Two Nations Under God: The Deuteronomic History of Solomon and the Dual Monarchies, 2 vols.

• Author: Soggin, J.A.

The aim of these two volumes is to offer a critical examination of the texts in I-II Kings describing the Israelite monarchy from Solomon to Josiah.

The author is quite proficient in textual criticism and endowed with a good amount of common sense. His remarks on the texts thus are among the most valuable elements of these two books, and will remain valid, even when other elements are open to criticism. In other words, the reader has here a textual commentary of high critical value.

Other elements are open to challenge. The most serious defect of the work is, for me, its conservatism. To link the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) with King Josiah's reform or to consider them in part pre-exilic (passim), with an Urtext (v. 2, p. 4) featuring archaic elements (e.g., v. 1, p. 185), is at least open to challenge, especially in light of the unfinished but published dissertation of E Foresti. The narrative about the favorably judged first activities of Solomon and those of other kings, followed by years of decadence (v. 2, p. 6) was first shown to be a narrative device of the DtrH by the Swedish author R. A. Carlson (see below); these two works are not mentioned in the otherwise adequate bibliographies. Could the queen of Sheba ever have visited Solomon (v. 1, pp. 131-32) if the existence of a kingdom of Sheba cannot be proved before the eighth century B.C.E.? The strange thing is that Knoppers himself readily concedes that one is dealing here with something like "ancient Near Eastern royal propaganda." (Knoppers' Latin is not always up to the task: if he wants to use a Latin expression referring to the peace in Solomon's time, should it not have been pax salomonica, rather than pax solomona [v. 1, p. 162]?) The problem of the Northern cult is that it is completely rejected by the DtrH. So how far can one gather information from polemical texts, and how can...