Josiah's Reform and the Dynamics of Defilement: Israelite Rites of Violence and the Making of a Biblical Text

by Lauren A. S. Monroe

Overview

Lauren Monroe argues that the use of cultic and ritual language in the account of the Judean King Josiah's reforms in 2 Kings 22-23 is key to understanding the history of the text's composition, and illuminates the essential, interrelated processes of textual growth and identity construction in ancient Israel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199913213
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/22/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Lauren A.S. Monroe is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Destructive Rituals and the Creative Process: The Dynamics of Defilement in 2 Kings 23
Chapter 2: Priestly Rites of Elimination and the Holiness: Core of 2 Kings 23:4-20
Chapter 3: Herem Ideology and the Politics of Destruction: Josiah's Reform in Deuteronomistic Perspective
Chapter 4: The Mechanics of Transformation: The Holiness Substratum and Deuteronomistic Revision of 2 King 23:4-20
Chapter 5: Literary, Historiographic and Historical Implications

Editorial Reviews

"Josiah's Reform and the Dynamics of Defilement is an innovative, clearly-written work that suggests a new, compelling understanding of 2 Kings 22-23 concerning Josiah's reform, and the historicity of that reform. This will be of great interest to scholars of Deuteronomy, Kings, and Priestly literature, and to those studying the connection between these various corpora, especially in its novel and compelling suggestion that sections of this reform in Kings were written by holiness priests."—Marc Brettler, Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies, Brandeis University

"Lauren Monroe's Josiah's Reform and the Dynamics of Defilement unsettles what biblical scholars thought they knew about 2 Kings 22-23. In a book that is well researched but also accessibly written, Monroe develops a bold new approach to this episode that may require a revision of how scholars think about the history of Israelite religion and the development of the Hebrew Bible."—Steven Weitzman, Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and Religion, Stanford University

"Monroe's judicious observations about the vocabulary and phraseology used in the description of Josiah's reforms in II Kings 23:4-20 enable her to demonstrate that they reflect some of the same concerns about ritual, cultic purity, and the elimination of impurity, as does the Holiness Code (Lev 17-26) and parts of P. Her conclusions about how this came about are important both to the intellectual history of ancient Israel and the history of biblical literature. Monroe's book will open up important new discussions about links between Pentateuchal sources and their dates."—Ziony Zevit, Distinguished Professor in Bible and Northwest Semitic Languages, American Jewish University

"Monroe makes a significant contribution...her core argument about the influence of priestly ideas on the reform account should influence all future studies of Josiah's reform and its literary reflections."—Interpretation

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