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3. Allegorical Texts
In assessing some biblical texts as national/political allegory, I would
like to move from an obvious case of political allegory to one that is
not so obvious, with the help of Mieke Bal, Regina Schwartz and David
Jobling. My argument will be that the political allegorical impulse is
basically the same in the more obvious 2 Samuel 12 as in the less
obvious 1 Kings 13.
My first exhibit of political allegory, Nathan's allegory delivered to
David regarding Bathsheba (2 Sam. 12.1-12), 'is a key text for understanding the nature of allegory in the Bible, for it allows us to see one
character allegorizing for another' (Rosenberg 1986: 43). In other
words, the story of the rich man who takes the only ewe of a poor man
to feed a guest is situated within a framework that makes its allegorical
function explicit. Following the story (12.1-4), itself close on the heels
of Yahweh's displeasure, there is both the king's explosive response to
the story (12.5-6) and then the prophet's application of the story to the
king ('You are the man', and so on [12.7-12]).6 Rosenberg's point here
is that this framework, or 'transfer/detransference mechanism', is more
often absent from biblical allegories/parables, although its existence in
2 Sam. 12.1-12 projects the possibility of its presence elsewhere.
Rosenberg's contribution is to toy with the relation between king and
reader who are thus both addressed with 'you are the man' (neglecting
for a moment the gender affiliations assumed by such a relationship).
On the other hand, the reader may refuse the allegorical trap ('Yes,
he's the one, all right!'). If I may rephrase this, then it will be possible
to extend the point: in giving out its own instructions as to how to
read, the text allows certain possibilities while closing off others. In one
sense I too wish to follow the text's guidelines for interpretation
'this is how to read for allegories'but I also want to move into the
zones forbidden by Nathan's interpretive act. A place to begin would
be in the difficulties created by Nathan's explicit allegorical reading:
why, for instance, does it need to be stated so clearly? Further, the
schema of allegorical reference does not seem to measure up: there is
6. Rosenberg omits the further response of David*I have sinned against the
Lord' (12.13)and the subsequent mitigation of punishment in which the child, not
David, will die (12.13-14), although this has the further problem that David's death
is not explicitly mentioned in Nathan's application (12.7-12).
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the material through 'gender-bound' violence, that is to say, the violence perpetrated against (unnamed) women in the context of marriage.
The argument is that such violence is a figure for a social revolution
in the realm of male-female relations, sexuality, procreation and
kinship (thus filling out Schwartz's Foucauldian focus on power). In
emphasizing a social-domestic revolution, over against the political
chaos and transition into statehood and kingship represented in Judges,
Bal is making a first move from the political to the social/domestic,
although the two overlap in numerous ways.
Bal makes a shift in the way marriage and kinship arrangements
have been understood: more conventional anthropology has generated
its terms from the perspective of the child, speaking thus of matrilocal
and patrilocal marriage systems depending on whether children grew
up in their mother's family home or in their father's family home. Bal
wishes to change the focus from children to women: matrilocal now
becomes patrilocal since the woman stays in her father's home and her
husband joins her; patrilocal becomes virilocal (Latin: v/r, man) since
in this system the woman leaves her father's house and goes to the
home of her husband. The shift in terminology also removes the false
impression that in one system (matrilocal) the women had the upper
hand in controlling lineage: rather, the woman is always under control
of a male, whether father or husband. Further, in a patrilocal system
(Bal argues) the women had relatively greater options, since in such a
situation the husband was under her father's jurisdiction and it was
possible to play off husband and father. Bal's argument regarding the
book of Judges is then that the violence against women acts as a figure
for the transition from a patrilocal to a virilocal system: the chaos of
this process shows its face in the conflicts over possession of the women.
This is the countercoherent narrative that connects firmly with reality
at the same time and allows us to make sense of the literary response
of Judges to this situation. (There remains for me a nagging question:
Bal still assumes that the material in Judges deals with the social transformations taking place in the same time period that Judges ostensibly
sets out to recount. In other words, while reading for a countercoherence, Bal's analysis still falls into a larger coherent narrative,
namely that Judges predates the kingship of Israel and sets up the
conditions for it.)
Apart from this reservation, it seems to me that this is a move beyond
Regina Schwartz, since it allows us to see the violence against and
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<
Shemaiah
old men
>
young men
Jeroboam
<
>
Rehoboam
old prophet
< ^-
man of God
Israel
<
Judah
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begins with this second episode that concerns the destruction of the
man of God, and that slide is marked by the presence of nature, which
was virtually absent in the first episode, and which increases in
proportion to the growing identity of man of God and old prophet.
Nature, more particularly the animals, function in this text as a
figuration of a larger entity, an absent totalityto use Jameson's
termsnever concretely realized in an explicit form, yet detectable in
its deformation of the episodes of this chapter and their national allegorical function like the gravitational pull of a hidden planet or moon on
the tides and other terrestrial phenomena. In order to fix on what this
larger entity might be I refer to an interpretation by David Jobling of
the royal Psalm 72 (1992). Among other things Jobling argues for the
integral role of nature in the imperial ideology of the ancient Near
East, although he uses the terminology of 'plenty', with its associations
of fertility, produce, agricultural labor and imperial wealth. In the
'perpetual motion machine' of royal legitimation in Ps. 72.1-7 Jobling
sees a parallel between the idea of royal justice leading to shalom
among the people with the theme of rain producing natural shalom for
the earth. In this proposed ideological construct the king's activity and
existence are part of the natural order; the king or despot, in other
words, and all that the despot stands for is 'natural', or rather, is
ordained by the gods in the appropriate mythologies. But this works
the other way as well, since the despots through their symbiosis with
nature also have an influence over nature through their own activities.18
Nature then would seem to be integral to the ideological framework
of ancient Near Eastern rulers and government, and it is for this
reason that it is possible to take the following steps.
