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Class Prep
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Victory & Defeat, Exile & Return
- Today's reading is a whirlwind trip through a series of victories and defeats that marked the early history of the Israelite people. The primary readings from the Torah and Prophets catalogue these successes and failures, and it will be useful to print the timeline presented in the last class so that you can follow the sequence more easily (click on the word "timeline" above to download a pdf of the timeline).
Kristin Swenson provides a clear review of the period in her five pages in Bible Babel too. Here's how the primary readings correspond to the timeline:
- Joshua recounts the victorious entry of the former slaves into the promised land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness (c.1210 BCE?)
- 2 Samuel reports on the rise of the United Monarchy and its first great king, David (1000 BCE; Levenson pp. 92-111 explains how the Temple in Jerusalem is tied to his rule and his dynasty, establishing the Davidic [as opposed to the Mosaic] covenant).
- The prophets Amos and (the early part of) Isaiah take us into the Divided Monarchy around the year 740 BCE. Amos is from the south but preaches against the Northern Kingdom for having broken away. He says they are doomed. Within 2 years, there's a devastating earthquake. Within 18 years, the Northern Kingdom is destroyed by the Assyrian Empire (the picture is from the Assyrian King Sennacherib's palace, showing his siege, destruction and exile of a town in the Southern Kingdom, which wasn't even destroyed; would-be escapees are being stripped and impaled on poles). Meanwhile, Isaiah is preaching in the Southern Kingdom as the Assyrian king is approaching, warning the Jewish king to remain faithful to God—or else.
- 2 Kings and Deuteronomy come a century after the destruction of the North, during a brief window when the Judean King is able to reunify the country. One tricky issue: the authors who wrote these stories also wrote Joshua and 2 Samuel.
- And finally, the later selections from Isaiah 40–45 come from followers of Isaiah writing after that reunified country has been destroyed by the Babylonian Empire and its leaders taken into exile in present-day Iraq.
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- If Levenson is right that Sinai and Zion represent molds or myths into which new experiences could be fit (see pp. 102-103), providing continuity as circumstances changed, our central question today is how the early Israelites could possibly make these experiences of both victory and defeat fit their "story" of a covenant with God. As Levenson points out on pp. 56-7, it's hard to square the belief in one God who is good with the fact of human suffering—even if, as Levenson admits on the following pages, there is more than one God in Jewish scripture! So as you read the primary texts, which will be our main focus in class, ask yourself this simple question: given what the authors were experiencing, how did each of them re-interpret the covenant relationship with God? (And remember: you've got 2 covenants (Mosaic and Davidic) and 4 authors: Amos, Isaiah, the authors of Joshua-2 Samuel-2 Kings-Deuteronomy [a.k.a. the Deuteronomists, who are the third "source" of the Torah in the Documentary Hypothesis], and the later editors of Isaiah).
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- There's just one term for today:
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- The journal question for today is pretty self-explanatory: Can God be good if suffering exists? Does God authorize suffering? A couple of those four biblical authors come close to saying so. What do you think? If you don't believe in God, you can reflect on these two questions or on what you believe about the the origins or purpose of suffering.
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- Assigned Readings
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- Primary: Joshua 1–2; 6; 2 Samuel 7:11-17; Amos 7:1–9:15; Isaiah 7; 2 Kings 22; Deuteronomy 6; Isaiah 40:1-5; 42:1-9; 45:1-7
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- Secondary: Swenson, Bible Babel 34-8; Levenson Sinai and Zion 56-70, 89-111 top
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- Slides from Lecture
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- Further Reading
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- Hallo, William W. and K. Lawson younger, eds. Context of Scripture. Leiden: Brill, 1997–2002.
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- Janzen, David. The Violent Gift: Trauma's Subversion of the Deuteronomistic History's Narrative, The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 561. New York: T & T Clark International, 2012.
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- Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969.
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- Links
- Where Are the Ten Lost Tribes? - a PBS broadcast in 2000 that explores the legends of what happened to the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom after the Assyrian conquest.
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- Sources
- Photographs:
- Judeans attempting escape from the besieged city of Lachish are impaled by the Assyrians in this scene from "The Siege of Lachish in Judah," a wall relief that decorated the Room 26 of the palace of the Assyrian King Sennacherib in Nineveh. Reliefs are in the British Museum, London. Photograph reproduced online at Kyle Butt, "Archaeology and the Old Testament," Apologetics Press, http://www.apologeticspress.org/image/rr/2004/r&r0403d.jpg.
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