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[750774(1997)95-116]

NATIONAL ALLEGORY IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

Roland Boer

United Theological College, 16 Masons Drive, North Parramatta, NSW 2151, Australia

The existence of two discourses with much in common yet no point of intersection—like parallel lines—is a fortunate situation for anyone interested in the twin disciplines of literary and biblical studies. I refer in particular to the discourse on political allegory—the suggestion that allegorical material has a political focus—in the Hebrew Bible and to the debate on national allegory in literary and cultural criticism. By 'national allegory' I mean a genre in which characters play out com­plex relationships that interpret and highlight what are felt to be the significant features of the national situation in past and present and pro­ject possibilities for the future; thus, national allegory connects public and private, society and individual, where public and society are consti­tuted by a 'nation'.

I would like to approach my topic from two different trajectories. From the biblical side I begin with the work of Joel Rosenberg, who has introduced the phrase 'political allegory' into the study of the Hebrew Bible. Subsequently the work of Regina Schwartz and Mieke Bal has pushed this issue further. From another direction comes the debate between Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad and Michael Sprinker on the possibility, nature and configuration of national allegory in con­temporary, particularly 'third world', literature. Such a situation— two similar discussions in different but related disciplines—lends itself to a dialectical play in which the two may intersect. Thus, the work of the biblical critics needs to be enhanced and strengthened by that of Jameson and company, yet the biblical material places certain demands of its own on the whole idea of national allegory, not least of which is

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the problem of applying a category used for contemporary literature to that of the Hebrew Bible.

Political Allegory

In a rather wide-ranging discussion Joel Rosenberg (1986) has made the useful dual proposal that allegory is an element of the Hebrew Bible and that its nature is very often, if not predominantly, political. Allegory is understood by Rosenberg—despite the presentation of a range of theories of allegory—in its most basic sense as a narrative that plays in some way on the intersection between personal and supra-personal domains. In other words, the personal or individual element refers in various ways to that which is beyond itself, often touching on the realms of cosmic and mythic history. By 'political' Rosenberg refers to that which pertains to the state, specifically the Israelite state.

In his account Rosenberg provides an apologetic for the return of allegory in critical discussion by means of a narrative of the progress of allegory, a narrative that begins with Philo, runs through Maimonides and allegory's decline in the eighteenth century, and closes with its return in twentieth-century modernism. In this account there are some interesting moves, most of which hinge, I would suggest, on the desire to remove the infamy and sheer illegitimacy that still hang heavily around the idea and practice of allegory. Two of the moves in this quest are crucial: Rosenberg removes all the negative dimensions from 'allegory' and assigns them to what he calls 'allegoresis'; he then seeks to associate, indeed identify, allegory with parable or mashal, both terms commanding much greater respect in contemporary literary (particularly biblical) criticism than does allegory.1 The distinction between allegory and allegoresis attracts to itself another opposition— now quite troubled in itself—between text and interpretation, the allegorical text being more legitimate than the allegorizing criticism (allegoresis) that seeks to allegorize a not necessarily allegorical text (e.g. with Homer's texts or the fourfold exegesis of Jewish and Christian biblical scholars). Into the allegory-allegoresis opposition

1. Although obvious, it is worth pointing out that this argument is circular: a definition of allegory is established on the basis of a selective use of the material, a definition that is then used to decide which of the available data counts as allegory and which is unwelcome or undesirable. That which is included is then used to refine the definition.

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are drawn a number of others, besides text and interpretation: vertical and horizontal; semiotics and deconstruction; canny and uncanny; hieratic priesthood and ecstatic prophecy.

According to Rosenberg, an allegorical narrative is characterized by allusiveness, referring or alluding in an indirect manner to frames of reference on the borders of the text. It is, then, a narrative that inverts or destabilizes the illusion of temporal continuity and succes­sion that the allegorical narrative establishes. This is achieved by means of clues that suggest that something else is going on with the text, that a larger realm lies just beyond reach; while often minimal clues, they first generate doubt and then flip the whole narrative over into another frame of reference: 'One can see that this process involves a crossing of semantic frames, a juxtaposition of literary or cultural codes, a revisionary upheaval of the meaning of words used earlier in the text' (Rosenberg 1986: 18).

