Israel in the Book of Kings —— The Past as a Project of Social Identity

----- 列王记上的以色列

ISBN: 9781850758594 出版年：1998 页码：337 James Richard Linville Bloomsbury Publishing

Israel in the Book of Kings: The Past as a Project of Social Identity, by James Richard Linville. JSOTSup 272. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 331. $85.00/ 50.00. As intimated in the book's title, this study has two major research foci: (1) How are "Israel" and related terms properly defined in the book of Kings? (2) How does the answer to this question shed light on the social function of the narrative in an Achaemenid context? The book is set out in three main parts beginning with a lengthy methodological overview. Building on the social setting model for the Deuteronomistic History developed by E. T. Mullen, Linville views Kings' narrative as reflecting a series of metaphors and "social dramas" that served to define the self perception of postexilic "Judah-ism." Linville defines the latter term as "some form of religious-cultural matrix that identified its members on genealogical and religious grounds with the history of Judah, and in the worship . . . of the god Yahweh, imagined as being the deity with a special association with Judah" (pp. 27-28). Common to "Judah-fists," who were spread out in Judah itself, Babylonia, and Egypt, was the desire to express their ethnic and religious integrity in the form of history writing. As such, Linville stresses that this historiography represents above all an "artefact of history" (p. 40), through which we can begin to uncover the socioideological dynamics of the writers' world. In this vein, the exile itself is to be understood as "not merely the immediate cause of an identity crisis but, rather, an essential part of the identity which the writer constructs for his dispersed people" (p. 87). Yet Linville is skeptical of attempts to pinpoint the circles responsible for producing Kings, rejecting the catchall term "Deuteronomists," and readily admitting that "reconstructing from Kings a precise map of the society and times which produced it is fraught with difficulty" (p. 106). In a nutshell, Linville is sympathetic toward the so-called "minimalist" school associated with P. R. Davies and N. P. Lemche, but not dogmatically so. The body of Linville's textual analysis begins in part 2 of the book, entitled "Empire and Entropy." In developing the hypothesis that "the two kingdoms are metaphorical projections of fractious, post-monarchic `Israel"' (p. 117), Linville argues that "Israel" in its idealized usage in Kings refers to the entire people. This is particularly true of such key texts as Solomon's temple dedication ( 1 Kgs 8:16, 30, 33, 34, 36 and passim) and the catalogue of sins accounting for the destruction of the northern kingdom and ultimately for Judah's destruction as well (2 Kgs 17:7-17). Consequently, the appearance of Judah as an entity distinct from Israel signals a setback to the ideal. In this connection, Linville interprets the MT version of 1 Kings 4 as expressing intentional latent criticism of Solomon, inasmuch as it defines "all Israel" whom Solomon subjected to the royal levy (v. 7) as excluding Judah. For Linville, even the closing verse of that chapter, which describes both "Judah and Israel" prospering, serves as an ironic statement that perhaps Judah's prosperity was attained by divisive means. Even after the narration of the northern kingdom's destruction, Judah alone is never offered the possibility of forging a distinct and permanent continuity to the exclusion of the northern tribes. …