Studies in Antiquity
King David:
Sacred and Secular in Biblical Times
E Bruce Brooks and A Taeko Brooks
The rise of the Kingdom was the great event in the history of the ancient Hebrews, and its fall was their great catastrophe: it meant the failure of the promise of God to David, and the end of the worldly aspirations of the people of Judah. The Biblical texts which record these events were written over centuries, and most of them reveal a process of growth and doctrinal adjustment during that time. This book follows those changes, both in in social forms (increasing emphasis on law, with greater prominence for women) and in doctrine (the ongoing conflict between the priestly and the kingly interest, the sacred and the secular). It follows the Promise Narrative, which links the first contacts with the Land of Canaan to the later Conquest, and finally to the Exile. Canaan itself, the people who were there first, figure prominently.
Many now regard all the Pentateuch texts as post-Exilic. The finding of this book is that part of this material is early pre-Davidic; a substantial later part is anticipations of the Kingship; latest of all are a few passages added after the Exile, to explain the Exile. To untangle these texts, the standard methods of philology are used: identifying interpolations and determining the directionality of related texts.
This book is not an Introduction to the Old Testament. The passages it does include are touched on only briefly, and even there, the treatment is suggestive rather than exhaustive. What it intends to suggest is a what a historical reading of the Bible would look like. We hope to see, in some detail, what was going on. What are these people up to? Out of what materials do they construct, and then reconstruct, their stories? These are the questions on which we focus.
Front Matter
Cover
Orientation, 11
Canaanite Tradition, 33
The Northern Patriarchs, 49
Out of Egypt, 69
The Laws of Exodus, 81
Leviticus and Numbers, 95
Deuteronomy, 111
Into the Land, 139
Three Kings, 157
Two Kingdoms, 177
Exile and Return, 193
The Parting of the Ways, 213
End Matter, 237
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