Steven L. McKenzie and Matthieu Richelle, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Books of Kings

McKenzie and Richelle gather a diverse international team contributing thirty-eight essays. The goal is a “premier reference work for academic study” that functions as an “accessible” entry for scholars and students interested in Kings (p. xxi). This new handbook is justified due to the revitalized scholarly attention to Kings, motivated by its complex textual history, the growth in understanding its historiography, and application of ideological readings to the books (p. xxi). The collection is divided into seven parts.“Part 1 Text and Language” (five essays) addresses Kings’s complex textual history. The new student or nonspecialist may, for orientation, first read chapter 4 on the textual history of Kings (Timo Tekoniemi). Other essays include: Kings manuscripts at Qumran (Eibert Tigchelaar), Greek versions of Kings (Julio Trebolle Barrera), and other ancient translations (Andrés Piquer Otero and Pablo A. Torijano Morales). Laura Hare concludes part 1 explaining how the language of Kings may address questions of Hebrew language diachrony, northern dialects, and application of sociolinguists to synchronic study of Kings (p. 67). The brief example of Jezebel’s portrayal through verbal speech patterns is particularly enriching.In “Part 2 Compositional History” (three essays), Reinhard Müller treats the relationship between Kings, Deuteronomy, and the Deuteronomistic History. The history of compositional theories, proposed stages, and variegated sources of Kings are summarized by Thomas Römer. Concluding this part, Henk de Waard maps out the shared parallel texts between Kings and Isaiah/Jeremiah.In “Literary Overtures” featured in Part 3, four essayists treat paired figures that span Kings: Solomon and Jeroboam I (Jonathan Miles Robker), Elijah and Elisha (Song-Mi Suzie Park), Jezebel and Jehu (Lissa M. Wray Beal), and Hezekiah and Josiah (Lowell K. Handy).The material culture and history of Kings are the focus of six essays in “Part 4 History.” These include Iron Age inscriptions related to Kings (Alice Mandell) and the history and archaeology of the United Monarchy and Israel (Aren Maier) as well as Judah (Shuichi Hasegawa). The “competing” MT and Old Greek royal chronologies are creatively tackled in a single chapter with Steven McKenzie arguing for the primacy of the former while David Villar Vegas makes a case for the latter. Christian Frevel in “Recent Issues in History” argues there was no United Monarchy (pp. 259, 261; cf. Maier, 241). Neither was there a kingdom division (p. 262) nor independent Judah prior to Ahaz (p. 268). Finally, Daniel Pioske, “Inscribing the Past,” helps readers gain an emic perspective on scribal practices, oral and written history, and the role of a remembered past in the construction of Kings (p. 279).The studies in “Part 5 Themes,” commence the latter half of the book. These five essays examine Kings with respect to the role of prophecy, especially the Elijah-Elisha narratives (Ruth Sauerwein), cult centralization (Matthieu Richelle), law (Dylan R. Johnson), and the Davidic covenant and dynasty with attention to three sets of texts: (1) 1 Kgs 2:24, 33, 45; (2) 1 Kgs 11:29–39; 15:4; 2 Kgs 8:19; and (3) 1 Kgs 2:3–4; 8:22–26; 9:1–9. (Jan Rückl). The essay by Peter Dubovský, “Solomon’s Temple in the Books of Kings,” is noteworthy for its multifaceted treatment of the historical, literary-structural, and symbolic-theological facets of the temple.The nine essays in “Part 6 Reception” begin with “The Books of Kings and Chronicles” (Deidre N. Fulton). The remaining essays are titled, “The Reception of the Books of Kings in . . .” with focus upon Second Temple Judaism (Mika S. Pajunen), the New Testament (Sarah E. Rollens), Rabbinic Literature (Moshe Lavee), the Church Fathers (Régis Burnet), Medieval Judaism— with Abravanel’s 1493 commentary as a case study with a focus on Solomon (Cédric Cohen-Skalli), Medieval Christianity (Frans van Liere), Islam (Mehdi Azaiez), and Ethiopia (Olivia Adankpo-Labadie).“Part 7 Select Ideological Readings” concludes the collection. In a life-affirming essay, Gina Hens-Piazza encourages alternative reading strategies by noting the increased interest in characterization studies in Kings. In “Against the Literary Matrix of Power,” Hens-Pizza calls interpreters to pay attention to the entire cast of Kings, including those often ignored. She then models that in the Solomonic narrative (pp. 498–502) observing that such reading strategies may play a formative role in our own character development (p. 503). The final essay in the book, “Academic Research on Kings in China,” then applies that call to hear other voices as Lydia Lee focuses on mainland Chinese academic works on Kings that “have generally been inaccessible or unfathomable” to scholars in the West (p. 558). Similarly, Jean Koulagna in “African Readings of the Books of Kings” provides an overview of recent African academic studies on Kings applying both historical/cultural approaches and ideological readings. Remaining essays attend to “Gender Studies in Kings” (Laura Quick), “Postcolonial/Native Readings of Kings” (Jione Havea), and “Reading Kings through the Lenses of Trauma” (David Janzen). The collection concludes with a “General Index” (pp. 555–88) and “Index of Biblical Reference” (pp. 589–92). The latter is shorter than expected given the depth of the essays and length of the book.Creating a volume that is both a “premier reference work” and “accessible” (p. xxi) is a challenge. This collection is indeed a top-tier work on Kings and of interest to seasoned or beginning scholars of this engaging biblical book. The essays are concise, truly focused on Kings, and are largely well ordered. The editors and contributors are to be commended. That does mean that the volume is always “accessible” given the topical diversity and technical understanding required for many of the entries.Alexander Rofé once wrote, “Full realization of what the message is can be attained only by attentive and perceptive examination of the single piece of art.” Reading the first half of the handbook makes this reader wonder whether such an approach is a fool’s errand and whether the pluriform text and tales of Kings reflect any sort of historical referentiality, a continued point of debate. Kings is, it seems, shot through with too much compositional complexity and fragmentation, literary incoherence, and artifice to apply such a reading strategy. However, Daniel Pioeske’s description of Kings as “bricolage patterning” (p. 278) may help readers conceive Kings in its literary fullness, comprising once oral and yet written stories, a remembered and yet updated past. I suspect the book of Kings, long resistant to so-called literary approaches, will continue to invigorate the development of creative narrative strategies that make sense of the whole in spite of and perhaps even because of its perceived fragmentation.