In memory of my mother, Germaine “Lynn” McKenzie, and of my daughter, Bonnie Lynn McKenzie.

Editors’ Foreword

The International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament (IECOT) offers a multi-perspectival interpretation of the books of the Old Testament to a broad, international audience of scholars, laypeople and pastors. Biblical commentaries too often reflect the fragmented character of contemporary biblical scholarship, where different geographical or methodological sub-groups of scholars pursue specific methodologies and/or theories with little engagement of alternative approaches. This series, published in English and German editions, brings together editors and authors from North America, Europe, and Israel with multiple exegetical perspectives.

From the outset the goal has been to publish a series that was “international, ecumenical and contemporary.” The international character is reflected in the composition of an editorial board with members from six countries and commentators representing a yet broader diversity of scholarly contexts.

The ecumenical dimension is reflected in at least two ways. First, both the editorial board and the list of authors includes scholars with a variety of religious perspectives, both Christian and Jewish. Second, the commentary series not only includes volumes on books in the Jewish Tanach/Protestant Old Testament, but also other books recognized as canonical parts of the Old Testament by diverse Christian confessions (thus including the Deuterocanonical Old Testament books).

When it comes to “contemporary,” one central distinguishing feature of this series is its attempt to bring together two broad families of perspectives in analysis of biblical books, perspectives often described as “synchronic” and “diachronic” and all too often understood as incompatible with each other. Historically, diachronic studies arose in Europe, while some of the better known early synchronic studies originated in North America and Israel. Nevertheless, historical studies have continued to be pursued around the world, and focused synchronic work has been done in an ever greater variety of settings. Building on these developments, we aim in this series to bring synchronic and diachronic methods into closer alignment, allowing these approaches to work in a complementary and mutually-informative rather than antagonistic manner.

Since these terms are used in varying ways within biblical studies, it makes sense to specify how they are understood in this series. Within IECOT we understand “synchronic” to embrace a variety of types of study of a biblical text in one given stage of its development, particularly its final stage(s) of development in existing manuscripts. “Synchronic” studies embrace non-historical narratological, reader-response and other approaches along with historically-informed exegesis of a particular stage of a biblical text. In contrast, we understand “diachronic” to embrace the full variety of modes of study of a biblical text over time.

This diachronic analysis may include use of manuscript evidence (where available) to identify documented pre-stages of a biblical text, judicious use of clues within the biblical text to reconstruct its formation over time, and also an examination of the ways in which a biblical text may be in dialogue with earlier biblical (and non-biblical) motifs, traditions, themes, etc. In other words, diachronic study focuses on what might be termed a “depth dimension” of a given text – how a text (and its parts) has journeyed over time up to its present form, making the text part of a broader history of traditions, motifs and/or prior compositions. Synchronic analysis focuses on a particular moment (or moments) of that journey, with a particular focus on the final, canonized form (or forms) of the text. Together they represent, in our view, complementary ways of building a textual interpretation.

Of course, each biblical book is different, and each author or team of authors has different ideas of how to incorporate these perspectives into the commentary. The authors will present their ideas in the introduction to each volume. In addition, each author or team of authors will highlight specific contemporary methodological and hermeneutical perspectives – e.g. gender-critical, liberation-theological, reception-historical, social-historical – appropriate to their own strengths and to the biblical book being interpreted. The result, we hope and expect, will be a series of volumes that display a range of ways that various methodologies and discourses can be integrated into the interpretation of the diverse books of the Old Testament.

Fall 2012 The Editors

Acknowledgements

I gratefully recognize the contributions of the following individuals and groups to this commentary. In the spring semester of 2011, 2012, and 2013 I taught a course entitled “Stories about Prophets” focused on the prophetic stories in 1–2 Kings at Rhodes College. I am indebted to the students in those courses for their comments and observations about the material in Kings and my own developing analytical work. One of those students, Elizabeth Hollingsworth, worked during the summer of 2012 reading through Old Testament Abstracts to help me to isolate articles that might be useful resources.

The travel and research for this commentary were underwritten by my position as Spence L. Wilson Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes, and I am constantly indebted to Spence and Becky Wilson for ther support.

I participated in seminars on the text of Kings at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid in 2012 with Jan Joosten, Jean Koulagna, Andrés Piquer, Julio Trebolle, and Pablo Torijano; in 2013 with Jan Joosten, Andrés Piquer, Matthieu Richelle, Julio Trebolle, and Pablo Torijano; and in 2016 with Jan Joosten, Andrés Piquer, Julio Trebolle, and Pablo Torijano. My debt to the participants, especially to Julio Trebolle, is evident throughout the commentary.

Portions of the commentary were presented in draft form at various professional meetings, including the Divinity in Ancient Israel continuing seminar at the Catholic Biblical Association in 2011 (1 Kings 19) and 2016 (2 Kings 5) and the Biblical Colloquium in 2013 (2 Kgs 6:24–7:20). I am grateful to Christoph Levin for the invitation to read a paper on the Elijah stories as one of the main lectures at the 2013 IOSOT meeting in Munich and to Sara Milstein for organizing a session at the 2014 SBL meeting in which I read on Jezebel. An earlier draft of the latter had been given at the CBA meeting in Providence, RI, in the summer of 2014. My treatment of the chronological problems in 2 Kings 15 was presented in a conference on “The Last Days of Israel” organized by Shuichi Hasegawa in Munich in March, 2016.

I am indebted to my colleagues, John Kaltner, for help with Arabic at several points and Rhiannon Graybill, for reading and commenting on drafts of numerous chapters; to Ralph Klein for consulting with me about text-critical matters; and to Mark Smith for consultation about Ugaritic parallels.

Per series protocol, works cited only in the treatment of one lemma appear in full the first time in the footnotes; those that are used for more than one lemma are cited in full in the bibliography and in abbreviated form in footnotes. I am grateful to many other scholars whose writings inform my thought and approach but who are not cited directly in the commentary.

My sincere thanks to Walter Dietrich, the series editor, for saving me from many embarrassing errors and for trying to save me from others that may remain. David Carr, the series co-editor, made several suggestions that improved the manuscript at different points. Linda Maloney corrected the prose and made me a better writer. Finally, I am grateful to Florian Specker of Kohlhammer Press for his oversight of the project and for his sensitivity in allowing me to include the dedication to my mother and my daughter, whose lives came to an end during the time I was working on this commentary.