Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel
Extract from a Review in Vetus Testamentum (Volume 6, Facsimile 4 from 1956):
Professor Johnson’s interest in the position of the king in the cult in ancient Israel has been known and his opinion respected since his essay on the subject in The Labyrinth (ed. S. H. Hooke), 1935. He redefined his position and somewhat modified it in an article on ‘Divine Kingship and the O.T.’ in Expository Times LXII, 1950-51, where he emphasizes the vital role of the king in the New Year Festival in rites designed to renew the covenantal relationship between Jahweh and Israel and so to effect a renewal of the vitality of the people. Now his researches culminate in a much fuller and more satisfying study, which contains more than its modest bulk suggests.
The book begins with a study of the significance of the King in ancient Israel as the keystone of the social and political order. The king’s function is to uphold the sedeq, the proper order of the national God of Israel. This divine order, or sedeq, was asserted in the ritual of the Enthronement of Jahweh, to which the Psalms celebrating the Kingship of Jahweh were relevant. The author follows Mowinckel here and further in arguing for an annual enactment of the myth and ritual of the Enthronement of Jahweh in the autumnal New Year Festival, a thesis which we consider wholly probable after the Babylonian analogy of the myth of the triumph of Marduk over the unruly waters and his consequent assumption of kingship in the Spring New Year Festival. Jewish tradition, for what such late authority is worth, supports this view, but the difficulty has always been the lack of direct evidence in the O.T. itself. Zechariah xiv 16-17, which associated the formal acknowledgment by the nations of Jahweh as King at Jerusalem in the Feast of Tabernacles at Jerusalem with the coming of the heavy rains (geshem), in itself, we consider, sufficient evidence, is duly cited, and other instances of a similar association of the triumph of the Divine King over the powers of Chaos with the winter rains in the Enthronement Psalms are further adduced. Such psalms as xciii, xcvii, xcix (all Enthronement Psalms according to Mowinckel) are cited and discussed as conveying the general background of the Enthronement Festival.
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Extract from a Review in Evangelical Quarterly (Volume 28, Issue 2 from 1956):
"Professor Johnson's … present volume embodies the Haskell Lectures which [before the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin in the spring of 1951, showing that] Israel had one Divine King—Yahweh, her Creator, Judge and Redeemer—but the human king bore a special relation to Him as His anointed. Under covenant the king was trustee of Yahweh's people; their prosperity and survival were in a special way bound up with his life; it was his duty to maintain personal and national righteousness and faithfulness to Yahweh, in fitting response to Yahweh's pledged troth to king and people. This relation of the king to God on the one side and to his people on the other was embodied in the ceremonial carried out at the Feast of Tabernacles, when the enthronement of Yahweh was celebrated. In this ceremonial Yahweh’s primeval triumph in creation over the forces of disorder was commemorated, His ultimate triumph over death in the new creation was anticipated, and the combination of these cosmogonic and eschatological factors in the ritual of Tabernacles gave an effective demonstration of Yahweh’s will for Israel and the world, a fresh assurance of His fidelity to His promises, and a new challenge to His people to yield Him their trust and their loyalty, that the day might dawn when righteousness and peace would be universally established and His kingdom manifested in power and glory."
