Reconstructing the Temple

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-086896-3
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

This book examines temple renovation as a rhetorical topic within royal literature of the ancient Near East. Unlike newly founded temples, which were celebrated for their novelty, temple renovations were oriented toward the past. Kings took the opportunity to rehearse a selective history of the temple, evoking certain past traditions and omitting others. In this way, temple renovations were a kind of historiography. Andrew R. Davis demonstrates a pattern in the rhetoric of temple renovation texts: that kings in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Syria and Persia used temple renovation to correct, or at least distance themselves from, some turmoil of recent history and to associate their reigns with an earlier and more illustrious past.

Davis draws on the royal literature of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE for main evidence of this rhetoric. Furthermore, he argues for reading the story of Jeroboam I's placement of calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs 12:25-33) as an eighth-century BCE account of temple renovation with a similar rhetoric. Concluding with further examples in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Reconstructing the Temple demonstrates that the rhetoric of temple renovation was a distinct and longstanding topic in the ancient Near East.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davis

Davis, Andrew R.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Bibelwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Andrew R. Davis is associate professor of Old Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. His first book, which was a revision of the dissertation he wrote at Johns Hopkins University, compared the temple complex at Tel Dan to biblical descriptions of worship in the Northern Kingdom. Davis's other main research interest involves literary approaches to biblical texts, which he has explored in articles on the books of Genesis, Ruth, and Job, and is pursuing in a new project on the book of Amos.