Review of Uriah Y. Kim,Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading, Hebrew Bible Monographs 22

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the character of David in 1 Samuel 2 Kings 2 is very complicated. Interpretations that picture him either as the purely pious shepherd or solely as the Machiavellian mafioso rising to power by killing anyone in his way do not do justice to this complex character. While many modern interpretations of David are available, Uriah Kim, Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hartford Seminary, has offered a different interpretation: a postcolonial David. In Identity and Loyalty Kim continues his program of a postcolonial reading of the Deuteronomistic History, having set out his program in Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005). In this reading strategy, Kim seeks to allow his own social context, as ‘an Asian American Christian’ (p. 13), to inform a reading of David. Such reading strategies are a helpful aid to better understanding in a field dominated by white, western, mostly affluent voices. In the first chapter, Kim sets up the concept of a postcolonial reading of David. Key factors lie in the concepts of identity, which in Kim's reading means largely who is and who is not considered an ‘Israelite’, and loyalty, which he examines in the David story in terms of the Hebrew word hesed, often translated ‘loving-kindness’ or ‘loyalty’. Kim proposes a reading of David which envisions him as ‘a Machiavellian man of hesed who was willing to cross various boundaries of difference in order to form his kingdom’ (p. 27). He reads the David story through the lens of hesed in order to see ‘neither the David of the narrator (and faith) nor the David of his enemies (and modern skeptics)... [but rather] a post-colonial David who represents a third way of reading the David story’ (p. 30). BOOK REVIEWS