Backlighting Jeroboam: Form, Content, and Paronomasia in 1 Kings

Abstract

The book of Kings portrays the period from Solomon’s death to the death of Ahab as signally consequential for Israel’s history as a people. The period began with the permanent partition of the nation. From the Kings perspective, however, the impact of Jeroboam I’s cultic innovations was even more catastrophic. The book’s preoccupation is to demonstrate a causal relationship between infidelity to YHWH and deleterious change manifested in societal and political instability and misfortune. This study applies two current trajectories of biblical interpretation, namely, ‘form follows function/content’ analysis and close reading of the text’s orthographic features to probe what 1 Kings 11–22 is saying about this dynamic and how it says it. The study concludes that, whether the medium be orthographic manipulation, graphic polysemous constructions, or onomastic paronomasia, form and content are closely coordinated in this text. This symbiosis between paronyms and content subtly reinforces the composition’s unity.