Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary

880 Pages·2013·7.39 MB·English

by  Robert Alter

ANCIENT ISRAEL
THE FORMER PROPHETS:
JOSHUA, JUDGES, SAMUEL,
AND KINGS
A Translation with Commentary
ROBERT ALTER
Dedication
for
HADAS
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
JOSHUA
To the Reader
The Book of Joshua
JUDGES
To the Reader
The Book of Judges
SAMUEL
To the Reader
1 Samuel
2 Samuel
KINGS
To the Reader
1 Kings
2 Kings
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Also by Robert Alter

INTRODUCTION
T
the rubric The Former Prophets may be puzzling. Some
O MANY READERS,
will not recognize it as the designation of a part of the Bible with which they
are familiar. Some will wonder which prophets are involved, for the figures
we usually think of as prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel are nowhere in
evidence, and Isaiah has only a late walk-on appearance toward the end of 2
Kings. Then, the question poses itself: Former to what? Or even, what did
they do after they stopped being prophets?
This conventional English title is a literal translation of the Hebrew nevi’im
ri’shonim. In the canonical Hebrew division of the Bible into three parts,
nevi’im, the Prophets, was the middle section. This large unit comprised two
halves, the Former Prophets, which were narrative books, and the Latter
Prophets, which were hortatory and predominantly poetic. The founders of
Jewish tradition seem to have thought of the first of these two units as
prophetic literature because they imagined it as having been composed by
various of the so-called “writing prophets.” This is not a view in any way
embraced by modern scholarship. More plausible grounds for calling this
sequence of narratives the Former Prophets is that from Samuel onward
figures identified as prophets keep popping up, for the most part to frame the
narrative with prophecies of doom. (This is not true for Joshua and Judges.
The sole exception is Deborah in Judges 4, who is called a “prophet-woman,”
ishah nevi’ah, but she is not shown exercising that vocation.)
Biblical scholars, since the work in Germany by Martin Noth in the middle
of the twentieth century, have adopted a more precise though less
pronounceable designation for the large narrative from Joshua and Judges to
Samuel and Kings: the Deuteronomistic History. In the late seventh century
BCE, a major revolution in the religion of ancient Israel was effected when, in
the course of renovation work on the temple in the reign of King Josiah, a
long scroll was purportedly discovered (see 2 Kings 22–23), referred to as
“this book of teaching,” sefer hatorah hazeh. Most scholars since the early
nineteenth century have concluded that it was a version of Deuteronomy, and
surmise that it was actually composed around this time by reformers in
Josiah’s court. It put forth a new insistence on the exclusivity of the cult in the
Jerusalem temple, vehemently polemicized against the use of any image or
icon in worship, and proposed a system of historical causation in which the
survival of a given king and of the covenanted people was strictly dependent
on their loyalty—above all, cultic loyalty—to their God. All this was cast in
language that highlighted certain formulaic phrases—“to love the L your
ORD
God with all your heart and with all your might,” “to keep His statutes, His
commands and His dictates”—and in a distinctive rhetoric that, unlike other
biblical prose, favored long periodic sentences and the oratorical insistence of
anaphora—that is, emphatic repetition.
At the same time that Deuteronomy proper (which would acquire some
additional layers when it was edited in the Babylonian exile only a few
decades after its initial promulgation in 621 BCE) was exhorting the people to
follow what it deemed to be the right path, writers in this same circle sought
to make sense of the history of the nation in the revelatory light of the new
reforming book. A religious intellectual—it may actually have been a whole
group, but for the sake of convenience, scholarship refers to him
schematically as the Deuteronomist—who was swept up in Josiah’s reforms
set out to assemble a more or less continuous version of the national history
from the conquest of the land to his own time, covering roughly six centuries.
This first Deuteronomistic historian does not envisage the destruction of the
southern kingdom (the northern kingdom of Israel had disappeared a century
earlier, in 721 BCE, at the hands of the Assyrians) or of the cutting off of the
Davidic dynasty, so it is plausible to date him to the late seventh century BCE.
Then, in the view of most scholars, a second and more or less final edition of
the Deuteronomistic History was executed in the Babylonian exile after 586
BCE, probably just a few decades later (it contains as yet no vision of a return
to Zion), incorporating an account of the devastation of the kingdom of Judah
and the humiliation, mutilation, and exile of its last king.
An elusive question about this entire chain of books is what exactly was the
role played by the Deuteronomist in their composition. Some scholars are