In a different terminology—that of semiotics—allegory for Rosenberg may be understood as 'a process of signification' (1986: 12). In this sense the less desirable types of allegory (allegoresis) are those that work with a direct correspondence (to echo Kant) between allegorical signifier and signified. The more dynamic type of allegory is one where the relationship is not so direct, the signifier having a range of possible signifieds and the signified itself generating and con­necting with a host of signifiers. Biblical scholars dislike allegory because they have confused it with allegoresis: 'The allegorical corres­pondences are generally understood [by biblical scholars] as a one-for-one homology—rather than as a dynamic system of syllogistic and dialectical transformation, in which words and figures change meaning across time' (Rosenberg 1986: 21). There is, however, a further step: allegory draws attention not so much to the signified as to the signifier, having therefore an auto-referential function in pointing not to external referents or signifieds but to the process of signification itself.

But modern biblical scholars have come to expect texts to refer to their own meaning production, and so for this study the more inter­esting and ultimately useful material is found at the points where Rosenberg makes the connection between politics and allegory. One of the assumptions in such a connection, drawn from the biblical text, is that the makers of biblical literature 'were deeply preoccupied with the nature of Israel's political community and were interested in the premises of political existence, addressing themselves to readers who

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thought about such things as leadership, authority, social cohesiveness, political order, rebellion, crime, justice, institutional evolution, and the relation of rich and poor' (Rosenberg, 1986: x). Because the indi­vidual was connected to the state through household and tribe, biblical allegory resists the split into individual and collective/political, using 'the conflicts of the household, the tribe, and the intertribal order as a means of anatomizing the strengths and weaknesses of state and empire' (1986: 21). It is here that the more explicitly political con­siderations return to Rosenberg's basic definition of allegory as that which mediates between the individual and that which lies beyond. If we acquiesce in Rosenberg's argument—and I propose to do so in part here—then it is possible to conclude, provisionally at least, that allegory, particularly its political variety, has a legitimate presence in biblical studies and in the biblical text.

2. National Allegory

Fredric Jameson is the originator of the idea that 'national allegory' may be identified as a device in contemporary literature. For Jameson national allegory is concerned with the nexus between the individual and the national situation: the individual story functions, in different and sometimes contradictory ways, as the source of a range of allego­ries of the nation in question. Jameson's theory is developed within the context of capitalism, which is of course the context of modern biblical scholarship but not of the biblical texts in their production and earlier reception. I will return to this issue later.

The possibility of national allegory begins with the notion that national problems are resolvable while international ones are not, a conception that explains the lack of vitality of the literature of a first world much more closely enmeshed in a global capitalist system (Jameson 1990: 129-30; see also 1987a: 49-50; 1968: 24-25). Due to a general postmodern breakdown in national boundaries and the process of cultural and economic homogenization, there is a concomitant diminishing of raw materials for national allegory. Jameson therefore searches for national allegory in third-world literature and culture (Jameson 1986; 1992: 114-57) and, to a lesser extent, in second-world texts (Jameson 1994: 73-128). In these areas it is felt that some viabi­lity still attaches to the nation. Indeed, as the surprised traveller and intellectual from the superstate to the margins, Jameson finds his own

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blindness overcome through 'their preoccupation with the national character and the national situation, the permanent and allegorical voca­tion of their intellectuals to denounce the national miseries' (Jameson 1993: xx).

In contrast to the historical forces that distinguish the first world— the transition from feudalism to capitalism and now late capitalism, as in the West and Japan—the clash between capitalist imperialism and other social formations (tribal society in Africa, the bureaucratic imperial systems of the Asiatic mode of production in China and India, and a now collapsed socialism in Eastern Europe) is for Jameson a more promising matrix for the production of national allegory, since it represents the struggle of different social systems with capitalism. National allegory is, however, fundamentally dialectical: it attempts to deal with the questions that emerge concerning individual and national existence in the face of a much larger imperial or colonial force. The question of national survival becomes problematic only when such belligerent forces make their presence felt.

