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This whole court history is just a wonderful, masterful work of prose. Some speak about
all of this unit as being authored by the J source. You need to know that source theory
has undergone so many permutations. There really isn't any standard view but I think
the idea that the sources J, E, P and D extend beyond the Pentateuch is now generally no
longer accepted so you will sometimes see people talking about the J source as going
all the way through the end of Second 2 Kings and being in fact--J is the author of the
court history. But for the most part I think most people think of the source theory as
applying to the Pentateuch, and beyond that we talk about the Deuteronomistic historian
redacting older earlier sources. I'll talk a little bit more about some of those sources
as we move through the later books, the books of the former prophets.
The court history has an array of very richly drawn characters. They act out all sorts of
scenes of power and *** and courage and struggle. There's crime, there's tender love. It's a
very realistic sort of psychological drama. It's also striking for its uncompromising
honesty. We don't see anything like that really in the work of any contemporary historian.
David is depicted in very, very human terms. The flattery and the whitewashing that you
find in other ancient Near Eastern dynastic histories is lacking here. The flattery and
whitewashing that we get for example in Chronicles, the books of Chronicles, are really just a
retelling of the material here in the former prophets and they clean up the picture of
David. There's no mention of Bathsheba in there. So you do have that kind of whitewashing
as part of the historiography of the Book of Chronicles, but it's lacking here. All
of the flaws, all of the weaknesses of David, a national hero--they're all laid bare.
Implicitly perhaps, that is a critique of kinship. It is perhaps a critique of the claim
of kings to rule by divine right. The author here seems to be stressing that David and,
as we shall see, Solomon (he's quite human, Solomon's quite human)--they are not at all
divine. They're subject to the errors and flaws that characterize all humans. As we
move out of Samuel now and into 1 and 2 Kings, we see that these books, [1 and 2] Kings,
contain the history of Israel from the death of King David until the fall of Judah in 587,
586, and the exile to Babylonia. These books also appear to be based on older sources.
Some of them are explicitly identified. They will refer sometimes to these works, which
evidently were subsequently lost but they'll refer to the Book of the Acts of Solomon or
the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel, or the Book of the Annals of the Kings of
Judah. Annals and chronicles were regularly maintained in royal courts throughout the
Ancient Near East. There's no reason to think that this wasn't also done in a royal setting
in Israel. These annals generally listed events, important events in the reign of a given king.
They tended not to have much narrative to them and the beginning of the first 16 chapters
of 1 Kingshas that kind of feel, not a lot of narrative, and [it's] really reportage
of events. Beginning in 1 Kings 17:17-22, and the first
nine chapters of 2 Kings, there's a departure from that [匽 annal style, annal genre [of]
the reporting of events in the reign of a king. You have more developed narratives in
those sources and these narratives generally feature prophets. So it's going to lead very
nicely into our study of Prophets