inclined to speak of him as the “author” of the history, a writer who utilized
older textual and perhaps also oral materials but edited them and reworked
them freely according to his own ideological bent. I find this view
implausible. The Deuteronomist clearly drew on a wide variety of pre-existing
texts, some of them probably preserved in royal archives, from annals to
folktales and legends to the most artfully articulated historical narratives. He
punctuated these disparate materials, especially in the Book of Kings, with
formulaic assertions—often reminiscent of the language of Deuteronomy—of
his own interpretation as to why particular historical events happened as they
did. But there is abundant evidence that the old stories resisted the pressure of
his insistent interpretation, showing their own view of things, and that for the
most part he did not feel at liberty to tamper with the literary documents he
had inherited.
Let me cite one central instance. Nearly a third of the Former Prophets is
devoted to the story of Saul and David (1 Samuel 8–2 Kings 2). As a literary
composition, this story manifestly antedates the Deuteronomist, perhaps even
by as much as three centuries. It also happens to be one of the greatest pieces
of narrative in all of Western literature. Biblical scholars have a lamentable
habit of referring to it as “royal propaganda,” and also of breaking it down
into purportedly disparate sources in a fashion that does violence to its
powerful continuities of style, image, motif, and character. Though David is
clearly represented as a divinely elected king in this narrative, he is also seen
quite strikingly in all his human weakness, in his relentlessness, and in his
moral ambiguity—hardly a figure of royal propaganda. And in regard to the
issue of historical causation, events here are the consequence of human
actions; in the preponderance of these stories there is nothing miraculous and
there is no divine intervention. When the aged king is dying, he calls Solomon
to his bedside and instructs him to use his “wisdom” to get rid of two men
against whom David has a score to pay off, and who also might well threaten
Solomon’s throne. This final gesture, worthy of a mafia chieftain, was
evidently too much for the Deuteronomist, so he inserted before David’s hit
list a whole swatch of dialogue, in which David, deploying an uninterrupted
pastiche of Deuteronomistic phrases, piously enjoins Solomon to walk in
God’s ways and keep His commands. What the editor did not feel free to do
was to change the inherited text or delete the parts of it he found
objectionable.
This combination of tendentious editorial framing with an assemblage of
disparate narrative texts from different periods and probably different regions
of the country has been a source of debate and perplexity among scholars.
General readers, on the other hand, may be grateful for the extravagant
heterogeneity of these books. Each has its own distinctive character. The first
half of Joshua is an account of conquest and destruction, enlivened by the tale
of Rahab and the two spies and the fall of Jericho; the second half is a
mapping out of the tribal territories in which the supposedly conquered land
now appears far from fully conquered. The Book of Judges comprises a series
of episodes of martial derring-do in the sundry struggles of the tribes with the
surrounding peoples, and it includes the unforgettable cycle of stories about
the Herculean folk-hero Samson. After the anarchic period recorded in
Judges, Samuel recounts the founding of the monarchy in the long,
continuous story—which is the artistic pinnacle of these books—of David
from brilliant youth to the sad infirmity of old age. It is in Samuel, as the
German scholar Gerhard von Rad argued seven decades ago, that the writing
becomes properly historical, liberated from the heavy dependence on legend
and sheer authorial invention. The Book of Kings, in more miscellaneous
fashion, and with more conspicuous interventions of the Deuteronomist,
continues the historical narrative, tapping the royal annals of both kingdoms
but also liberally introducing folktales and legends, especially visible in the
cycle of stories about Elijah and Elisha.
What results from this amalgam is a richly overflowing miscellany. It
incorporates folk memories or fantasies about ideal and magically powerful
figures; historical accounts of deadly court intrigues; representations of the
intricate and dangerous complexities of life in the political realm; and reports
of the great powers surrounding the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah and
of their military campaigns in the land of Canaan. Over it all hovers the
somber awareness of the Deuteronomist that these two nation-states, located
at the crossroads of aggressive empires to the east and to the south, lived
under constant threat and in the end might not endure. What did endure,
embodied in the stories themselves, was the people’s memories, their vision
of God and history and national purpose. All these, preserved in their Hebrew
texts, they would one day bring back from exile as the potent instrument of an
unprecedented national revival.
JOSHUA