A Literary Approach to 1 and 2nd Kings/Melekiym

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[Why is Israel’s sacred scriptures included their national history where their failures and successes are recorded for all the world to read?  Imagine students and readers of the Hebrew Scriptures expecting to learn about God and how to live His way and yet they get far more than just laws and commandments, but a record of the interaction and communicationbetween God and His chosen people.  The book of Kings complement the other historical narratives such as Joshua, Samuel, Chronicles.  Here again is another commentary from our MUST READ/MUST OWN:  The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Reformatted and highlighted for this post.]

• a selection of details,
  

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• the imposition of a pattern of organization,
• and the expression of the historian’s point of view.

For readers who wish to uncover ”what really happened,” such elements of deliberate organization are a barrier to be penetrated and discarded, for they only obscure whatever historical reality can be recovered. But for those of us who feel that the truth of the text lies in the telling, the analysis of the historiographer’s narrative strategies is a matter of primary importance.

• For further details about Solomon we are referred to ”the book of the acts of Solomon” (1 Kings 11:41),
• and for the affairs of state of subsequent rulers to “the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah” (1 Kings 14:29) or to a similar work about the kings of Israel (1 King 14:19).
• Each king is judged either good or bad in black-and-white terms, according to whether or not he “did right” or “did evil” in the sight of the Lord.

This evaluation is not reflective—

• of the well-being of the nation,
• of the king’s success or failure in war,
• or of the moral climate of the times,

—-but rather of the state of cultic worship during his reign.

• Those kings who shun idolatry and enact religious reforms are singled out for praise;
• those who encourage pagan practices are denounced.

So important is this criterion that even a positive evaluation may be qualified by the king’s failure to do away with worship at shrines outside Jerusalem.

• Thus Joash of Judah “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord” but is censured by the narrator because “the high places were not taken away” (2 Kings 12:2-3).
• Hezekiah, on the other hand, is singled out for praise because of the program of cultic reorganization which he sponsored (2 Kings 18:1-6).

• The first king of the North, Jeroboam, breaks with the political and religious authority of Jerusalem and establishes alternative shrines in the old cult centers of Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12:25-33).
• He is censured severely for having had the audacity to reject the primacy of the Temple in Jerusalem and, worse, for having installed a golden calf as a cultic object in each place.
• The narrator is largely unconcerned with the political and social motivations of Jeroboam’s revolt;
  • he and all his successors are depicted as unrepentant idolators of the worst kind,
  • who lead the entire nation into sin and, ultimately, into destruction and captivity.

• Joshua,
• Judges,
• Samuel,
• and Kings,

—betrays the influence of a school of thought which embraced the central tenet of Deuteronomy:

• Israel’s presence in the land derives from its covenantal relationship with God,
• the breaching of which will result in the people’s destruction and exile (see Deut. 28).

Other themes which reflect a strong Deuteronomic influence include—-

• the ideal of the centralization of cultic worship in Jerusalem
• and an intensive polemic, couched in a distinctive rhetoric, against idolatry.

These concerns stand behind the criticism of the many kings who allow worship to continue in the “high places” and underlie the condemnation of all Northern kings as well.

• There is no single figure, like Joshua, whose life serves as the organizing principle for the book.
• Nor can we isolate a few major protagonists whose interaction, like that of Saul and David in 1 Samuel, creates a dramatic framework.
• The overriding unity of Kings derives both from its presentation of a continuous history of Israel’s monarchy from Solomon to Zedekiah and from the formulaic language with which the reign of each king is outlined and evaluated by the narrator.
• But at the same time there are unexpected changes in the type of material presented, with sudden shifts from dry, annalistic writing concerned with genealogy and chronology to sophisticated stories with elaborate plot and character development.
• Judges bears some resemblance to Kings, with its cyclical pattern of oppression and salvation spanning two hundred years.This is a work which emphasizes the inexorability of that fate by its use of repetitive, stereotypical language and by a continuous demonstration of the reliability of prophecy.
  • But whereas Judges spins out of control toward the end, the collapse of its literary structure mirroring the breakdown of authority in society,
  • Kings marches steadily toward the terrible fate of the Northern Kingdom, then of the kingdom of Judah.

