ABSTRACT
These data, as many commentators have noted, suggest that the queen mother figured much more prominently in the royal court in the south than she did in the north. To explain this, I propose to turn to the differing ideologies of kingship found in Israel, on the one hand, and in Judah, on the other. These two contrasting ideologies were initially described by A. AIt in his 1951 article "Das IZonigtum in den Reichen Israel und Juda."s9
To be sure, in the forty years since AIt's article first appeared, there have been modifications and refinements of his thesis. Of particular interest to us is the work of F.M. Cross and the description he offers of sacral kingship as one feature in the contrasting ideologies of north and south. Here, in addition to depending on AIt for a theory of north/south dichotomy, Cross also draws profitably on basic descriptions ofsacral kingship in Israel provided by the British and Scandanavian "myth and ritual" schools (while prudently ignoring these schools' more controversial conclusions concerning, for example, the annual New Year's festival).60 Cross's synthesis argues that part of the ideology of Judean but not Israelite kingship involved seeing the Davidic king as the adopted son of Yahweh, the divine father;61 the pertinent texts, all ofwhich Cross assigns to a Jerusalem provenance, are well known: 2 Sam 7:14a; Pss 2:7; 89:20-38 (Hebrew); 110:1-7; Isa 9:5 (Hebrew). We quote only the adoption formula ofPs 89:27-28, to Cross the "ultimate statement,,62 of the Judean royal ideology:
It is this motifofdivine sonship in Judean royal ideology that I believe can provide a clue for understanding the role of the queen mother in the southern monarchy. For if the Judean royal ideology holds that Yahweh is the adopted father of the king, then is it not possible that the adopted mother of the Icing is understood to be Asherah, given, as we have noted above, that Asherah was seen by many-in both the state and popular cultas the consort of Yahweh? The language of divine adoption, that is, may imply not only Yahweh, the male god, as surrogate father, but also Asherah, the female consort, as surrogate mother.
