The Elisha-Hazael Paradigm and the Kingdom of Israel by Hadi Ghantous

Author:Hadi Ghantous [Ghantous, Hadi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General
ISBN: 9781317544357
Google: Q_bOBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-10-14T16:07:56+00:00

10.1 THE BOOK OF KINGS AND THE DEUTERONOMISTIC HISTORY

The cycle of Elijah (1 Kgs 17:1–2 Kgs 2:18) and the reign of King Ahaziah of Israel (1 Kgs 22:51–2 Kgs 1:18) span the divide between the two books of Kings and reveal the artificiality of the division in the Christian Bible. The division of Kings is not attested in the Hebrew tradition before the sixteen century ce. It first appears in print in Daniel Bomberg’s Biblia Rabbinica (1516–17), under the influence of the Septuagint (LXX) and of the Vulgata (Holloway 1992). The LXX combines Samuel and Kings under one single title Basileion “Reigns” in four books.

In response to a volume titled Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), the German theologians Albrecht Alt, Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth and other colleagues developed the “history” catchword and crafted a confrontation between “myth” and “history” to counter Nazi propaganda (Balzer 2005). Gerhard von Rad claimed that the account of the succession to the throne of David (1 Sam. 9-20; 1 Kgs 1–2) is “the oldest most complete example of Israelite historiography,” (quoted by Blum 2007: 27). Against the notion that the Hebrew Bible is a collection of myths, the book of Kings was sold as the centrepiece of the “historical” writings of the Bible.

In 1943, in the thick of the Second World War, Martin Noth went a step further with the suggestion that the book of Kings was part of a larger work, the Deuteronomistic History (DH), DtrG in German (Deuteronomistiche Geschichtswerk). According to Noth, the Deuteronomistic History (Deut. 1 to 2 Kgs 25) was composed slightly after the destruction of Jerusalem, during the Neo-Babylonian era, around 562 BCE (Noth 1967: 12). For Noth, the whole DH, except for some later additions, was the work of a single historian or rather theologian.

The genius of Martin Noth’s hypothesis resides not so much in the arguments upon which it is based but in the echo it produced on the German Zeitgeist after the Second World War. The DH provided German theologians with the means to come to term with the defeat of the third Reich. Writing as Allied forces were bombing Germany and flattening the dream of a great German Empire, Noth identified with a figure of his own making, a Judean scribe contemplating the smoking ruin of Jerusalem and looking for ways to overcome the disaster. To come to terms with YHWH’s obvious refusal to save his city from the Babylonian onslaught, Noth pictured his historian as looking back to the past to realize that YHWH had long foretold the disaster. Nebuchadnezzar’s victory did not signify the defeat of YHWH by Marduk. Far from it, it confirmed the faithfulness of YHWH and the truthfulness of the prophets he had repeatedly sent to his people. Noth thus imagined the DH as a work of consolation, a piece of early historical genius that was bound to produce a peculiar resonance when the Germanic Nebuchadnezzar committed suicide. After 1945, Noth played an essential role in the rehabilitation of German theology.

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