the term and a splendid vessel for ecumenical history. But essential ecumenicity inheres, if in quietness and subtlety, in the Decalogue; and it receives its first emphatic description of meaning in the Yahwist's work in the tenth century B.C., a work which proclaims the central thesis of God's impingement on Israel, to be sure, but at the same time - such is the historical form of Israel and the meaning of her life - on the world, the whole household of God. The primeval story (see Chapter 2) and its structural relationship to the patriarchal stories and all that follows proclaims the Yahwist's sweeping ecumenical perspective.

The Yahwist's place is sure in the story of Old Testament prophetism and the roster of the prophets. Indeed, he renders more credible and comprehensible the roles of Samuel, Nathan, and Elijah, as well as the classical prophets from Amos to Second Isaiah.

I 17-2 Kg 13

Samuel whose career begins in the eleventh century, Nathan and Ahijah in the tenth, and Elijah, Micaiah, and Elisha in the ninth - these six prophets dominate the history of preclassical prophetism. Although they differ radically from one another and appear in widely varied contexts, these early prophets evidence in two significant ways their place in the movement of prophetism from premonarchic times to the decay and collapse of monarchy and on into the days of Jewish reconstruction. First, they address themselves powerfully and sometimes passionately to the contemporary scene in the characteristic prophetic conviction of Yahweh's impingement upon the sociopolitical institution. All six are intimately related to the life of the state and are effectively, if not always decisively, involved in crucial contemporary events; and all six function as prophets to kings.

The second characteristic of the pre-Amos prophets, which sets them apart from the prevailing pattern of contagious-ecstatic group prophecy, is their relationship and responsibility to the debar-Yahweh, the Word of Yahweh. In all these prophets, the address to history takes its content from the Word, and the divine impingement upon history is made articulate and is interpreted by the same Word.

As we have observed, the Word, through Samuel, is responsible for the establishment of monarchy, first tentatively under Saul and then securely and full of promise under David. Through Nathan the word not only interprets the reign of David but decisively determines the course and nature of that reign. Ahijah and the Word effect the kingdom's tragic rupture. The next fifty years - from about 925-875, from Jeroboam and Rehoboam to Omri and Jehoshaphat - were on the whole bleak years in both kingdoms and apparently without prophets of outstanding stature.

Under Omri in Israel and Jehoshaphat in Judah a substantial measure of security was regained in the sister kingdoms. Concord was achieved within the family, and relationships with nearby neighbors, except Damascus-Syria, ranged from tolerable to good. Jehoshaphat enjoyed a long reign (873-849, according to the Albright-Bright chronology), and the four-member Omri dynasty survived from 876 until Jehu's bloody revolution in 842.

Elisha the prophet was a younger contemporary of Elijah (1 Kings 19:19-21; 2 Kings 2-13) who died during the reign of Joash, Jehu's grandson (837-800). During the second half of the ninth century, especially under the rule of Jehu, Jehoahaz. and Joash, the Northern kingdom led an increasingly miserable existence brought on by her own internal weakness and the ravaging attacks of Syria (note, for example, 2 Kings 5:7, and the Syrian siege by Samaria, 6:25). In the closing years of Joash's reign the North was almost destroyed, but was brilliantly, if briefly and superficially, revived in the long reign of Jeroboam II (786-746), the fourth and strongest member of the Jehu dynasty.

Now, like Samuel and Nathan and Ahijah in the tenth century, Elijah, Micaiah, and Elisha are instrumental in the ninth century in bringing the Word of Yahweh into history, in conflict with and in judgment upon the life of the king, and in effective encounter with the life of Israel.

The Word is at its weakest in Elisha. Indeed, of the six prophets in the preclassical succession, Elisha appears in the least substantial form. This is not to deny his historical reality and his powerful influence on the events of his time. The cycle of stories collected around his name and exploits testifies to his impact on Israel over a long prophetic career; but elements in the cycle partake of the stuff of sheer legend far more than in the shorter Elijah cycle (1 Kings 17-19,21; 2 Kings 2 and even 2 Kings 1 are of different origin).This is true even of one of the theologically most profound stories in the cycle - the story of Naaman's leprosy in 2 Kings 5. The narrative presents insuperable historical problems, but speaks with inspiration to the theme of faith's simplicity and the perennial human problem of the validation of faith. Other stories of the cycle, even less credible historically, are unfortunately at the same time aesthetically or theologically repulsive. One wonders whether the Elisha cycle may not betray efforts to assert the "superiority" of Elisha over Elijah. The only two direct parallels in the two cycles strongly suggest this. The role of the widow her son, and the prophet is far more realistic in the two episodes of 1 Kings 17 (vv. 8-16; 17-24) than in 2 Kings 4 (vv. 1-7; 18-27). "Sons of the prophets" appear prominently in the Elisha cycle, a circle of prophets over which Elisha presided on occasion. Are these disciples in part responsible for creating out of their prophetic master a figure possessing fantastic magical powers?

