The cholos which is one of the constitutive features of Hera is at the heart of this chapter, which treats the narratives and traditions which recount conflicts involving the Hera of Zeus and certain of Zeus’s sons (e.g. Herakles, Dionysos, Hephaistos), and where her wrath is decisive for the definition of their divine prerogatives and their full integration into the Olympian order. By challenging some of Zeus’s illegitimate children, Hera works as a power of legitimation, redefining the divine family. In the world of heroes, the angry Hera is an agent of legitimation as well, but also of delegitimation, especially in cases of human sovereignty: her intervention contributes to identifying rulers whose sovereignty is rotten, as is the case with the royal family of Thebes under Oedipus, and that of Iolkos, in the epic of the Argonauts. Her interventions are nothing but actions that take charge of and realise the boulai of all the gods collectively and of her husband in particular. She does this, to be sure, in her own way, as a goddess whose characteristic is constructive opposition, but her anger remains, in the final analysis, at the service of an order guaranteed by Zeus.

Chapter 3 tests the claim that the biblical god Yhwh is uniquely aggressive by rereading several biblical royal psalms, including Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Psalm 20, and Psalm 21. The chapter finds that in these psalms, the aggression of the biblical god Yhwh targets external enemies of the king and country; conversely, Yhwh’s favor towards his client king is completely guaranteed. The choral voice of the psalms aligns itself with Yhwh and his king; the community of readers and reciters somehow shares in the king’s own prior and paradigmatic relationship of divine favor. However, the rhetoric of the psalms also places the texts’ own readers and reciters in potential danger of Yhwh’s aggression, if they should refuse the psalms’ rhetorical appeal.

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.

Chapter 4 tests the claim that the biblical god Yhwh is uniquely aggressive by rereading two biblical royal psalms, Psalms 89 and Psalm 132.These royal psalms share many features with the royal psalms of Chapter 3—but they differ in one crucial respect: where all the previous royal psalms exempted Yhwh’s favoured king from experiencing divine aggression, Psalms 89 and 132 reflect Yhwh’s past aggression exactly towards his own king. The chapter thus identifies these texts as psalms of defeat because in them, a past event of divinely sponsored damage to the king comes to speech: and shocked and alarmed speech at that, particularly in Psalm 89. As such, they begin to articulate a unique theological contribution with regard to divine aggression: a real departure from the unconditional loyalty of a patron god for his individual, favoured king.

Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.