• Chapters 1-11 of 1 Kings describe the United Monarchy, primarily during the reign of Solomon;
• 1 Kings 12-2 Kings 17 relates the synchronistic history of the divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel down to the destruction of the latter in 722 B.C.E.;
• and 2 Kings 18-25 recounts the subsequent fortunes of Judah through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.

But the thematic emphases of the book suggest an additional, chiastic structure:

• desecration by Manasseh (2 Kings 21),
• renovation by Josiah (chaps. 22-23),
• and destruction by the Babylonians (chap. 25).
• The description of the despoliation of the Temple vessels in 2 Kings 25:13-17 corresponds to the order of their manufacture in 1 Kings 7.

• The Northern Kingdom is established by Jeroboam,At the center of B is the account of his building the infamous golden calves, which are strongly condemned by narrator and prophet alike (12:25-33).
  • who is first acclaimed as a divinely chosen alternative to Solomon’s son (1 Kings11:35)
  • but who becomes the very model of the apostate king.
• In the corresponding section, B’, Israel’s ultimate fate mirrors that of Judah;The link between B and B’ is made explicit by the explanation of Israel’s destruction as the result of the idolatry begun by Jeroboam (2 Kings 17:16-18).
  • it is destroyed by a foreign power from the east,
  • and its people are exiled to Assyria.

• This central section details the rise and fall of the Baal cult in Israel together with its royal patrons, the family of Omri, Ahab, and Jezebel;
• it concludes with a short coda on the demise of Baal in Judah as well (2 Kings 11-12).

The exceptional length of D is out of proportion to the period of narrated time—eighteen chapters for about forty years.

• Elijah,
• Elisha,
• and others

—in their successful fight against the idolatry sponsored by the crown.

• the early stories of D depict the establishment of Baal worship in the Northern Kingdom (1 Kings 16:31-32, 18:4),
• and the closing chapters describe its violent eradication in Israel (2 Kings 9-10)
• and subsequent reforms in Judah (chaps. 11-12).

Closer to the center of D are—

• Elijah’s commission to anoint the leaders who will assist in this removal (1 Kings 19:15-18)
• and Elisha’s execution of this task (2 Kings 8:7-15, 9:1-3).
• The midpoint of D is 2 Kings 2, which tells of Elijah’s ascent to heaven and his succession by Elisha.

Although royal succession is frequently described in Kings,

• the people’s perception of the king as insensitive to their demands,
• divine disapproval in 14:21-24,
• and the narrator’s implicit linkage of sin with historical misfortune.

• but he is ever obedient to the prophet’s commands,
• gathering together the people (18:19),
• eating and drinking (18:41),
• and preparing his chariot (18:44).

In 1 Kings 20 he complies with the oracles of an unnamed prophet (vv.13, 28) and is rewarded with successive victories over his Aramean enemies. But the most surprising moment of obedience follows Elijah’s vitriolic denunciation of the king in the next chapter (21:20-26), where Ahab rends his clothing and fasts in a profound display of repentance. The narrator underscores the sincerity of the king’s behavior by citing God’s approval in direct speech to Elijah, which includes a stay of execution till the next generation (vv. 28-29). What is the role of such servility and contrition in the portrayal of this wickedest of wicked kings?

• The first hint of this occurs in 1 Kings 18:4; the persecution of the prophets of the Lord may be attributed to Jezebel, but we hear nothing of Ahab’s reactions.
• Further, Ahab’s failure to reply to his wife’s threat to execute Elijah in 19:2 detracts from the sincerity of his support for the prophet in the previous chapter.
• The pattern continues in chapter 20, where Ahab accedes to his enemy’s appeal for mercy and incurs the wrath of the anonymous prophet in verses 35-43.

