Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Francesca Stavrakopoulou on the confusions between Bethel and Samarian in 1 Kings 13 and 2 Kings 23

  

There appears to be some confusion within 1 Kings 13 and 2 Kings 23 between Bethel and Samaria. In 1 Kgs 13:11, the old prophet buried in the tomb with the Judahite Man of God is said to come from Bethel, but in 2 Kgs 23:18b he is described as ‘the prophet who came out of Samaria’. In view of the tradition in 1 Kings 13, most commentators detect a redactional or scribal error here, and assume the prophet from Bethel is the intended referent. A similar confusion is also evident in 1 Kgs 13:32 and 2 Kgs 23:19-20, in which the focused assault on Bethel slides into a general attack on Samaria and its sanctuaries. These problems are often blamed on a clumsy redactor, keen to extend the cult crimes and punishment of Bethel to a broader northern population, including, perhaps, the foreigners and ‘Samarians’ (שמרנים) said in 2 Kgs 17:24-41 to live in the territories of the former Northern Kingdom. It is possible that the sliding of designations in these texts is informed in some way by the tradition in 2 Kgs 17:27-28 that (a) priest(s) from Samaria relocated to Bethel to offer religious instruction to the local inhabitants. The apparent confusion of Bethel and Samaria seems likely to occupy redaction critics for some time yet, but also inhibits a more robust contextualization of the Bethel polemic in Kings. (Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims [Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 473; London: T&T Clark, 2010], 90 n. 35)