Joel Baden's "The Historical David"

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toejam
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Joel Baden's "The Historical David"

Post by toejam »

http://www.amazon.com/The-Historical-Da ... 062188372/

About 3/4 of the way through this. Great read. Sees the books of Samuel and Kings as essentially royal propaganda. Through reading between the lines, Baden sees David as something of a ruthless mafia boss who slowly but surely gets all the pieces in place to mount a run for kingship. Some of it seems very reasonable, other parts a bit speculative (but such is all historical reconstructions whose only sources are one-sided textual documents I suppose). Anyone else read this? Thoughts?
My study list: https://www.facebook.com/notes/scott-bignell/judeo-christian-origins-bibliography/851830651507208
Diogenes the Cynic
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Re: Joel Baden's "The Historical David"

Post by Diogenes the Cynic »

I have the book, but have only read a couple chapters of it. That's basically the thesis of Finkelstein and Silberman in David and Solomon, though. They say David was a southern warlord who filled a power vacuum after the Assyrian conquest of the North and the death of Saul (whether as a literal figure or just a symbol for Northern kings in general). They say refugees poured into Judah resulting in parallel traditions about David as heroic on one side and villainous on the other. The syncretization of those traditions produced a literary effect of "complexity" for the character, who in reality was probably just a Saddam Hussein type strongman asshole romanticized centuries later as a symbol of lost Jewish power.
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