| The study of ancient Israelite kingship has been a favorite topic of biblical scholars for decades. Research has focused on the narratives about kings, or on the courtly language surrounding them (now embedded in the book of Psalms), or on rituals of kingship.;The present dissertation seeks to identify the underlying code of meanings about the king operating in various ways through all the relevant texts. The focus is upon the (living) body of the king, its anatomical characteristics, its constitution through ritual, and the conventions concerning proper self-display by the king.;Chapter I introduces the problem to be studied and some of the theoreticians whose work has been helpful to this project.;Chapters 2--3 examine the royal psalms, paying close attention to the ways in which they talk about the royal body. The corpus chosen includes Psalms 2, 18, 20, 21, 28, 45, 72, 89, 101, 110, 132, and 144, as well as Isaiah 11 and 38. After demonstrating that these are in fact Iron Age texts, the chapter shows that the court of Judah (and probably Israel) concentrated upon the military prowess of the king, who was trained for war by Yahweh, and this military imagery shaped even depictions of his sexuality. Moreover, the king was thought to have an outsized, superhuman body owing to his being the son of the deity, a status he attained upon his coronation.;Chapters 4--5 note how narratives, especially in the Deuteronomistic History, dealt in part with this courtly code of ideas about the king and partly with conflicting codes. Stories of Saul's coronation come under consideration, from the point of view of how the coronation ritual was structured, and especially how it transformed the body of the crown prince into that of the king. Other subjects taken up include the presentation of the dangerous and dangerous king (especially the intertwined stories of David and Saul) and the king as builder, medical patient, and finally corpse. Such an examination shows that a variety of attitudes existed toward kingship, in part owing to the fact that kings played their roles with varying success, with some meeting the expectations of the royal code better than others.;Chapter 6 sets this material about the Israelite king in a larger context by comparing biblical depictions of foreign kings with those of local ones.;Chapter 7 attempts to retrieve parts of the Song of Songs for Iron Age depictions of kingship. The focus is especially upon the scenes in chapters 3 and 5, respectively of the entrance of Solomon's litter and the depiction of the male lover, who seems to be the king depicted fictionally as "Solomon," as a statue. The statue imagery, in particular, draws on conceptions of the divine body seen also in Mesopotamian religious texts (wasfs) and must be fairly early.;Chapter 7 summarizes the results of the dissertation and anticipates further questions, especially concerning what these biblical depictions of the body of the king might say about the body of the deity (a theme taken up in later Jewish literature such as the Shi`ur Qomah). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
