Christopher J.H. Wright, “The People of God and the State in the Old Testament,” Themelios 16.1
(Oct/Nov 1990): 4-10.
On the other hand, it is Yahweh himself who gives Israel a king, choosing, anointing and (for
a while) blessing him. It is Yahweh who goes on to exalt David, embarrassing him with the
multiplicity of victories, gift of a city, rest from his enemies, and a covenant for his posterity.
‘Solomon in all his glory’ suffered no embarrassment, but his greatness is still attributed to
Yahweh’s generosity. In other words, Yahweh takes the human desire and resultant institution
and makes them fit in with his own purposes. Indeed, he goes further, and tries to mould the
monarchy, for all its origins as rejection of theocracy, into a vehicle for theocracy by
subsuming the reign of the king under his own reign. And so the royal theology of Jerusalem
is absorbed into the transcendent rule of Yahweh and given a covenant framework which
harks back to Sinai in its call for loyalty and obedience.
If the monarchy thus stands in a position of ambiguous legitimacy before God, neither totally
rejected nor unconditionally sanctioned, it likewise had to struggle for legitimacy at a human
level. This is how South African scholar Gunther Wittenberg interprets the texts of the
Davidic-Solomonic era, seeing in them both attempts at theological legitimizing and also
theological resistance to the claimed legitimacy of the Davidic house.
15
The legitimizing texts,
of course, are those which related to the Davidic covenant, the temple, Zion, and the
relationship of the king to God. Resistance was crystallized in the secession of the northern
tribes under the leadership of Jeroboam. The presenting cause of this was the social and
economic oppression which had developed during Solomon’s reign, and which Rehoboam,
though offered the chance of a change of policy, deliberately chose to continue and intensify.
But there are hints also of a theological refusal in principle to accept the legitimacy of the
glorious Davidic ‘new thing’. The prophet Ahijah, who accosted Jeroboam to launch him on
his secession from Judah, came from Shiloh. Shiloh was an ancient cultic centre of the pre-
monarchic tribal federation, former resting place of the ark of the (Sinai) covenant and all its
links with Israel’s historical, exodus traditions. Above all it was closely associated with
Samuel, whose denunciation of monarchy must have echoed loudly among northern Israelites
in the later years of Solomon. Furthermore, there are echoes of the cry of the Israelites in their
Egyptian bondage, in the plea of the northerners to have their burdens lifted. Had Solomon
become a pharaoh? Noticeably, in setting up the religious foundations of his own state,
Jeroboam recalls the exodus liberation: ‘Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you up out
of Egypt’ (aside, ‘not to mention, out of Jerusalem’) (1 Ki. 12:28).
[p.7]
What we have seen, then, is that the transformation of the people of God into an institutional
state generated both approval and rejection, in the heat of the process itself, and also in
theological and canonical assessment. It seems that the institutional state, like certain other
human conditions of life which the law permits but never wholly approves, such as divorce
and slavery, is a concession to human ‘hardness of heart’: permitted but transient.
15
G. H. Wittenberg, ‘King Solomon and the Theologians’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 63 (June
1988) (special issue on church and state and the problem of legitimacy), pp. 16-29. Brueggemann also finds
implicit criticism of the golden age of Solomon in the texts themselves which catalogue it, texts which he claims
conceal a social criticism designed to lead the reader to enquire exactly what kind of shalom it was under
Solomon which brought the people such satiety. See ‘Vine and Fig Tree―a Case Study in Imagination and
Criticism’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981); ‘The Bible and Mission’, Missiology 10.4 (1982), pp. 397-
411; ‘Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel’, Journal of Biblical
Literature 98 (1979), pp. 161-185.