One would expect then that national allegory is more prone to appear in situations of conflict and tension between imperial states and subject peoples. For example, Jameson locates national allegory in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr (1979: 87-95)2 at a time—which he will later describe as the middle phase of capitalism—in the West when similar contradictions between national and international set the aesthetic agenda. The advent of late capitalism and postmodernism closes down the enabling conditions for such a literary solution to the contra­dictions; but new avenues open up in postmodernism, whose constitu­tive features include the increasing international presence of third-world material. It is these materials from areas such as Africa, China and India that are of particular interest since they provide the texts that in turn suggest the possibility of national allegory in the biblical text. Thus, for instance, from China there are the stories of Lu Xun (the leading cultural figure of China's revolution; see Jameson 1986: 69-77), especially 'The True Story of Ah Q' and 'Diary of a Madman'. In

2. The idea of national allegory is first elaborated in Fables of Aggression (1979). It works here but not in the sense elaborated in the later pieces. Wyndham Lewis's Tarr is more of a pan-European allegory than a national allegory, and, more importantly, the allegorical structure functions as a 'libidinal apparatus' which is filled with the different charge of the fragmented psyche: rather than connecting the realms of politics and the individual, the allegorical structure breaks them apart.

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the latter story the 'alimentary transgression' of concealed cannibalism suspected by the mad person is not so much psychological as a 'figure' or symptom of profound social trauma. In the former story, China is depicted not only in the ill-fated life of the village derelict or coolie, Ah Q, who feels superior through his self-belittlement, but also through those who torment, beat and eventually execute him. Yet Lu Xun himself, as rebel intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, may be seen as the embodiment of the revolutionary forces that even­tually brought into effect the new China he was never to enjoy. But China is also those who hunt him: here the complexities and disconti­nuities—the 'floating or transferable structure of allegorical reference' (Jameson 1986:78)—so characteristic of national allegory (and allegory as Rosenberg has described it) make their presence known.3

Jameson's proposal has not, however, been accepted without ques­tion. The focus of debate has been his essay, 'Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism' (Jameson 1986), which itself has reignited an old debate within Marxism concerning 'the national question', over which Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky, Stalin and Lenin argued (see Sprinker 1993). Some have endorsed national allegory as a tool of analysis for third-world texts (e.g. Zhang 1990 on the Chinese film, Red Sorghum).4 But a spirited debate has begun with the response of Aijaz Ahmad (Ahmad 1987; 1992: 95-122) attacking the designation 'third world' as lacking the appropriate rigor, questioning the idea of national allegory insofar as that concept is based on the binary opposition between the so-called first and third worlds, and pointing out that representative 'third-world' texts present a skewed picture of non-metropolitan literature. Ahmad effectively

3. Other examples of national allegory include: Ousmane Sembène's Xala (Jameson 1986); Hubert Aquin's novels in Québec (1983); André Platonov's national allegory of the new Soviet Union in Chevengur (1994: 73-128); and the Taiwanese film Terrorizer (1992: 114-57).

4. A more curious situation pertains to Santiago Colas's study (1994) of post-modernity and Latin America. Theoutcome of a PhD completed partly under Jameson's supervision, Colas raises some useful questions about Jameson's use of the third world yet does not discuss national allegory. At the same time his reading of key Argentine texts in conjunction with Argentine history has all the marks of a sophisti­cated national allegorical reading. Krupat (1989:212-17), on the other hand, responds to Jameson by arguing that a national literature' comprises local, indigenous and dominant literatures within itself and is part of an international/world/cosmopolitan literature.

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focused subsequent debate on the third/first world opposition and on the role of nationalism in such a context. Thus other participants and commentators continue in the same path: Sprinker notes the way Jameson makes use of the idea of a 'political unconscious' by attri­buting national allegory to the unconscious of first-world texts but to the conscious realm of third-world texts (Sprinker 1993: 5-6; see further Schwartz 1989 and Prasad 1992).5