The phrase, "the Word of Yahweh" (and the corresponding verbal phrase, "thus says Yahweh ) appears in the Elisha cycle. We do not doubt the prophetic authenticity of the historical Elisha, but again, the historical person as well as the prophetic Word are largely obscured in the present cycle of Elisha Stories. The most decisive event for which Elisha is responsible is the anointing of Jehu as king (2 Kings 9). Elisha and his "young man, the prophet" act upon and pronounce what theyrepresent to be the Word of Yahweh (9:3,6) with radically effective and appallingly violent results (2 Kings 9:21-40:27). Quite properly, as it seems to us, classical prophetism in the person of Hosea (1:4) subsequently repudiates Jehu and his whole rebellion, and implicitly, therefore, denies that this could be the responsibility of the true Word of Yahweh.

We see the Word of Yahweh imposed upon the king earlier in the eighth century in that brilliant scene of 2 Kings 22 immediately preceding the death of Ahab. The Word through Micaiah works its historical effects, and another preclassical prophet is instrumental in the efficacious juxtaposition of divine life and divine judgment upon human events. Incidentally, the narrative attests the official court adoption in Israel of the originally Canaanite form of group prophecy.¹¹

Elijah. 1 Kg 17-19, 21¹²

Like David (in 2 Sam. 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2), Elijah found a brilliant narrator, whose original brief account of a few episodes from the prophet's life has unfortunately been augmented with some well-intentioned but tedious or offensive details. The narrator wrote with economy of words, as witness the three succinct, eloquent scenes of 1 Kings 17. His use of the Hebrew language was fresh and original: a surprisingly large number of words and forms are unique. His portrayal of character is powerful in its simplicity and subtlety. Nowhere surpassed in the Old Testament are, Elijah himself; Ahab, in briefer scenes but especially in chapter 21; even Jezebel, especially in the line omitted in the Hebrew manuscripts but authentically preserved in the Greek translation, the Septuagint, at 19:1 - "If you are Elijah, I am Jezebel!" The narrator wrote also with humor, profound sensitivity, and theological insight. His portrayal of the explosively voluble Obadiah (18:7-16) is a masterpiece of humor. The depth of his "psychological" penetration of the prophet himself is astonishing (ch. 19). And only a man himself nurtured and articulate in the tradition of prophetic Yahwism could record Elijah's racy, earthy verbal devastation of Baal (18:27) and Yahweh's rebuke of Elijah in the climactic Horeb scene (19:9-18), unquestionably simpler, more direct, and even more moving in its original form. And finally, he also intimately comprehended what Elijah comprehended - that the honor of Yahweh in the Yahweh community involves a theological ethic which not even the king may violate (ch. 21).¹³

In the prophet Elijah, and certainly also in his narrator, both in the ninth century, the prophetic understanding of the Word of Yahweh has come to full, conscious maturity. Perhaps Elijah and his narrator would not have put it as the Second Isaiah did about three centuries later, but his words express what was essentially their own understanding of the Word-with-power: the entity not merely verbal and descriptive but also instrumental, by its very nature containing the resources for its own accomplishment and fulfillment:

"For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it. "(Isa. 55:10-11)

We note in the Elijah narratives the relative frequency of the term, "the Word": 1 Kings 17:2,5,8,16,24; 18:1 (and vv. 31 and 36, which may not be from the original narrator, however); 21:17 (and v. 28, also possibly secondary). Note also that, as in the records of later classical prophetism, the Word here conveys the sense of a formula whose nature and potency are widely known. Note further that the Word is associated not only with the king but with the people as well. It creates and terminates the drought as a judgment upon people and king (chs. 17,18). It is surely instrumental in the prophet's indictment of the Carmel assembly (18:20 f.), "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?" It is, of course, the Word which sends the prophet back from Horeb (19:15 ff.) to minister to Israel in the good company of multitudes still faithful to Yahweh.¹⁴ And it is the same Word again confronting and judging the king for murder and theft - thus says Yahweh, "Have you killed, and also taken possession!" (21:19).

