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Reconstructing the Temple: The Royal Rhetoric of Temple Renovation in the Ancient Near East and Israel

2020; Eisenbrauns; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/bullbiblrese.30.4.0610

2576-0998

Kaz Hayashi,

Archaeology and Historical Studies

In this book, Andrew R. Davis argues that temple reconstruction/renovation constitutes a subset of temple building accounts with its own rhetorical purpose within the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East. Particularly, temple renovation serves the king’s royal ideology in distancing himself from recent turmoil and instead associates his reign with an ideal past.In ch. 1, Davis begins by identifying temple renovation as a vehicle of royal rhetoric. Temple renovation announces the end and beginning of an era and marks the transfer of authority. Moreover, since temples embody and represent the past, altering its structure reflects a type of historiography. Whereas founding a temple emphasizes the novelty of the king’s accomplishment, temple renovation differs in its orientation to the past.In the first half of the second chapter, Davis analyzes Neo-Assyrian accounts of temple renovations with a special attention to Esarhaddon’s reports. Esarhaddon’s restoration of the Ešarra Temple in Aššur connects his reign with important kings from Assyria’s past, whereas the renovation of the Esagil Temple in Babylon associates Esarhaddon with the temple’s ancient origins. The lack of reference to Sennacherib, however, disassociates the king from his infamous predecessor. The second section analyzes the three temple renovations of Jehoash (2 Kgs 12:5–17), Ahaz (16:10–18), and Josiah (22:3–10) within the so-called Deuteronomistic History. According to Davis, Jehoash and Ahaz provide negative examples of temple renovations. Josiah’s reform corrects the previous renovations by cooperating with the priesthood and leading a religiously motivated cultic purification. Furthermore, the discovery of the “book of the law” and Josiah’s obedience to the law likens him with the ideal king, David (22:2).The third chapter deals with temple renovations during the Persian period and the reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple in the book of Ezra. Persian temple renovations differ from Neo-Assyrian examples in their dearth, unformulaic nature, and strong connection with biblical literature. Nevertheless, like Esarhaddon’s renovations, the reconstructions by Cyrus II, Cambyses II, and Darius I connect these kings with an ideal past while also distancing them from recent turmoil. The rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple in Ezra 5:7–6:12 serves a similar rhetoric that expresses religious continuity as well as discontinuity. The Judean elders associate their reconstruction efforts with the founding of the temple by Solomon and correct the mistakes by their recent ancestors that led to Nebuchadnezzar’s incursion and the temple’s destruction.In the fourth chapter, Davis identifies and interprets Jeroboam’s placement of golden calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs 12:25–33) as temple renovations. After establishing 12:25, 28*–29, 32a as the text’s earliest layer, he uses archaeological and textual data to contend that the Jeroboam narrative represents an account of temple renovation. To begin, the archaeology of Dan and Bethel suggests their ongoing cultic function since the Bronze Age. Hence, Jeroboam hardly constructed a “new” cultic site. Turning to the textual data, Davis notes that the Canaanite background of the calf imagery, the formula associating the statues with the God of the exodus, and the careful selection of the Hebrew verbs ʿśh, śym, and ntn instead of bnh suggest that the biblical author viewed Jeroboam’s actions as an act of renovation rather than founding a sanctuary. Davis then dates the background of Jeroboam’s golden calf narrative to the 8th century BC during the reigns of Joash and Jeroboam II, instead of the 10th century BC during the reign of Jeroboam I. These kings embedded their renovation of Dan and Bethel within the story of the Northern Kingdom’s founding king in order to reassert Israelite independence from Aramean hegemony, while simultaneously distancing their reigns from the Omride kings.The fifth chapter serves as an epilogue that briefly explores temple renovations during the Greco-Roman period. The three examples Davis highlights include the dedication of the Jerusalem temple in 2 Maccabees during the Hellenistic period, Josephus’s account of Herod’s rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple during the Roman period, and Jesus’s prediction to destroy and rebuild the temple in the NT. However, due to his limited training in the literature and history of this period, Davis admirably offers a prospect for future research that he hopes another scholar will take up in the future.This monograph offers a scholarly model with its careful analysis of a variety of primary sources (i.e., Neo-Assyrian, Persian, and biblical texts) as well as its integration of a wide range of secondary literature from the US and Europe. Davis persuasively defends his thesis that temple renovation constitutes a distinct subset of literary genres that kings employed both to disassociate their reigns from recent turmoil and to connect their reigns with the illustrious past. His thesis that the Jeroboam narrative represents a temple renovation stands out as the most innovative portion of the book, but some arguments in this section may require refinement. For instance, Davis’s argument that Dan and Bethel’s archaeology reflects their ongoing cultic significance since the Bronze Age does not consider how settlement changes and occupational gaps (e.g., James Kelso describes a conflagration and subsequent cultural change that marks the Late Bronze age–Iron Age transition at Bethel) may in fact reflect cultic discontinuity. Additionally, Davis’s eighth-century dating of the Jeroboam narrative based on references to Bethel by Amos and Hosea overlooks recent compositional studies of these books. Although some scholars date Amos 7:10–17 to the eighth century BC, recent redactional studies identify this text as an editorial insertion by a later redactor. Davis’s argument would benefit from acknowledging the diachronic development of these prophetic books. Nevertheless, the combined argument of the fourth chapter succeeds in demonstrating the plausibility of Davis’s thesis. This book will surely benefit those interested in ancient Near Eastern temples and will undoubtedly influence scholars in considering the implication of interpreting the Jeroboam narrative as a temple renovation.