ABSTRACT
Classical overviews of the role of biblical literature in the history of ideas tend to stress the essential discontinuity of the Hebrew Bible, in its ancient social and intellectual context, from the intellectual products of Jewish antiquity. This view has its roots in the ideological program of modern biblical scholarship, which is a legacy of Christian Hebraism and the Protestant Reformation. The classic assumptions of biblical philology and higher criticism, however, remain, and can be outlined as follows: critique of the historical claims of the biblical text; resistance to efforts at harmonizing "divergent biblical traditions"; sensitivity to the text's genres; and study of the text in its historical and cultural context. A debate on the authority of human kings can be traced throughout the biblical narrative texts, particularly in the themes of Israel's distinctiveness among the nations and the frequent representation of the Israelite God as king.
