David as Co-Recipient of Worship?
On several occasions,
Chronicles blurs dramatically the lines between actions directed at Yhwh and
actions directed at the king such that they share an exalted status. A
particularly intriguing instance of blurred lines between divine and human
royal exaltation occurs immediately preceding Solomon’s coronation, where we
read,
Then David said to all the
assembly, “Bless Yhwh your God.” So all the assembly blessed Yhwh, God of their
ancestors, bowing to worship (ויקדו וישׁתחוו) Yhwh and king. (1 Chr 29:20)
What is the significance of the
congregation’s actions in this scene? Do the people worship Yhwh and David as
equals? The verbal hendiadys *קדד + *חוה is a common way of expressing
deferential prostration toward God or humans in the Hebrew Bible.75 Several
scholars thus contend that bowing toward and worshipping David is similar to
other texts where the roots קדד and חוה combine
to depict deferential prostration toward humans, as when Ornan prostrates
himself before David (1 Chr 21:21//2 Sam 24:20), when officials do obeisance
before Joash (2 Chr 24:17, without Vorlage), or when Bathsheba twice
prostrates herself before David (1 Kgs 1:16, 31). David falls prostrate before
Saul (1 Sam 24:9) and Saul falls prostrate before Samuel’s spirit (1 Sam
28:14). Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, Joseph’s brothers bow reverentially
before him (Gen 43:28). In short, the idiom *קדד* + חוה is not necessarily a cultic act, but rather an
act of yielding submission to a superior. According to this line of reasoning,
translating the hendiadys as “worship” is appropriate only insofar as
the people ascribe great worth to Yhwh and the king, or as the acts denoted by
the verbal pair occur in cultic contexts.
However, the foregoing view
does not capture the uniqueness of this scene, in which a human (David) and
Yhwh receive the same acts of ritual prostration. As Japhet
contends, “such a close conjunction of God and king in an act of worship … is
not found elsewhere in the Bible.” It is not only the acts, but the recipients
and contexts that determine the significance of the hendiadys *קדד and *חוה
. That Yhwh and David are corecipients
of ritual obeisance speaks strongly to the king’s exalted status in Chronicles.
Several contextual features
suggest why this is so. First, Chronicles states only three verses later that
Solomon “sat on Yhwh’s throne in place of his father David” (v. 23), indicating
that David sat previously on the same throne. The close proximity of this claim
to v. 20 may account for the worship and obeisance directed at Yhwh and David.
As Japhet observes, Chronicles never refers to the “throne of David,”
but instead speaks of the “throne of the Lord” or the “throne of the kingdom of
the Lord over Israel” (1 Chr 28:5), or the “throne of Israel” (2 Chr 6:10, 16;
cf. 1 Kgs 8:20, 25) or simply the “royal throne in Israel” (1 Chr 22:10; 2 Chr
7:18; cf. 1 Kgs 9:5). By eliminating references to the Davidic seat of power,
and identifying it instead with God’s throne within the theocracy, Chronicles
indicates that the divine office-bearer was uniquely positioned for obedience
and reverence also directed at Yhwh himself. Second, v. 20 suggests that David
qua king plays a dual role as cult leader and exalted recipient of worship.
Therefore, he is and is
not on par with Yhwh in this scene. On the one hand, David directs the
congregation to “bless” Yhwh (v. 20a). Thus, they “bless Yhwh” and not
David. On the other hand, David receives the congregation’s worship with Yhwh
(v. 20b) as bearer of the divine royal office. David played both roles as
intermediating king. He was Israel’s deferential king, who led all Israel to
exalt Yhwh as king (as in his preceding prayer and 1 Chr 16), but was also the
concrete representative of Israel’s exalted divine ruler, and one who participates
in Yhwh’s rule. (Matthew Lynch, Monotheism and Institutions in the Book of
Chronicles [Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2.Reihe 64; Studies of the
Sofja Kovalevskaja Research Group on Early Jewish Monotheism 1; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 232-34,
emphasis in bold added)
