{"id":56840,"date":"2019-06-05T15:54:19","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T12:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=56840"},"modified":"2022-12-27T22:27:41","modified_gmt":"2022-12-27T20:27:41","slug":"unity-and-continuity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/unity-and-continuity\/","title":{"rendered":"Unity And Continuity"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[835,423,839,832],"acf":{"old_id":"56840","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":56443,"related_cahpter":"235","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"For this, a worldly king is more important than a transcendent God","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the Samuel narrative, both the shift away from the political theology of the Book of Judges and the initial appearance of monarchy in Israel are presented as events occurring in human history. They do not belong to the mythic past. The biblical king, enthroned before our eyes, is a thoroughly human being, not a God. He is not a pillar of the cosmic order. He plays a negligible and wholly dispensable role in religious ritual, does not convey divine commands to his people, does not maintain the order of nature, and is not the prime lawgiver.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Admittedly, mythical conceptions of monarchy are not entirely absent from the biblical material. The royal hymns in the Book of Psalms (chapters 2, 45 and 110), for example, offer striking examples of a political theology very similar to that of other communities in the ancient Near East. Yet the Book of Samuel reflects a radically different conception. For one thing, monarchy is described as emerging rather late in the history of Israel. It arose under emergency conditions, from the worldly needs of a rickety confederation of tribes that, at this particular moment, were seeking protection from the better-armed and better-trained Philistines \u2013 a new and threatening enemy nation that had dealt them one defeat after another. To the Israelites, pressed by an aggressive and militarily superior adversary, God the king seemed absent and remote. The people therefore yearned for a human sovereign able to muster and command a visible standing army, a worldly sovereign who could marshal and coerce them into a coordinated military response to a lethally powerful external foe. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They demanded that Samuel, the last of the judges, establish a dynastic monarchy to ensure continuity of sovereignty over all Israel through the bloodline of a king. The monarchy for which they were pleading would thus answer the people\u2019s two most pressing and existential political concerns: the need for unity and the need for continuity. In this telling of the worldly founding of biblical kingship, the people, united by consanguinity and their covenant with God, preceded the monarchy and caused it to be instituted. The kingship was not a mythic force, therefore, but rather an institution that was voluntarily embraced for strategic reasons in historical time. Its emergence reflected the people\u2019s incapacity or refusal to keep faith with the radical theological notion of God\u2019s exclusive kingship when faced with the threat of extinction or enslavement by a mighty foreign army.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Excerpts from <em>The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp 7-8. Re-printed with permission of the author.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":56668,"id":56668,"title":"halbertal-book cover.jpg","filename":"halbertal-book-cover.jpg.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/halbertal-book-cover.jpg.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-fine-grained-phenomenology-of-political-power\/halbertal-book-cover-jpg\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"halbertal-book-cover-jpg","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":56661,"date":"2019-06-02 14:58:58","modified":"2019-06-03 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