In my opinion it is necessary to make a distinction between national allegory and nationalism (Jameson 1987b: 27; see 1979: 94) so as to loosen the connection between national allegory and the emergence of nation-states (this is in contrast to the close connection between nationalism and the nation-state). Rosenberg's characterization of poli­tical allegory as that which mediates between individual and state through household and clan provides an alternative situation for national allegory to function. However, it is important to focus on the question of contradiction and conflict, for the vitality of national allegory in our time is due in part to the deadly struggle between third and second world nations and the rampant multi-nationalism of the first world: 'the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society' (Jameson 1986: 69). Now, there would seem to be a com­parable situation, although on a smaller scale, with much of the Hebrew Bible, where a large number of smaller political and social units— such as Israel and the small surrounding states—come under the sway of vast empires, among whom Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Persia may be numbered. Without pursuing the necessary detail, it is worth bearing in mind the question of modes of production, for the strong differences between these (from the Asiatic to capitalism) have a distinct effect on the way something like national allegory may be understood or even transferred between them. National allegory may thus be found not only in third-world literature, but also in biblical literature, although it might be best to revert to Rosenberg's termi­nology of political rather than national allegory.

5. In an earlier intervention on the debate Sprinker is more judicious, attempting to mediate between Jameson's drive to totalization and Ahmad's particularism (Sprinker 1989).

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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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a transferrai of death from Uriah to the lamb (who, it seems, is meant to signify Bathsheba) and thus of life from Bathsheba to the poor man in the story (although such a representational mismatch may well turn out to be a feature of allegories in the Hebrew Bible). And then there is the comparison of Bathsheba to an animal in the possession of a human male.

However, I would like to return to the question of frameworks and focus more closely on why this story might be described as political allegory. Some process seems to be required in order to make the connection from parable to king/woman to politics (there are then at least three layers in this process). How this takes place does not seem to require great mental effort, but why it should be necessary in the first place raises the question of a suspension or temporary repression of the political in the story. In fact, such a suppression is released only after the story is closed, which means that the story itself is not overtly political. I would tentatively suggest that the repression of the political in political allegory is a signal feature of political allegory itself.

A much stronger way of reading for allegories comes out of the work of Regina Schwartz and Mieke Bal (I owe the initial conjunction of these two to David Jobling [1991: 247-50; 1993: 28-29]). Opting for a disjunctive, rather than synthetic reading, Regina Schwartz (1991) focuses on the breaks, tears and ruptures of the text, specifically through the bodies of women. Schwartz constricts her analysis to the interaction between David and three of the wives who were previously married to another—Abigail, Michal and Bathsheba. Not only do the former husbands suffer—Nabal drops dead, Paltiel grieves, and Uriah's death is arranged—but there are consequent alterations in political power. The seizures of Abigail and Michal signal David's inexorable progression on his way to absolute power, while the episode with Bathsheba and the closely tied sequel between Amnon and Tamar raise questions about monarchy as such.

However, what is most interesting from my perspective here is the way Schwartz sees the political transitions figured in the sexual transi­tions: the move of a woman from one man to another signals the move of political power to that other (which happens in each case to be David). Jobling points out that this makes use of Lévi-Strauss's theory of exchange systems in which political power is determined by sexual power over women, in particular their reproductive capability (thus the chief in many tribes has more than one wife, even to the extent of

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causing a gender imbalance in the rest of the tribe); the corollary of this is that sexual rights over women in a narrative may give expres­sion to or provide a figure for political power. All of this provides what might be termed a libidinal dimension to national or political allegory, for the women in Schwartz's analysis, rather than the men who seem to be at the centre of the action, may be understood as allegorical markers for the state of Israel: in their bodies is the story of Israel inscribed. Not only do the exchanges of women between men signal the exchanges of political power, but the violation of women's bodies—especially Bathsheba and Tamar—prefigures the violation and rupture of the body of Israel. It is not for nothing that the story of the decline of David's monarchy should begin with the abduction of Bathsheba, particularly when there is no longer any need for the acquiring of political power by David.

If we follow Jobling's lead a step further, then a connection needs to be made with the work of Mieke Bal on Judges, in particular Death and Dissymmetry. There are a number of things happening in this book—methodological piracy, narratology, feminism, a challenge to male interests of biblical studies as a whole—yet what interests me most is her notion of figuration: the idea that certain elements in texts— preferably the marginal and neglected ones—provide complex con­nections with a reality out of which they arise and in which they are active players. Bal is concerned to emphasize the very obliqueness of the relation between the text and reality, being neither direct nor non­existent.7 But figuration seems to have another, less articulate, task in Bal's work, which is to provide the necessary resources for developing a 'countercoherence', an alternative coherence to the strong and overt political coherence that is assumed in the interaction between contem­porary reader and the text, an interaction that signals its own political dimensions. Yet this second function of figuration connects with the first in that the countercoherence will turn out to be a reality that is also figured by the text and that Bal still hopes to identify.

