Hezekiah and the Books of Kings : A Contribution to the Debate about the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History

Description

In ihe last few decades, the analysis of Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets has been more controversial in rhetoric than in reality. Martin Noth's vision of a unified exilic history, a Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). remains a centerpiece of all mainstream theories. From this basis, recent scholarship begins, discerning earlier editions, histories of redaction, and so on. Noth’s theory was that an exilic historian had composed DtrH whole (using diverse, earlier written sources). Additions, mostly minor, then accrued in transmission. Today there are essentially four schools of thought on the matter. Some scholars (as J. Van Seters and H. D. Hoffmann) adhere to the thesis of a single (exilic) edition with additions but not reeditions (they also tend to deny that the historian, here H[Dtr], was restricted by written sources). Continental scholars, for the most part, follow Rudolf Smend in isolating editions (Prophetic. Nomistic) of—rather than scribal additions to—Noth's unified original (e.g., W. Dietrich, T. Veijola, T. D. M. Mettinger). Most Albrightians (such as R. G. Boling, R. E. Friedman, R. D. Nelson, and others, including A. D. H. Mayes and A. G. Auld) follow Frank Moore Cross. Cross resuscitated a nineteenth-century hypothesis that a history written to sustain Josiah's reforms was updated by an exilic editor (here, E[Dtr]x). Typically, passages assigned to the "Nomistic" redactor by Smend’s followers coincide with those attributed by Cross to E(Dtr)x. The fourth school of thought began from an article (since expanded in other studies) by Helga Weippert, These scholars (A. Lemaire, A. F. Campbell, this reviewer) discern behind the Josianic historian (H[Dtr]jos) an Hezekian edition of the history. Again, there is no serious conflict with Cross's view. Since 1983 J. B. Peckham has argued, in a book and several articles, that formal features—such as sequences of verbal forms—indicate only two editions of DtrH, namely, the Hezekian and the exilic (the latter is inescapable, since the last events reported date to 561-560 B.C.E.). Provan attempts an improvement on this economical approach. He defends the thesis that the "Hezekian" history covered the period from the United Monarchy down through Hezekiah, but he dates this history to Josiah's period.