Apart from the class resonances that animals generatethey do all
the work (carrying, killing and guard duty)I would suggest a double
allegorical reference: the lion, as agent of divine punishment, is the
allegorical manifestation of God in this passage, but then simultaneously of the Babylonian (or Persian) empire itself, or rather emperor.
If we entertain this possibility for a moment, then it is to be noted that
the man of God from Judah (the figure of Judah itself) is cut down by
the lion, just as the Babylonians did to Jerusalem in 587, and that the
donkey and the lion stand guard over the body of the man of God, one
on either side like a pair of sentries of a bodyguard or soldiers of an
18. This moves the model over to the one in Ps. 72.8-17 in which the king's
righteousness is the motor for the system as a whole.
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occupying army. By not eating the body of the man of God (v. 28; in
contrast to that person's breaking of the prohibition against eating)
nor attacking the donkeys or the prophet, the lion exercises control by
restraint; for at any moment the lion could attack and eat, in the same
way that imperial control is exercised by the restraint of force. Yet it
is not merely the lion who makes this signification possible, for the
increasing presence of nature may be understood as something like the
Sartrean Other to the characters and action of this chapter, and the
Other for Judah when this material was put together was the Babylonian
or Persian empire.
A couple of final steps remain:first,the connections I have made are
enhanced when it is recalled that political or national allegory comes
into play when a political identity is questioned or threatened by a
larger reality such as empire. Further, I introduced the term 'despot'
a little earlier for the specific reason that there is a need to identify the
nature of the imperial Other a little more closely, which may be done
by mentioning Oriental despotism', or more properly the Asiatic mode
of production for which the boundaries between the imperial ruler
and the deity were often very blurred. The intrusion of nature into
this passageif thefigurationof empire is at least plausibleassists in
accounting for the slippage in the same section of text of the allegorical opposition between Israel and Judah. It is of course still a political
allegory, but one which has a multiple referential pattern.
5. Conclusion
I have tried to expand and enhance Rosenberg's proposal for political
allegory in the Hebrew Bible by means of Fredric Jameson's notion of
national allegory, particularly the suggestion that national allegory
takes place in the intersection and conflict between socio-economic
systems. In order for this contribution to be transposed to the biblical
text I found, following a lead from David Jobling, the work of Regina
Schwartz and Mieke Bal very useful in tracing the way women and
their bodies act as markers or figures for the political and social transitions out of which these texts arose and to which they respond. Yet it
was necessary to include the basic category of the socio-economic
(mode of production) to see the full extent of political allegory. The
final step was to push an allegory from the literary text of 1 Kings 13
via its more immediate political referents to a broader socio-economic
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situation where the tension between an empire and its various subject
peoples, in the particular context of an Asiatic mode of production,
may be said to give rise to national or political allegory.
All the while this analysis has been apparently more objectified than
I would have likedalthough there will of course be all sorts of
traces of my own ideological constructs in their myriad inclusions and
exclusionsbut it will suffice to point out that 'national allegory' may
do double duty and act as a cipher for my own standpoint, or the ' of
this discourse (to avail myself of a slightly different linguistic usage),
contradictory and conflictual that it is. I too find myself in a marginal
country which is both enmeshed within an increasingly globalized
capitalism (to whose reproduction it contributes vast amounts of raw
materials) and yet finds itself in the impossible situation of having
only nationalist discourses at handdesperately asserting the necessity
of a national identity, republican independence, Australian ownership
of products and ideas, and a national culture of theology and biblical
studiesto counter such overwhelming international socio-economic
dominance. The impossibility of the situation lies in the fact that such
efforts at independence from the world system are always already
absorbed. This essay may then be said to be a national or political
allegory of its own production.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, A.
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Colas, S.
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Deboys, D.G.
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Kings xiiiA "New Criterion" Reconsidered', VT41.2 (April): 210-12.
DeVries, S.J.
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/ Kings (WBC, 12; Waco, TX: Word Books).
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'The Way of the Man of God from Judah: True and False Prophecy in the
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Eynikel, E.
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'Prophecy and Fulfillment in the Deuteronomistic History: 1 Kgs 13; 2
Kgs 23,16-18', in C. Brekelmans and J. Lust (eds.), Pentateuchal and
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'Lying Prophet and Disobedient Man in 1 Kings 13: Role Analysis as an
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Die Bcher der Knige (HAT, 1.5; Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).
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Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
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115
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ABSTRACT
In order to develop the idea of national allegory in the Hebrew Bible I engage the
work of Joel Rosenberg on 'political allegory' and Fredric Jameson on 'national
allegory'the notion that narratives about individuals function as allegories of the
national situation. Moving from the straightforward example of Nathan's allegory in
2 Sam. 12.1-12,1 find that national allegory also operates in the work of Regina
Schwartz and Mieke Bal, specifically in the way women and their bodies act as allegorical markers for political and social transitions. Finally, I argue that the old prophet
and the man of God in 1 Kings 13 are allegorical figures for Israel and Judah, only to
be disrupted by external imperial forces, represented here as nature. In this final
section mode of production turns out to be a crucial category.
^ s
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