König und Tempel

Abstract

Abstract When looking at the literary history of the dynastic oracle in 2 Sam 7:1-17 and its narrative embedding in the historiographic concept of Samuel and Kings, one can argue that in the beginning, there was a royal oracle of salvation shaped by a common Ancient Near Eastern royal ideology. Even though the exact wording or the original ‘Sitz im Leben’ of the oracle cannot be identified with any certainty, some observations in the literary structure of the narrative indicate that the ‘deuteronomistic’ narrator in 2 Sam 7 used an earlier form of the dynastic oracle in order to combine it with the motive of building the temple and creating a coherent story that plays a key role in the historiographic structure of his narrative work. Later (dtr) editors enhanced the concept of building the temple over the dynastic promise and interpreted the time of David as the final stage of Israel’s conquest of the land. The dynastic oracle has not been revoked, but the political reign of the Davidides has been relativised, so that the text was opened up for new interpretations and applications, which can be studied in the wide range of its history of reception.