Sunday, August 19, 2018

Jeroboams' bulls

Dale Ralph Davis on Jeroboam (in 1 Kings) making two bulls to substitute for Yahweh worship. Davis' concern is that some Bible commentators excuse Jeroboam, by claiming that later 'editors' have altered the original text. This is something Davis will not have - here, nor anywhere else. In a strongly-worded footnote (not the first one in this book) he writes:

'The problem with my view is that I have taken the testimony of the text at face value. Obviously, this is not good, furrow-browed scholarship. Many would hold that i fail to understand that the viewpoint in the text comes from later Judean editors who held an extremely anti-Jeroboam bias - hence one cannot depend on such texts. I don't mind if they think such. If they do, they should be faithful agnostics, i.e., they should deny that they can know anything accurate about Jeroboam's cult since the evidence is tainted. This they do not do; they deny the reliability of the texts yet proceed to do plastic surgery on Jeroboam. If the texts are unreliable, they should shut up. Instead they proceed to reconstruction based upon (essentially) re-written texts. This yields both bad history and perverse theology.' (page 139)

Davis isn't consistently opposed to certain commentators: Ian Provan, who is criticized in an earlier footnote or two, gets a thumbs up in a footnote just prior to the one quoted; Brueggemann, however, seldom comes off with commendations. 

No comments: