(Download) "Mashal Le-Melekh: The Search for Solomon." by Hebrew Studies Journal " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Mashal Le-Melekh: The Search for Solomon.
- Author : Hebrew Studies Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 214 KB
Description
The case for extensive inner-biblical interpretation has been made by Michael Fishbane in his comprehensive volume, and more recently by Yair Zakovitch in two separate books. (1) In this paper, we will attempt to show how various types of inner-biblical interpretation were marshaled to develop the character of a single biblical figure, King Solomon. While the natural focus of such a search is the resultant image of Solomon, we would like to investigate the exegetical methods that were used to paint this portrait, in order to assess their implications for dating those books in which they appear and their relation to the origins of midrashic explanation. Though our main interest lies in the methods used to expand the image of Solomon, we shall nevertheless be paying attention to the portrait of Solomon that was drawn and the impression it made on subsequent writers. (2) In Bialik and Ravnitsky's Sefer Ha-Aggadah, King David is accorded twenty-three entries and Solomon twenty. Yet David's legends take up seven pages and those for Solomon, nine. (3) David's entries, at least in name, are all historical, while the longest chapters allotted to Solomon are entitled "Solomon's Throne" and "Solomon as King and Commoner," two subjects which are respectively midrashic elaborations of several verses (4) and a legendary motif with no scriptural basis at all. Louis Feldman, an acknowledged expert on Josephus, notes that the Roman-Jewish historian devoted more external evidence to support his account of Solomon in Antiquities of the Jews than for any other biblical character. (5) The inspiration for all this interest in Solomon can only have been his image in the Bible. Appropriating the title of Moshe Shamir's novel about Alexander Jannaeus, King Solomon is presented in Kings as melekh basar va-dam, a flesh and blood monarch. (6) Yet in other books he appears, to adopt the rabbinic phrase, to be more like a mashal le-melekh, a metaphorical king. (7) It would indeed seem that the case of Solomon bears out the estimation that "historical biography occupies a kind of no-man's-land between history and literature." (8)
 "Mashal Le-Melekh: The Search for Solomon." by Hebrew Studies Journal " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}