Rethinking the 'Exilic' Book of Kings

Abstract

The most frequently encountered arguments for the 'exilic period' date of the book of Kings depend upon premises that the book was intended to be up-to-date, and that the end of the Exile would have been a necessary episode in a monarchic story composed in the Persian or subsequent periods. The premises are unjustified and Kings could be reasonably dated to these later ages. Furthermore, scholarly constructs of a normative 'Exilic Period' are unsuitable, as diverse conceptualizations of the monarchic and post-monarchic past are to be expected to have been commonplace. For related reasons, literary features often taken as suggestive of a 'pre-exilic' edition can be interpreted differently. This paper proposes that the story Kings tells represents a symbolic history of a culturally, if not politically, autonomous vision of 'Israel', which included the communities of the Diaspora/Exile.