• in 1 Kings 18, Elijah the prophet is concerned with repentance; he seeks to turn the hearts of Israel back to God and executes only the prophets of Baal.
• Jehu the king, on the other hand, is motivated by political considerations; in 2 Kings 10 he destroys all those who worship Baal, for they are potential enemies of the new regime.

• “he left him none remaining” (10:11);
• “neither left he any of them” (10:14);
• “Go in, and slay them; let none come forth” (10:25).

All this bloodshed seems to stimulate Jehu’s appetite in a literal way as well.The unusually graphic description of Jezebel’s death—“So they threw her down, and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses, and they trampled her” (9:33 [AR])—is followed immediately by: “Then he went inside, and he ate and drank” (9:34 [AT]).

• Despite the narrator’s overall disapproval of Joram, he portrays him as a wounded war hero—“Joram and all Israel had been protecting Ramoth-gilead against Hazael, king of Aram” (9:14 [AT])—In 10:1-11 he dupes the guardians of Ahab’s children into killing their wards in the vain hope of saving their own necks. Jehu’s mistreatment of the remains of the victims violates the biblical ethic of proper treatment of the dead (Deut. 21:22-23, 2 Sam. 21:10-14).
  • whereas Jehu takes advantage of Joram’s infirmity and brazenly shoots him dead with no warning.
• His self-righteous condemnation of the elders for a crime which he himself has forced them to commit appears as a weak attempt to justify his own behavior: “O, you righteous people! True I conspired against my own master and killed him, but who has slain all these?” (10:9 [AT]).
• In the brief account of Jehu’s attack on the kinsmen of Ahaziah of Judah (10:12-14), the victims’ own words emphasize their peaceful intentions: “We are going to pay our respects [shalom] to the king and to the children of the queen” (v. 13 [AT]). But as with Joram and Jezebel, the mention of shalom is the kiss of death.
• The lack of congruence between Jehu’s words and his actions leads us to sympathize with the victims, at the expense of the “hero.”
• His command “Take them alive” (v. 14) at first appears to respect the claims of the Judeans and to signal an end to the violence. But the immediate mention of their slaughter frustrates our expectations and makes these deaths seem all the more cruel and sadistic, as if the capture were simply for the pleasure of killing.

• As the ideal king, he is the legitimate heir to David’s kingdom and to his covenant with God,
• the very model of material and political success,
• and the builder of the Temple.
• But he also exemplifies the good king
  • whose heart is turned to idolatry,
  • whose ultimate fate shows that the divine promise is not unconditional and can be revoked, as happens subsequently to Jeroboam, and to Baasha after him.

• mark both a beginning and an ending;
• as a continuation of the account of David in Samuel,
• they recount the twilight years of David’s reign.
• They focus upon his impotence in old age,
• his manipulation by those around him,
• and the last-minute recovery so characteristic of him.

But as the opening chapters of the work whose topic is the period subsequent to that monarchy, 1 Kings: 1-2 should be seen as the introduction to the story of Solomon.

• In the first chapter he is the passive recipient of the throne,
• but in the second he actively demonstrates his ability to carry out his father’s orders,
• as well as his own sense of self-preservation in finishing off his rival, Adonijah.
• Like his father,With the military and the cult under his control, Solomon has buttressed his position and come into his own as a ruler.
  • Solomon promotes his own chief of staff (Benaiah)
  • and installs his own priestly family (Zadok).

