![]() ![]() ![]() While many biblical passages, such as in Isaiah 6, envision God as a king upon a throne, which implicitly strengthens the institution of kingship, by and large the logic of correspondences between the earthly and heavenly polities is absent within biblical writing. Nor does his rule mimetically resemble that of the King of Kings to nearly the extent that we saw in Ugarit and Mesopotamia. Certainly, the king as depicted throughout the Bible is not meant to be the “visible image of a god” as in Egypt. 18 “I have fathered you this day,” perhaps, implies the adoption of the king by God at the king’s coronation. The concluding phrase of the psalm, in which God says, “You are my son, I have fathered you this day,” 17 does not necessarily imply deification of the king the phrase “you are my son” is a legal term found in the Code of Hammurabi, implying adoption. The claim here is a relatively modest one: The king is legitimate because he has been chosen by God. For example, in Psalm 2, perhaps the most pro-monarchal of the so-called royal psalms, the identification between God and king is not nearly as strong as was seen elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Yet even in those passages that grant the greatest legitimacy to Davidic rule, some fundamental differences are apparent. At first glance, the same “hermeneutic of suspicion” employed by Berger with regard to ancient religion as a tool for the legitimization of power structures might be applied to the biblical description of monarchy, as well, at least in some passages. The proposition of kingship in the Hebrew Bible looks rather different. He, like the earthly king, lived in a palace with his wives, children, and extended “household.” 8 He presided, like his earthly counterpart, over a large assembly. Enlil, like his earthly counterparts, ruled by delegating responsibilities to lesser dignitaries and functionaries. ![]() The realm of the gods had a king as well-Enlil, who presided over an elaborate pantheon of Mesopotamian gods corresponding to the range of lesser authorities that served under earthly kings like Sargon and Hammurabi. Within the earthly realm, the king presided over a vast hierarchy, a pyramid of lesser authorities. that the political structure of the exalted sovereign emerged as the central model of Mesopotamian civilization and was mirrored in its conception of the heavenly realms. With regard to the former, it was after the great conquests by Sargon, king of Akkad, in 2300 B.C.E. Two representative cultures from the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia and Ugarit, each displayed this mimetic dynamic of the logic of correspondences. 3 Instead, the relevant chapter assesses the covenant narratives in the Bible in light of modern political theories of consent. Zohar, likewise eschews any attempt to engage covenant on its own terms within its biblical and ancient Near Eastern contexts. ![]() 2 A more recent work, The Jewish Political Tradition, a major compendium of sources and commentaries edited by Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Yet by invoking the principle of “covenant” in so many different instances, Elazar makes a precise definition of the term difficult to attain. Moreover, Elazar discovers “covenant” at every turn-even in the account of creation-and he attempts to show how the principle of covenant underlies every major story in the Bible. Yet the covenant in the Bible is between God and Israel, and any definition that is not built around this relationship must necessarily miss the point. Seeking to mine the term for its contemporary implications, Elazar depicts a covenant, following Max Weber, 1 as a bonding agent among members of the Israelite community. Elazar’s Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel offers a good example of the problem. ![]()
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