In the case of Judges the countercoherence Bal is after is marked in

7. * Rather than seeing the text as a transparent, immaterial medium, a window through which we can get a glimpse of reality, I see it as a figuration of the reality that brought it forth and to which it responded. And rather than seeing the text as literary in the esthetic sense, as a fiction that has no connection to reality, I will try to show how the literary and linguistic choices made in the text represent a reality that they both hide and display' (Bal 1988: 3).

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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 counter-coherence, 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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possession of women not only as a signifier of David's increasing and declining power but also as a figure for a more profound social revolu­tion as such. I do, however, want to follow Jobling further still and argue that this social transition sets up the necessary social conditions for a monarchy in Israel: the king must be able to bring his wives to his home, rather than going to live in the house of his wife's father (which also restricts the possibility of developing a harem). Yet even this point is not quite enough, for the move to kingship entails not only a change in marriage/kinship arrangements or the construction of a political unit such as Judah/Israel, but more importantly entails a basic shift in the mode of production (thus far I have been speaking of the relations of production, or social relations). Via the change in marriage/ kinship arrangements the violence against the women of Judges may be understood to act as a marker of the transition in mode of pro­duction from one of neolithic agriculture (with its social unit of the gens or hierarchical kinship structures) to the Asiatic mode of produc­tion (Oriental despotism' or Gottwald's tributary mode of production).8

In the light of this suggestion the nature of political/national allegory gains some significant interpretive power, since the unnamed women of Bal's study of Judges may be described as political allegorical figures for the social revolution from patrilocal to virilocal marriage, for the political transition to monarchy, and for the socio-economic change in modes of production.

4. Divided Allegories

My final and major textual example (1 Kings 13) comes from the midst of the story of the breakup of the kingdom of Israel after Solomon.9 It also signals a turn from the critical allegorical function of women in Judges and Samuel to that of the men in the division, although I want to pick up not the major players in that narrative but some unnamed

8. This terminology is deliberately more rigorous than Gottwald's 'communitarian' (which seems to collapse primitive communism or tribal society into neolithic agriculture) and 'tributarían' modes of production, since Gottwald's termi­nology makes for a certain looseness of analysis.

9. See my Jameson and Jeroboam, especially chapter 2.1 am not interested here in battles over the dating, provenance and contours of a postulated pre-Deuteronomistic form of 1 Kgs 13 (for this see Eynikel 1990; Lemke 1976: 301-304; Dozeman 1982; Gross 1979: 100-107; Würthwein 1973). For another reading see Simon 1976.

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and parochial religious figures: a man of God and an old prophet. 1 Kings 13 comes as the breakup of the kingdom is complete; yet the

text contains little that suggests a major political crisis. The chapter is framed by more overt political references, although these are more properly religious by nature (13.1-2, 33-34), yet the bulk of the chapter has no such political reference (a feature of political allegory I suggested earlier). The initial indicator that something like a political allegory10 is indeed happening relies upon the immediately preceding 1 Kings 12, where an opposition is set up between Rehoboam, the new king of Judah in the south, and Jeroboam, king of the newly seceded Israel in the north. In 1 Kings 13 there is a slippage in which the conflict between Jeroboam and Rehoboam is replaced by that between Jeroboam and the man of God from Judah (vv. 1-10); and then a further slippage replaces Jeroboam with the old prophet from Bethel (vv. 11-13), giving us the opposition: man of God/Rehoboam/Judah versus old prophet/Jeroboam/Israel.11

The first episode (13.1-10) presents a systematic degrading and rejection of Jeroboam through a series of violent oppositions between him and God/man of God. After a series of orders that backfire Jeroboam is reduced to begging for assistance for his withered hand.

10. The chapter has variously been designated a 'parable' (Rofé 1988: 173; Van Winkle 1989), 'legend' (Dozeman 1982; Eynikel 1990: 227-28; Plein 1966: 17), 'midrash' or 'ancient tale* (Wellhausen 1963: 277; Kittel 1900: 112; Lemke 1976: 303-304; Robinson 1972: 161), and 'prophetic authorization narrative' (DeVries 1985: 169).

