Mimicking Empire: Divine Administration in Isaiah

The gōlāh-oriented vision of Ezra was opposed in the scroll of Isaiah, which in Isaiah 49–55 called for a reconciliation of Returnees and Remainees within Yhwh’s own empire. Identifying King Cyrus as a messiah in Isa 45:1 might well have sacrificed messianic hopes, but this is only an apparent concession to the ruling powers. Many of Isaiah’s texts have in fact mimicked the imperial administration in order to claim jurisdiction for Yhwh’s torah not only within the limited state imagined in the Deuteronomic Code but also across the many nations of the empire. Isaiah’s vision of peaceable rule interacts with some distinctive features of Iranian royal ideology, including the symbolism of royal parklands. Isaiah’s Eden theology mimics the Persian paradises, while envisaging the rule of God in a this-worldly eschatology.

Wise Reservations: Places of Understanding in Job

Bringing skeptical wisdom to the conversation, the book of Job contests the various accounts of covenantal right order and, more broadly, the location of God in the cult. Job 28 condenses the larger intellectual tradition when it suggests that the many places of wisdom in creation might be regarded as traces of the divine. In this respect, Job connects with the cosmic understanding of God in Psalm 104. Foreigners like Job are shown to be fully capable of sharing public space, much as the “Elohim theology” within Priestly tradition also suggests. Neither Job nor the earlier Priestly version of monotheism are inherently opposed to other religious traditions. Wisdom speaks in the earth, not in heaven, and this allows for a broader spirituality of place beyond any theology of divine names.

Legal Compromises: Imperial Contexts of the Pentateuch

The “hexateuchal” imagination (the six-book story stretching from Genesis to Joshua) located the center of Israel’s life in Shechem, in the north. How that story was cut back to a Pentateuch is not explicitly told, but we can assume that it entailed negotiation and compromise well into the fourth century BCE. Instead of the earlier Priestly internationalism, a renewed “Deuteronomic” vision could see Abraham as the founder of a single descent group and a single, great nation (gôy gādôl). Read from the perspective of the completed Pentateuch, the ancestors in Genesis were promised a “Torah republic” with a homeland that could nourish communal identity even from afar. This theocracy was envisaged more in national terms, but communal obligations included the broader range of both Priestly and Deuteronomic provisions now collected within the Pentateuch’s common law, and renegotiated especially within the book of Numbers.

Performance Indicators: The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah

The kings of Israel and Judah were measured by a variety of standards, and each of the two kingdoms were subjected to overall evaluations in the books of Kings in an effort to explain their demise. While it is often assumed that the ultimate performance indicator is conformity to Mosaic law, this assumption is problematic. The few allusions to a written Torah of Moses in the books of Kings introduce both chronological and theological problems. For example, 2 Kgs 23:25–26 explains the destruction of Jerusalem by assuming the validity of intergenerational punishment, but this particular understanding of divine justice is rejected in the fully developed theology of Deuteronomy (Deut 1:39 and 7:9–10, overturning Deut 5:9). Attending to key ideas of centralization and social justice, we may describe the books of Kings as “Yahwistic” rather than “Deuteronomistic,” a conclusion that is confirmed by comparisons with the book of Jeremiah.

Social Contracts: The Formation of Political Sovereignty

The creation of political sovereignty in ancient Israel arose through alliances of kinship networks under a king, and this was facilitated by tribal elders and by a single charismatic leader, Samuel. The chapter shows how the elders of Israel prevailed in their argument for a king “like all the nations” by entering into social contracts between kinship groups, rather than by invoking a preexisting divine law that provides for the possibility of monarchy. The subsequent history of kingship eventually gave rise to a utopian law that provides for a strangely modern-looking constitutional monarch (Deut 17:14–20), but there is no evidence in the books of Samuel that the legal framework of Deuteronomy helped to shape the origins of political sovereignty in ancient Israel and Judah.

Redeeming Eden: A Priestly Dialogue in Genesis–Leviticus

The Priestly compositions in Genesis–Leviticus turned away from the national vision, emphasizing wider filial connections with other kinship groups and, in effect, proposed that Eden could be redeemed as a sacred space. Yhwh is certainly the God of Israel, but the ancestors never knew that divine name. Combining an interpretation of Abraham as a non-Yahwist, a distinctive exodus account, cultic laws, and the social ethics of the Holiness Code, this paradigm provided hope for a renewed divine communion within which Yhwh may once again “walk about” among the people (Lev 26:11–12), even if the same Creator is known as Elohim or El by other nations. Instead of emerging from a royal court, the Priestly laws were promulgated by Moses in the desert, without the benefit of royal power or territory, and there is no conquest legislation in this material.

Nation Dreaming: Deuteronomy and Joshua

Deuteronomy implicitly reflects a loss of political sovereignty, but more overtly, it presents a utopian model of the ideal, future nation. The centralized “nationalism” of this book imagines a people only superficially divided by class, whose blessings are secured on the condition that a uniformity of religion is vigilantly maintained, along with a justice system that pays special attention to the “alien, widow and orphan.” Adopting and transforming an imperial treaty model for its covenantal constitution, the law code retains an old intercultural tradition of warfare (ḥērem), but later editing translates this requirement into a ban on intermarriage, which could then preserve a distinct ethnic group in multiple social contexts. The implications of Deuteronomic theology are explored in a reinterpretation of Israel’s conquest traditions in the book of Joshua.

Intergenerational Trauma: Children of the Exile

This chapter explores the hypothesis that Ezra 7–10 reflects the legacies of intergenerational trauma, particularly in the restriction of Israel’s core identity to children of the exile. This conception of a qᵉhal haggôlāh built on the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who had pronounced judgment against all those who remained in the land during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. Laying claim to imperial authority, Ezra’s social policy may have led to ethnic fissure if it had succeeded, since it excluded all the Remainees who claimed descent from Abraham. In later developments reflected in Ezra 1–6, however, the gōlāh identity was expanded to include Benjamin, an area that had been continuously occupied during the sixth century, but it still did not include the northern territory of Samaria.

Colonial Inversions: Roger Williams and Wiremu Tāmihana

This chapter turns to some remarkable examples in the colonial history of the Bible’s reception. In the seventeenth century, Roger Williams opposed Puritan national allegories by adopting the Persian imperial imaginary in order to secure Indian rights on Rhode Island. Wiremu Tāmihana advanced a similar anticolonial purpose in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand by embracing the law of kingship from Deuteronomy. Whether in ancient or modern times, the sheer complexity of intergroup conflict in colonial contexts is not always reducible to binary contrasts between elites and subalterns, or imperialists and nativists. The more subtle postcolonial readings will attend to the details of mimetic circulation, both in the compositional layers of the Bible and in its reception. The discussion includes historical reflections on the settler colonial context within which this book was written, Australia.

Introduction

Political theology can be understood very broadly as God-talk located in the context of multiple, often competing, perspectives on social life. The focus of this book, however, falls particularly on conceptions of nationhood and empire, and how these have figured in the forming and re-forming of Israel’s social body in a number of geographical settings. The book argues that both the national imaginary and its imperial alternatives were woven into the biblical traditions by authors who enjoyed very little in the way of political sovereignty. But this complex literature has shaped the imaginations of nations and empires until today, and understanding its internal debates will continue to be relevant for those who still live within its history of reception.