Hell Hath No Fury like a God Scorned

And the Deuteronomistic historian who is responsible for the redaction of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges and so, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, provides not just a history in the sense of documenting events as they occur (as if there's ever documentation without interpretation) but provides a strong interpretation of history, a philosophy of history. He's trying to ascertain the meaning of events, the larger purpose and design, something we've called a historiosophy. And we find the Deuteronomists' interpretation of Israel's history in the preface to the Book of Deuteronomy, we find it in editorial comments that are sort of peppered throughout Joshua through Kings, and we especially find it in the summary of the entire unit that is contained in 2 Kings 17. Before we read that passage we need to think about what it was that prompted the Deuteronomist to adopt a particular interpretation of Israel's historical record. The Deuteronomistic historian was attempting to respond to the first major historical challenge to confront the Israelite people and the Hebrew religion. And that was the complete collapse of the Israelite nation, the destruction of God's sanctuary, and the defeat and exile of the people of the “Lord and God of history”. The calamitous events of 722 BCE, but especially 587 BCE, raised a critical theological dilemma. God had promised the patriarchs and their descendants that they would live in His land. He had promised that the house of David would stand forever but here the monarchy had collapsed, the people were defeated and they were in exile. So the challenge presented by this twist of history was really twofold: Is God the god of history, is he omnipotent, is he capable of all, can he in fact impose and effect His will, and if so then what about his covenant with the patriarchs and his covenant with David? Had he faithlessly abandoned it? Well, that was unthinkable. Then if he hadn't faithlessly abandoned his covenant with his people and with David, he must not be the god of history, the universal lord of all. He wasn't able to save his people. Neither of these ideas was acceptable to the Deuteronomistic school. It was a fundamental tenet of Israelite monotheism that God is at once the god of history, capable of all, whose will is absolute, whose promises are true and at the same time a god of faithfulness who does not abandon his people, he is both good and powerful. So how could the disasters of 722 and 586 be reconciled with the conviction that God controlled history and that He had an eternal covenant with the patriarchs and with David? The historiosophy of the Deuteronomistic school is the response of one segment of the Israelite community, we'll see another response when we turn to the Prophets, but the basic idea of the Deuteronomistic School is that God's unconditional and eternal covenants with the patriarchs and with David do not preclude the possibility of punishment or chastisement for sin as specified in the conditional Mosaic covenant. So you see how both ideas are going to be important to hold in dialectic tension: both theologies, the covenant theology as well as the patriarchal and royal theology. So this is because although God is omnipotent, humans do have free will, they can corrupt the divine plan. So in the Deuteronomistic history the leaders of Israel are depicted as having the choice of accepting God's way or rejecting it. God tries to help them. He's constantly sending them prophets who yell at the kings and tell them what it is God wants of them, but they continue to make the wrong choice. They sin and ultimately that brings about the fall, first of Israel and then of Judah and it's the idolatrous sins of the kings that does it. With the deposition and the execution [correction: death; see note 5] of the last Davidic king, Zedekiah, the Deuteronomistic school reinterpreted the Davidic Covenant in conditional terms on the model of the Sinaitic Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, according to which God's favor toward the king depends on the king's loyalty to God, and in this way the fall of the house of David could be seen as justifiable punishment for disobedient kings or rulers like Manasseh. (We'll come back to him.) Remember the Davidic Covenant that Nathan proclaimed in 2 Samuel 7 explicitly said that God would punish and chastise his anointed. That's what it means to be a son, to receive correction, discipline and punishment.