Blue Cord

Claude Mariottini has a remarkable post on the story of Rizpah from 2 Samuel 21:1-14. It is a Mother’s Day reflection unlike those you will probably hear in church this Sunday. I encourage you to check it out.

His post got me curious about a couple of issues, so I headed for my commentaries. I only found one commentary on Samuel. Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on Samuel in the ??????Interpretation series was resting among a legion of commentaries on Leviticus and Numbers.

Oddly enough, Brueggemann does not comment on Rizpah’s role in the story. He focuses exclusively on David and the question of whether to read David in a positive or negative light. A positive read would see David as doing what he must to save his kingdom from famine. A negative reading — which Brueggemann adopts — sees the private oracle as a fiction invented by David as an excuse to get rid of any remaining political rivals from the house of Saul.¹

But regardless of the interpretation of David’s role, I think Brueggemann misses an important element of the text in overlooking Rizpah. While David’s actions may be ambivalent,² Rizpah’s certainly are not. Her actions exhibit exemplary faithfulness. And they force (or shame) David into faithful action as well. In response to what she has done, David takes the bones of Saul and Jonathan and buries them in Zela. This is something that David should have done when they were killed at the beginning of his kingship, but only now does he do it at the end of his reign. Rizpah’s faithful actions bring benefit not only to her two sons and the five sons of Merab, but also to Saul and Jonathan.

1. Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel, 336–38. [back]
2. In the text, David’s actions are seen in a positive light. Although Brueggemann may be right in suspecting that the oracle is a historical invention, the text presents it as a reality. Brueggemann opts for a historical reading, while my interpretation for the purposes of this post is more literary. [back]

I’ve been watching Baseball Tonight on ESPN for the past couple of weeks. I often have it on the the background while doing something else. I noticed a few nights ago that when someone (often Ryan Howard of the Phillies) hits a home run, Steve Bertiaume will sometimes say “Fill thing horn with oil and go.” For those who don’t recognize the quote, it is what God says to Samuel in the KJV of 1 Samuel 16:1 when commanding him to anoint David as king over Israel.

I am not sure what this expression has to do with baseball. A quick search of the Internet reveals no answers except that this use of the phrase seems to be limited to Bertiaume. Anyone have a clue on this?

At the SBL meeting in 2006 I picked up Alice Hunt’s book Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History. I wrote a review of it on this blog a couple of months later. While the book does make some good points, I ultimately did not agree with the conclusions. Hunt argues that there are no Zadokites until the Hasmonean period because she sees no stress on Zadokites prior to that, while I would say they were around in the preexilic period, but because of their position of power they did not need to justify their position.

This month’s Review of Biblical Literature has a review of Missing Priests by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Tiemeyer has a slightly more positive view of the book, so if you are looking for a review with a different take on the book, check it out.

James Getz at Kethubim has decided to post something on the Nevi’im. In a post entitled “Musings on Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel”, he discusses James C. Moyer’s 1969 Brandeis dissertation, “The Concept of Ritual Purity among the Hittites.” James (Getz, not Moyer) points out a passage in which James (Moyer, not Getz) draws attention to the idea that the king in ancient Israel may have been inviolable due to his anointing. Both of the Jameses (Jamesayim?) have good things to say, and I encourage people to head over to Kethubim to read the post.

I wanted to add a couple of things that may support what they both have to say. It may be the case that David refused to attack Saul because he was God’s anointed. But we do have other cases in which kings were assassinated by others who had been anointed. The most obvious example is Jehu who was anointed with the specific instructions to strike down Joram, who presumably had also been anointed when he became king.

I also wonder about Solomon and Adonijah. Although the text does not explicitly say so, it is hard to imagine that Adonijah had not been anointed as king by Abiathar (1 Kings 1:5-10). Yet he is scared that Solomon, who has also been anointed (1 Kings 1:34), will kill him (1 Kings 1:49-53). Solomon does not do so at the time, although he later has Adonijah killed for requesting Abishag as his wife (1 Kings 2:25). It is interesting in this case that Solomon sent someone else to do it. If kings were inviolable except to others who were anointed, then apparently one anointed person could send a non-anointed person to kill another anointed person.

The connection between the story of the golden calf episode in Exodus 32 and the setting up of the golden calves by Jeroboam in 1 Kings 12:25-33 is well-known. One of the stories is dependent on the other, although the direction of dependence is still debated. The problem has been discussed in a number of places, but I wanted to draw out some implications of these stories for the history of the priesthood in ancient Israel.

There are three elements of the Exodus 32 story that bear on the priesthood. One is the anti-Aaron story that forms a main element of the story. It is unclear whether there was an original form of this story that did not include Aaron,¹ but in the story as it is currently found he is an inseparable part of the narrative. The second element of the story that bears on the priesthood is the pro-Levite story in Exodus 32:25-29. This story is an etiology for the service of the Levites as priests.² Noth judged this story to be a secondary addition to the original J narrative.³

It seems likely that these two elements came together at a time when there were two priestly factions vying for control. Obviously, that does not narrow the time frame that much. Opposition between the Aaronides and the Levites seems to have begun at least as early in the monarchy, Eli may also have been an Aaronide. The Aaronides, who were probably a sub-set of the Levites, rose to a position of prominence in Jerusalem and soon became the only priests who were allowed to serve in the Jerusalem temple.⁴ The rest of the Levites were left serving in other cities. This would mean that all the priests in the northern kingdom of Israel were Levities, at least originally.

We are told in 1 Kings 12:31 that Jeroboam appointed non-Levitical priests to serve at his shrines in Dan and Bethel. This pulls in the third element of the Exodus 32 story that bears on the history of the priesthood: the critique of the golden calf.  If we are looking for pro-Levite / anti-Aaronide authors who would have reason to critique golden calves, then the Levites in the north are the obvious choice. From their point of view, the story scores points against multiple adversaries: it critiques the religious practices of Jeroboam while painting the Aaronides in a negative light.

This means this story in its present form must have originated between 930-722 BCE. Some of the traditions are probably older, and this phase of the development of Exodus 32 may have been oral instead of textual. But to me these three elements indicate that the story in Exodus 32 is of northern origin and is based at least in part on the reforms of Jeroboam. It provides a brief but tantalizing glimpse into the development of the priesthood in the 9th-8th centuries BCE.

1. Aaron is barely mentioned in the parallel account in Deuteronomy 9:8-21. He shows up only in v.20 and his sin is unclear. [back]
2. Why Durham says that this story does not justify the Levites ordination as priests is unclear. John I. Durham, Exodus, Word Biblical Commentary 3 (Dallas: Word, 2002), 432. [back]
3. Martin Noth, Exodus, trans. J.S. Bowden, Westminster Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 245. [back]
4. Zadok and Abiathar were both Aaronides, although Abiathar and his descendants were banished from Jerusalem for supporting Adonijah against Solomon in 1 Kings 2:26-27. [back]