• No violence or intrigue of any sort clouds the image of the wise and successful king whose main concerns are the extent of his mercantile domain and his ambitious building projects, including the construction of a fitting temple for his God.
• Throughout this section there is little narrative drama. The tale of the two prostitutes in 3:16-28 is the only episode with some degree of tension, and the only text in which Solomon interacts directly with the people.
• Otherwise he is the recipient of praise and honor from both God and man,
• and the controlling force behind a wealthy empire which knows no threats to its prosperity.
• In chapters 3 and 4 the emphasis is on Solomon’s wisdom;
  • in a vision at Gibeon, God promises him the knowledge necessary to judge the people, to “discern between good and bad” (3:9).
  • The story of the prostitutes demonstrates this wisdom in action;
    • not only is the king capable of uncovering the truth,
    • but the justice he declares is life-sustaining—“Give her the living child, and in no way slay it” (3:27).
• In contrast to David’s reign,
  • the kingdom is at peace,
  • with “every man under his vine and under his fig tree” (4:25),
  • Solomon receiving both physical tribute and considerable fame from his neighbors roundabout.

• Fully half of the material on Solomon (5:1-9:9) is devoted to this project.
• The narrative moves slowly and with great attention to detail, giving a sense of grandeur and completeness.
• Unlike the text describing the building of the tabernacle in Exodus 25-40, Solomon is not instructed in the design of this sanctuary; we are spared a tedious account of the process of construction.
• The architectonics of the Temple is presented not as the embodiment of a heavenly blueprint but as a practical demonstration of Solomon’s much-lauded wisdom.
• It is Solomon who claims to have built this “house” in 8:13, and the narrator attributes to him a great deal more of the credit than Moses receives for the tabernacle.
• The building process moves from without to within, beginning with the hewing and dressing of the great stones for the foundations, to the erection of the outer frame, the decoration of the inner walls, and the fashioning of the tools and utensils essential to the Temple service.

• “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?”
• The answer is both yes and no: “behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?” (v. 27).
• Solomon continues, quoting God’s own authorization, explaining God’s indwelling as a state of constant attentiveness: “That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there” (v. 29).
• This interpretation of God’s presence is essential to Solomon’s definition of the Temple as the focal point of all prayer.
• Even when the suppliant is physically dislocated from the site, his prayer is deemed most effective when directed toward the earthly locus of worship.

• To be sure, Solomon begins by asking God to continue to fulfill his promise to David,
• but the greatest part of his prayer is about future petitions to be made in response to both natural and historical crises:
  • famine,
  • pestilence,
  • disease,
  • and defeat in war.
• God is implored to listen and respond in the future;
  • the refrain “then hear thou in heaven” recurs seven times.
  • There is here a mixture of optimism and fear,
  • an intimation that God will be attentive to future prayers,
  • as well as a sense of foreboding about future disasters.
• Most distressing in the final plea in 8:46-53,
  • where captivity is mentioned,
  • but not the return to the land,
  • despite the reference to the Exodus in the very last verse.
  • In light of Israel’s fate at the end of Kings, the passage has a near-prophetic quality.

• God accepts his prayer and again affirms his dynastic promise.
• But in contrast to chapter 3,
  • the threat of destruction of Solomon’s line and of the Temple itself
  • emphasizes the conditional nature of the covenant
  • and makes that final section of his dedicatory prayer seem all the more ominous.
• The Temple no longer stands at the center of Solomon’s world,
  • and the projects described are undertaken for the king’s own glory.
  • Verse 26 begins a long catalogue of Solomon’s wealth:
    • his fleet of ships,
    • shields and bucklers of gold,
    • an elaborate ivory throne of unprecedented proportions,
    • chariots and horses,
    • not to mention the vast quantities of gold, precious gems, and spices received in tribute.

Despite the praise of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, this whole section is cast in a negative light by the ominous warning in 9:6-9 and by the narrator’s overtly critical attitude in chapter 11.

• are tied to the far-flung trading ventures which have brought him his wealth,
• and that the narrator’s condemnation of the former implies a criticism of the latter.
• Solomon’s straying may have been simply a policy of accommodation for his wives
  • rather than reflecting an intrinsic belief in other gods.
• But in the eyes of the narrator,
  • the size of the harem
  • and the corresponding number of temples
  • leave no doubt about the extent of his idolatry.

