The Invention of Monotheist Ethics by Millgram Hillel I

Author:Millgram, Hillel I.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761849254
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

1. See Chapter 23.

2. See Chapter 24.

3. See Chapter 25.

4. See Chapter 24.

5. See Chapter 25, especially note 67.

6. Another matter occupying the king at this time was the long-term project to increasingly professionalize the army. This involved enlarging the size of the regular army and the contingents of foreign mercenaries, and the building of a chariot corps. This may have been, in part, a response to the growing unrest in Israel’s population that made the reserve forces increasingly unreliable. On the one hand this professionalization removed the burden of periodic military service from the public (though this was probably replaced by periods of unpaid labor—the levy or corvee—more on this later). On the other hand, it was preparing the tool that would enable David’s successor to ruthlessly oppress the population and to crush any public unrest. See Chapter 25, especially note 18.

7. There may have been other projects of which we know nothing.

8. One important purpose of taking capital cases out of local hands was to stamp out the deeply embedded tradition of blood feuds. In this the reform ultimately proved successful, but only after the passage of many generations. The institution of “The Redeemer of the Blood” was only relegated to the realm of a historic memory towards the end of the first Commonwealth.

9. This is based on Solomon’s administrative districts. My assumption is that the first stages of this reorganization originated in David’s time, and that Solomon simply brought the process to its conclusion.

10. This administrative reorganization was never applied to the Kingdom of Judah, only to the Kingdom of Israel. Was this discrimination in favor of Judah, not disturbing the status quo, due to favoritism shown to David’s home tribe, or to the danger of explosive resistance, or simply to the fact that Judah, a mini-kingdom comprising a single tribe, was too poor and sparsely populated to be worth the effort? We do not know.

11. The dire warnings of the prophet Samuel, as to the price the population would pay for their demand for a king, were now being fulfilled (see Chapter 5). It may be that the author secretly sympathized with Samuel’s anti-monarchic views: perhaps that is why she gave them such prominent treatment. In a sense, all of 2 Samuel is a description of the working out of Samuel’s grim foresight into how things would develop.

12. See Chapter 25: “The Economic Consequences of Empire.”

13. Reading with Q; MT reads Absalom provided him self with.

14. The runners served several purposes: they cleared a way for the chariot through the narrow and crowded streets of ancient cities, they acted as bodyguards and they displayed the exalted rank of the man who rode in the chariot. Egyptian pictures show some of the runners as being armed with clubs, possibly to beat pedestrians out of the way when necessary.

15. The writer of the Book of Kings, in a very similar situation, underlines David’s permissive attitude with a heavy hand, inserting the remark: Now his father had never restrained him in his entire life by saying: “Why have you done this?” (1 Kings 1:6).

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