5 - Divine Aggression in Prophetic Texts of Defeat

Summary

Chapter 5 tests the claim that the biblical god Yhwh is uniquely aggressive by reading a sampling from several biblical prophets, specifically eighth-century minor prophets such as Hosea and Micah, though also more briefly from Amos and Zephaniah. These texts share several features with the royal psalms of preceding chapters: they are focused on the king, and they are short and non-narrative. Like the royal psalms of defeat in chapter 4, they witness to Yhwh’s aggression against his own client country and its king; and, although this destructiveness is future in the literary presentation of the prophets and not past as in the psalms, the former, too, merit description as texts of defeat. The chapter finds that prophetic defeat texts do not make divine aggression against the king the focal point of the theological crisis they articulate. Rather, the king is one among other leaders caught up in judgement, and the monarchy is but one institution suffering divinely wrought harm.