• oracles promising the rending of the kingdom
• and descriptions of rebellions against Solomon’s authority by internal and external enemies.

These first mentions of challenges to the king’s authority effect a sharp change from the calm optimism that has previously characterized the narrative, reinforcing the narrator’s claim that these are punishments for Solomon’s idolatry.

• On a national level, the covenant guarantees the continued survival of Judah.
  • The narrator repeatedly justifies Judah’s resilience to dangers from without and within—
    • Jeroboam’s rebellion (1 Kings 11:12-13),
    • God’s anger over the sins of Abijam and Jehoram (1 Kings 15:4-5, 2 Kings 8:19),
    • the near-fatal attack of Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:34, 20:6)—
  • in terms of God’s commitment to his dynastic promise to David.

• Thus Asa of Judah is praised for having pleased the Lord “as did David his father” (1 Kings15:11),
• whereas his father Abijam is excoriated because “his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father” (15:3).
• Solomon himself is first praised, then criticized according to this criterion (1 Kings 3:3, 11:4-6).
• Even Jeroboam of Israel is promised great things if he will follow in David’s path, and is subsequently condemned for his failure to do so (1 Kings 11:38, 14:8).
• Perhaps the most striking illustration is found in the comment on Amaziah of Judah, who “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, yet not like David his father” (2 Kings 14:3).
• One could please God yet still fail to measure up to the Davidic prototype.

• The presence of the Ark of the Covenant within the Temple is an essential part of the building’s sanctity.
• The ark contains the stone tablets which are the physical representation of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel, while externally it serves as a pedestal for the deity.
• The relocation of the ark makes the Temple the guardian of that covenant, as well as the new resting place of God; immediately after it is brought in, the presence of the Lord fills its precincts (8:10).
• The Temple is a sacred center, a point of contact between man and God, whose power flows over into Jerusalem, if not into the entire nation.

• The fact that his son Rehoboam permits popular worship of the fertility cult, the narrator intimates, leads to the looting of the Temple treasury by the Pharaoh Shishak (1 Kings 14:22-26).
• The narrator also expresses his displeasure with Ahaz of Judah by suggesting that the foreign altar which the king places in the Temple reflects both political and religious subservience to the Assyrians (2 Kings 16:10-18).
• But the most extensive description of contamination of Temple rites is reserved for Manasseh.Whatever the historical value of these judgments, in the eyes of the narrator the two greatest disasters in the life of Judah are the direct consequence of violations of the sanctity of the Temple and temple worship.
  • He installs altars for the worship of a variety of deities within the Temple and encourages witchcraft, conjuring, and a whole range of objectionable practices.
  • The end result of Manasseh’s behavior, we are told, will be the complete destruction of Judah (2 Kings 21:13).

• He orders extensive repairs on the Temple structure,
• removes and destroys the idolatrous cult objects associated with Manasseh,
• and centralizes worship in Jerusalem by outlawing other shrines (2 Kings 22-23).

So great is the narrator’s concern with the exclusive authority of the Temple that all the other “good” kings of Judah, who are described in general terms as having pleased God, are criticized for allowing cultic worship to continue outside Jerusalem: “But the high places were not taken away: the people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places.” Such a statement seriously undercuts whatever praise may have preceded it and heightens the achievements of the kings who did enforce changes.