11. There are some further connections with the old men whose advice Rehoboam refuses in 1 Kgs 12 and the young men whose advice he follows. Also, Shemaiah is the 'man of God' (12.22) who deals with Judah, while Ahijan is the 'prophet' ( 11.29) who deals with Jeroboam.

Ahijah < » Shemaiah

old men i > young men

Jeroboam < > Rehoboam

old prophet <— -̂» man of God

Israel < » Judah

Karl Barth (1946/1957) makes a related though distinct series of theological connections: the dialectical interplay between old prophet and man of God, Israel and Judah, Jeroboam and (strangely) Josiah, grace and sin, election and rejection means that 1 Kgs 13 is an example of the unterscheidende Wählen (differentiating election) of God.

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This request is granted but it is the other request that is of greater interest. In inviting the man of God for a meal, Jeroboam uncovers, as it were, one of the most neglected elements in analyses of 1 Kings 13; namely the prohibition against eating, drinking and travel on the same road.12 But what seems to be peripheral or marginal—at least to inter­preters if not in the story itself—is the sort of thing that provides pre­cious and crucial hints, since these odd items suggest that other things are happening in these texts, usually conflicting with the more obvious narrative action.13 It is precisely this prohibition against eating, drinking and travelling—an ideological unit or 'ideologeme' relying on and informing the psychological, social, political, economic and spatial dimensions of hospitality—that provides the means of identi­fying the workings of political allegory in this text. It does so through a series of repetitions (11 in various forms) whose cumulative effect is to undermine the overt favouring of Judah by means of a slow separa­tion of the unity between the man of God and Yahweh (indicated also by a shift from miraculous to mundane and from violent to verbal conflict) and the subsequent condemnation of the former, providing thereby a much-desired legitimation of the north.

I have detailed elsewhere (Boer 1996) the nature of the prohibition, its arrangement into threefold clusters (13.7-9, 15-17, 22-23), its variations—invitation, refusal, prohibition, transgression, (false) divine command, temporal clause—and its sources—Jeroboam, man of God, old prophet, God (by relay) and even the narrator. What interests me here is not only the rich area of repression and refusal for which Freudian thought is perhaps the most useful, but also the question of legitimation and its crises: in the first verses of ch. 13 any legitimacy claimed by the north is sledge-hammered out of existence, and the prohibition would seem to set the seal of divine rejection. The funda-

12. Of all the commentators only DeVries (1985: 171-74), Nelson (1987: 84), Reis (1994) and Rofé (1988: 170-82) have identified the prohibition as crucial. For DeVries its function is to test the authenticity and radical obedience of the man of God, his punishment serving to authenticate the message he delivered as divinely inspired; for Nelson it is subservient to the central theme of the condemnation of Bethel; for Reis it is part of the bargaining procedure whereby the man of God attempts to disobey God and stay in Israel; and for Rofé it is part of the evidence for understanding the man of God as a (human) angel of the Lord.

13. This overt narrative is often interpreted as prophetic conflict or the question of prophetic legitimacy or truth (Dozeman 1982; Van Winkle 1989; but see Deboys 1991).

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mentally social activities of eating, drinking and regular travel on the same road between Jerusalem and Bethel, some 18 km (11 miles) apart, would deny or provide the basic legitimation required. The man of God's refusal to stay, on divine orders, enforces the denial, but also sets the scene for the breaking of the prohibition and all that comes with it. (Now, I would want to suggest that such a legitimation crisis has less to do with Israel in the north than with the place of Judah in the Babylonian and Persian empires, but more on that later.)14

Up until this point, however, the opposition has been between Jeroboam and the man of God: it is only in the next episode, beginning in v. 11, that the final allegorical opposition of man of God and an old prophet (who replaces Jeroboam and succeeds where he failed, namely in enticing the man of God into his home) takes place. Not only does the continuity in narrative action between the old prophet and Jeroboam override the strong narrative closure of v. 1, but the virtual repetition of 13.7-9 in 13.15-1715 reinforces such an allegorical connection. It would seem that the primary motivation of the old prophet was to ensure that the man of God accepted the offer of hospitality by what­ever means possible: indeed, the seventh appearance of the return-eat-drink sequence (v. 18) comes in the form of a lie, whether by the old prophet or by the messenger of Yahweh (the subject of ίΟΓΟ is either the same as that of ΊΏΚ'Ί or is the "JK̂ Q of the old prophet's reported speech).16 The lie and rapid submission by the man of God are followed by the announcement of punishment for the now transgressed prohi­bition,17 an announcement that comes in the form of a final triplet

14. The prohibition may also function as an allegorical counterpart to the 'covenant' with the kings, in particular the blessing/curse opposition in relation to (dis)obedience.

15. In both there are: invitation (old prophet); refusal (man of God); prohibition (God). Apart from the offer of a gift, the sequence is parallel to the point of word for word likeness: come with me, eat food (v. 15); cannot come to eat bread and drink water 'in this place' (v. 16); for God forbade the eating of bread, drinking of water and returning by the same road (v. 17).

16. This of course has repercussions for the status of the word of Yahweh in Kings as such.

17. Culley (1992: 87-89) identifies 1 Kgs 13 as primarily a punishment sequence set within a larger announcement sequence. It also contains two embedded sequences, prohibition/transgressed and announcement/happened.

The imminent breach of the prohibition is foreshadowed by the use of verbs of motion as well. Out of 40 verbs of motion in this chapter, 2 refer to Jeroboam's

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turning on the prohibition (13.22-23). The triplet marks a resolution of some sort, which I would suggest is the final breakage of identity between the man of God and God and the end of the opposition between the man of God and the prophet. This in turn leads to the gradual identification of the second pair which culminates in the anticipated burial of the northern prophet beside the bones of the man of God (the final dimension of the ideological unit of hospitality).

To sum up: the allegorical function of the prohibition and its trans­gression is to provide Bethel, and thus northern Israel, with the legiti­macy sought in the preceding ch. 12. The activities of eating, drinking and travelling on the same road provide fundamental social and econo­mic recognition of the north; a narrative line that runs somewhat at tension with the other line, namely, the rejection of the north and Jeroboam's own impending punishment and doom (a narrative line to be picked up in the closing verses of this chapter). 1 Kings 13 may then be described as an imaginary resolution to the contradictory situation of a North and South in the people of Israel.

Now, as suggested earlier, one of the features of allegory is that the allegorical references have a somewhat slippery or evasive quality, continually being displaced into other referential schemes. So also here: the initial intimation that something is amiss comes with the death of the man of God from Judah; for a national or political allegory one would expect the representative from Judah to outlive the other, since Judah itself lasted well beyond Israel (although in the more immediate narra­tive context Jeroboam outlives Rehoboam). This referential slippage echoes the life-death switch that I noted in Nathan's parable of 2 Samuel 12. The second indicator is the tying up of the destinies of both protagonists, while the third comes from an entirely different quarter—that of nature. For in this second episode (i.e. the one with the old prophet and the man of God in 1 Kgs 13.11-32) there appear 2 donkeys (one ridden twice by the old prophet and the other borrowed by the man of God), a lion, an oak or a terebinth under which the man of God sat, and food and water. The slide within the political allegory

religious apostasy in v. 33, and 4 refer to the fortunes of Jeroboam's hand, which leaves 34 verbs describing the motion of complete human unit: of these, 23 concern motion towards Bethel while 11 indicate movement in the other direction to Judah. The frequency above all of the verb 2W, 'to return' (15), is particularly important given that the prohibition concerned returning by the same road. The very repetition of the verb itself signifies the breaking of the prohibition.

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BOER National Allegory in the Hebrew Bible 111

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 totality—to use Jameson's terms—never 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 generate—they 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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112 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 1A (1997)

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 passage—if the figuration of empire is at least plausible—assists 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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BOER National Allegory in the Hebrew Bible 113

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 liked—although there will of course be all sorts of traces of my own ideological constructs in their myriad inclusions and exclusions—but it will suffice to point out that 'national allegory' may do double duty and act as a cipher for my own standpoint, or the 'Γ 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 hand—desperately asserting the necessity of a national identity, republican independence, Australian ownership of products and ideas, and a national culture of theology and biblical studies—to 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.

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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.

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