Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible. By Mark G. Brett

Abstract

Neither ancient Israel nor Early Judaism composed political treatises, legal charters, or political commentary on history or social life. And yet, social ideals, including ideals about the construction, use, and limits of power, are woven into the fabric of the Hebrew Bible. Mark Brett has written a wide-ranging survey of the political theology of the Bible’s writers, from the monarchic period to the age of sceptical wisdom. His tools for reconstructing this ‘political theology’ are social-historical, and his presentation diachronic. The result is a comprehensive history of the competing socio-political ideologies contained in the Bible, culminating in a reflection on the ways that these ideologies have influenced the course of nations and empires even into the modern age. ‘Political theology can be understood very broadly as God-talk located in the context of multiple, often competing, perspectives on social life’, says Brett, and the oldest instances of this brand of God-talk are found in the book of Samuel. The adoption of a monarchic framework was not based on existing legal sanction but on the persuasive power of tribal elders to convince kinship groups to support the institution of a monarch. The early monarchy was governed by a law laid down by Samuel, not by the Torah of Moses. The ‘constitutional monarchy’ of Deut. 17 was still a long way off, historically speaking. Even the evaluation of the long line of Israelite and Judahite monarchs in the book of Kings was independent of deuteronomic logic. The fall of Samaria and of Jerusalem, Brett argues, were based on the principle of intergenerational punishment, a juridical perspective that was rejected in the theology of Deuteronomy (e.g. 1:39, 7:9–10). The core ideals of monarchic political theology, centralization and social justice, are ‘Yahwistic’ in Brett’s terminology, not ‘deuteronomic’.