• In a global sense, the entire enterprise of the Northern Kingdom is considered corrupt because of its fundamental opposition to the religious authority of Jerusalem and because of the institutionalized idolatry of the golden calves.
• Accusations of Baal worship are particularly prominent in the stories of Elijah (1 Kings 18-19, 21; 2 Kings 1).
• As in the South, the kings singled out for praise are those who initiate purges of whatever idolatrous practices their predecessors have engaged in, such as Jehu’s liquidation of all those associated with the Baal cult in 2 Kings 9-10.
• Yet, like all other Northern kings, Jehu has broken faith in the most basic way simply by following the example of Jeroboam and is forced to share the blame for the final destruction of Israel.
• In reflecting upon the causes of its fall, the narrator begins by outlining the full gamut of idolatrous behavior:He closes, however, with harsh condemnation of Jeroboam as the one who “drove Israel from following the Lord, and made them sin a great sin” (17:21).
  • the fertility cult,
  • setting up “images and groves,”
  • human sacrifice,
  • divination, and so forth. (2 Kings 17:7-17).

Israel has been exiled for rejecting the two tenets which the narrator holds sacred:

• proper worship of the Lord (that is, without idols such as the golden calves)
• in the only place where God has said: “My name shall be there” (1 Kings8:29).

• human initiative
• and divine control.

Although every misfortune which befalls Judah or Israel is accomplished by a human enemy, these disasters are interpreted retrospectively by the narrator of Kings as agents of the divine.

• a short time,
  • such as Ahijah’s prediction of the breakup of the monarchy
  • and its actualization in the subsequent chapter (1 Kings 11:31-39, 12:15).
• Or the time of fulfillment may span centuries,
  • as with the prediction about the ultimate fate of the altar at Bethel during Jeroboam’s time (1 Kings 13:1-10)
  • and its realization during the reforms of Josiah (2 Kings 23:15-16).

• Both are strongly associated with the common people,
• and many of the tales about them have a legendary or folktale quality.
• In a book which is almost entirely about the ruling classes, these stories restore a sense of everyday reality and suggest something of the popular support of the prophet’s authority.
• The styles of the two figures are very different.
  • Elijah is aloof, if not mysterious, in his comings and goings, constantly at odds with the crown, even forced to flee for his life in 1 Kings 19. He has a flair for the dramatic, best illustrated by the contest with the Baal prophets in 1 Kings 18.
  • By contrast, Elisha is involved in the daily affairs of the prophetic guild of which he is the leader. He is rarely hostile to royal authority, even serving as an adviser to the king in 2 Kings 3 and 6.

• Not only is he like Moses in his prophetic role as messenger to the people,
• but he is portrayed as a Moses redivivus. 
• Elijah experiences a divine revelation at Mount Sinai (Horeb) after a journey of forty days in the desert (1 Kings 19).
• Like Moses, he is fed in the wilderness by God (1 Kings 17:4, 19:5-7) and provides food for others as well (17:14-16).
• The slaughter of the priests of Baal as a response to idolatry in 1 Kings 18 is reminiscent of the aftermath of the Golden Calf incident in Exodus 32:26-29.
• Most striking, however, is the series of events surrounding the prophet’s death in 2 Kings 2.
• Accompanied by Elisha, he crosses the Jordan to die on the other side.
• Unlike any other prophet but Moses, his death is mysterious, and his place of burial is unknown (Deut. 34:6).
• In an unprecedented move, he appoints his own successor in the person of Elisha, whose similarity to Joshua in this story is unmistakable: he splits the waters of the Jordan in order to cross into the land and then assumes command of his “people,” the band of prophets who were formerly loyal to Elijah. That his first stop along the way is Jericho helps to round out the analogy.

• By invoking the figure of Moses, the narrator also recalls the Covenant at Sinai as the point at which all Israel bound itself to God in response to a fiery revelation. At the same movement, the people empowered Moses to act as the mediator of that covenant (Exod. 20:18-21, Deut. 5:24-29). I
• n 1 Kings 18 the people return to their covenant with the God of Israel and favor Elijah over the political authority of the king.
  • But this new revelation is also intended as a repudiation of the god Baal, who, as a storm god, was perceived as showing himself in thunder and lightning, in a manner too close to the traditional image of the Sinaitic revelation.

The crucial redefinition of the manifestation of Israel’s God appears in 1 Kings 19,