Protest or Propaganda

War in the Old Testament Book of Kings and in Contemporaneous Ancient Near Eastern Texts
Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-90-04-16855-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 51, 720 Seiten, Format (B × H): 168 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 1293 g

Reihe: Studia Semitica Neerlandica

In this study, the war stories from the Old Testament book of Kings are compared to ten extrabiblical texts. Narratological analysis is applied to deconstruct the ideology of the respective literary compositions. The Old Testament ideology of war seems to be neither typically Israelite, as Gerhardt von Rad put it, nor commonly Ancient Near Eastern, as Manfred Weippert thought it to be. This poses the question whether the reading experience of biblical war stories is so very different from, for instance, Assyrian royal inscriptions, both in terms of its literary value and its ideological bias. Narratological analysis turns out to be a strong tool for explaining the similarities and distinctive features of the respective texts.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Deijl, Aarnoud R van der

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Bibelwissenschaften Altes Testament: Exegese, Geschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Aarnoud van der Deijl, Ph.D. (2005) in Theology, University Faculty of Protestant Theology of Brussels, is minister in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands.