Hezekiah’s “Showing” and the Babylonian Ambassadors’ “Seeing” of the Royal Treasures: Towards a New Understanding of 2 Kings 20:12–19

The book of Kings offers a detailed description of Hezekiah’s reign. Among the episodes recorded, there is the visit of a Babylonian embassy to whom the king shows the treasures of his palace. This act prompts the prophet Isaiah to announce that all these riches will be carried away to Babylon (2 Kg...

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书目详细资料
主要作者: Martins, Francisco 1983- (Author)
格式: 电子 文件
语言:English
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Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
出版: 2024
In: Vetus Testamentum
Year: 2024, 卷: 74, 发布: 3, Pages: 369-391
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Bibel. Könige 2. 20,12-19 / Hiskija, Juda, König / Jesaja, 先知 766 BC-686 BC / Schatz / zeigen / sehen (话)
IxTheo Classification:HB Old Testament
Further subjects:B Treasures
B Akkadianism
B Hezekiah
B 2 Kings
B Isaiah
在线阅读: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
实物特征
总结:The book of Kings offers a detailed description of Hezekiah’s reign. Among the episodes recorded, there is the visit of a Babylonian embassy to whom the king shows the treasures of his palace. This act prompts the prophet Isaiah to announce that all these riches will be carried away to Babylon (2 Kgs 20:12–19). Although the plot is relatively straightforward in its broad contours, scholars have struggled to make sense of the relationship between the king’s gesture and Isaiah’s reaction. This article argues that a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon observed in Akkadian offers a path towards a new understanding of the text’s inner logic and meaning. Hezekiah’s “showing” and the Babylonian envoys’ “seeing” of the royal treasures acquire, in light of the parallel evoked, unexpected “legal overtones”: the king’s actions constitute a kind of legal symbolic act, whose dire consequences are fully explicated by Isaiah’s pronouncement.
ISSN:1568-5330
Contains:Enthalten in: Vetus Testamentum
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685330-bja10137