Although Elijah belongs to the company of preclassical prophets, more than any other in the company he anticipates in two regards that succession of prophets beginning with Amos. Elijah alone of all prophets properly belongs to both groups. In Elijah the Word has attained substantially full prophetic definition and form. Through him the Word finds its mature expression and application, not merely or even principally to the king, but to the nation, the whole people of the covenant. Yahweh's Word now impinges decisively upon the history of Israel with such force as to involve all history, and upon the royal house with such intensity as to judge all men. Jesus, among others, condensed the Old Testament prophetic ethic (quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus) when he declared that "all the law and the prophets" depend upon love of God and love of neighbor (Matt.22:35-40; cf. Mark 12:28-31). But in reality he reached back ultimately to Elijah, in whom these two propositions find impassioned expression, for the first time in biblical record, in a single life. The divine life confronts and decisively qualifies the life of history. To repudiate Yahweh's lordship and his historical impingement ( The people of Israel have forsaken you ), to delimit it or run in the face of it ( Have you killed and also taken possession ), to attempt to compromise with it ( How long will you go limping with two different opinions ) - all of this is not folly but unqualified disaster. Thus to deny the Word of Yahweh is to invite loss of meaning and fulfillment and the imposition of chaos and death.

Elijah's address was of course to his own people and his own time; but in his passionate intensity, all men and all history are implicitly embraced. It remains the task and function of classical prophetism to make concrete and specific the decisive involvement of Yahweh in historical existence.

1. In the Annals of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727). See James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed., Princeton, 1955, p. 284.

2. M. Noth, "History and the Word of God in the Old Testament," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XXXII, no. 2 (March, 1950), 200 ff.

3. Ibid.

4. Cf. G. von Rad. Genesis, trans. J. Marks (from Das Erste Buch Mose, in the series Das Alte Testament Deutsch, vol. Il) Philadelphia, 1961, pp. 23 ff., 27ff.

5. Cf. G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, Munich, 1957, vol. I, p. 292.

6. Ibid.

7. See E. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, Baton Rouge, 1956. p. 428: "The Moses of the prophets is not a figure of the past through whose mediation Israel was established once and for all as the people under Yahweh the King, but the first of a line of prophets who in the present, under the revelatory word of Yahweh, continued to bring Israel up from Egypt into existence under God." See further B. D. Napier, "Prophet, Prophetism," The interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Nashville, 1962.

8. Cf. Pss. 2, 20, 45, 72, 110.

9. See above. Chapter 2. See also von Rad, Genesis, op. cit., pp. 27 ff.; and Voegelin, op. cit., especially chap. 4, "Israel and History."

10. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, p. 32.

11. The contention that the account of 1 Kings 22 is not authentic and, at best, mistakenly assigned to Ahab's reign is unconvincing. See M. Noth, History of Israel, trans. S. Godman (from Geschichte Israels, 2nd ed.), New York, 1958, pp. 178 ff.

12. Cf. 2 Kings 1-2.

13. If the character of Ahab comes off rather poorly in the Elijah narratives (1 Kings 17-19, 21), 1 Kings 20 and 22 return the impression of an administrator of considerable ability and power and a man of stature. Assyrian records offer one item of significant support. Shalmaneser III (859-824) fought a battle in 853 against a coalition of smaller Western states including Israel. Since he does not claim to have destroyed this alliance (see Pritchard, op. cit., pp. 278 f.) historians have assumed that the allies gained at least a draw. Shalmaneser's own records report that Ahab supplied the largest corps of chariots; and it may be that he was the moving force behind the alliance. 1 Kings 20, probably before this battle of Qarqar, suggests precisely Ahab's long-term strategy aiming at such an alliance with Syria. 1 Kings 22, which includes the narrative of Ahab's heroic death, makes clear that the alliance did not long survive the battle of Qarqar.

14. This is against the interpretation of some who read in the seven thousand faithful in Israel an early insinuation of the "remnant" idea.