Jerusalem's Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition

Jerusalem's Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition. By Ingrid Hjelm. JSOTSup 404. London: T & T Clark, 2004, xii + 372 pp., $170.

The Samaritans have found a voice in Jerusalem's Rise to Sovereignty, a revised version of Ingrid Hjelm's doctoral thesis written at the University of Copenhagen in 2002. It is a continuation of her work, The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis (Sheffield, 2000). In this volume, Hjelm argues that the biblical narratives in Samuel-Kings that tell of the rise of David as Israel's king and Jerusalem as Israel's capital are not, in fact, representative of the true historical situation. Instead, Jerusalem and Gerizim (among other sites) were competing capitals and cult centers during the monarchy, exile, and much of the post-exilic period. By prioritizing Samaritan sources and arguing from archaeology and cultural phenomena, Hjelm rejects the view that Israel ever achieved the idealistic unity presented in the reigns of David and Solomon. Tribal tensions and multiple cultic sites, rather, were the norm for Israel from the tenth to the second centuries BC. Accordingly, Hjelm sees the Samuel-Kings narratives as representing a created ideology written in and based on the actual historical conflicts between North and South in third to second centuries BC Israel.

Hjelm's work will interest most students of the OT. This is because she validates her thesis by calling upon almost all facets of OT studies in her argumentation, including source and redactional criticism, linguistics, archaeology, ancient Near Eastern history, and even biblical theology. It is also important to note that her method of argumentation is not always straightforward. Instead of a point-by-point linear approach, Hjelm points out "coincidences" and raises questions in many places that bolster her case. Her hope is that the many coincidences she points out and the doubts she raises will cause her reader to agree with her argument in the end.

The book has seven chapters. In chapter 1, Hjelm states her thesis and raises the questions that she will deal with in the following chapters. In chapters 2 and 3, Hjelm begins to gather her "coincidences" of Zion ideology to form her argument. She begins with the Hezekiah and Josiah narratives. She argues that the Hezekiah narrative is meant to show the election of Jerusalem as God's chosen city because of its inviability against Assyrian attack. She contends that the Zion ideology is apparent through the shared linguistic occurrences between the Hezekiah narratives and idealistic Zion language in the prophets and Psalms. She also argues that the evaluation of the reigns of kings in the North (almost always negative) and South (many positive evaluations) betray a southern and Jerusalem-biased ideology. She also makes general statements about the narratives themselves; she notes that the Samuel-Kings narratives are meant to be ideological works and are not meant to be what we would consider "history" (p. 37).

In chapters 4 and 5, Hjelm addresses the question of Samaritan and Jewish traditions, especially how the two groups differ in the way that they handle the law, the monarchy, and the prophets. She questions the long-standing assumption that Samaritans developed their Pentateuch from the Jews and implies that the opposite, in fact, may be the case. She demonstrates how the Samaritan tradition gives higher authority to the law above that of the monarchy and the prophets. She sees the Jewish tradition, however, prioritizing the monarchy and prophets over the law so that the Davidic monarchy (by the authority of the prophets) is accomplishing what she calls "something new" that goes beyond and has greater authority than the law (pp. 248-49). In this way, David (South) and Moses (North) are in competition.

In chapters 6 and 7, Hj el m attempts to demonstrate that the cultural and historical setting of the third to second century Israel is a more appropriate home for the narratives of Samuel-Kings. She cites historical events from Hellenistic extra-biblical sources and remarks on their striking similarities with biblical narratives. She claims that this "coincidence" means that "only one, if any, of such parallel traditions is likely to reflect historical reality" (pp. 287-88). Hjelm, of course, favors the Hellenistic traditions. Chapter 7 of the book contains her conclusions.

I find several important contributions in this book. First of all, Hjelm does raise many important questions about the relationship between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms in the tenth to second centuries BC. She also provides a voice for the Samaritan tradition, a tradition often neglected in OT studies. In addition, Hjelm does a masterful job of making literary connections between different parts of the OT. Finally, I think this book is an important landmark to note for conservative scholars; it may be showing us where some biblical historians are heading with their scholarship in the future for both content and methodology. Hjelm's blending of literary, source, redaction, and historical criticism along with linguistics and ANE history could provide a methodological model for future research. The content of this work seems to be driving the authorship of biblical narrative later still than previous works and closer to the period of the Dead Sea community.