Texts in Conversation
1 Kings describes Solomon’s building projects using the same language for storage cities and forced labor found in Exodus. The Deuteronomistic history uses this language to describe Solomon to be just as oppressive as Pharaoh.
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Exodus 1:11
Hebrew Bible
10 Come, let’s deal wisely with them. Otherwise they will continue to multiply, and if a war breaks out, they will ally themselves with our enemies and fight against us and leave the country.” 11 So they put foremen over the Israelites to oppress them with hard labor. As a result they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread. As a result the Egyptians loathed the Israelites, 13 and they made the Israelites serve rigorously.
Date: 5th Century B.C.E. (Final composition) (based on scholarly estimates)
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1 Kings 11:28
Hebrew Bible
27 This is what prompted him to rebel against the king: Solomon built a terrace, and he closed up a gap in the wall of the city of his father David. 28 Jeroboam was a talented man; when Solomon saw that the young man was an accomplished worker, he made him the leader of the forced labor from the tribe of Joseph. 29 At that time, when Jeroboam had left Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite met him on the road; the two of them were alone in the open country. Ahijah was wearing a brand new robe, 30 and he grabbed the robe and tore it into 12 pieces.
Date: 6th Century B.C.E. (Final composition) (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... there is a series of intertextual connections between Exodus and the entity usually delimited as the Deuteronomistic History, Deuteronomy–2 Kings. These connections are not easily explained as contact points between independent works; instead, they suggest a context of contiguous works. First, the situation of Israel’s forced labor in Egypt presented at the beginning of Exodus has a parallel in the presentation of the Solomonic period in Kings. With the exception of Chronicles, the expression ערי מסכנות (“storage cities”) in Exodus 1:11 only appears in the context of Solomon’s construction activity. The same is true for the expressions used for forced labor, מס (1 Kings 9:15) and סבל (1 Kings 5:29 or 5:13; 11:28). Although these data have been viewed as an argument for the early Solomonic dating of J, an internal literary explanation is more compelling. The word choice in Exodus 1:11 apparently is intended to cast a negative light on Solomon’s building activities. On this point, Solomon was no better than the Egyptian pharaoh of the exodus ..."
Schmid, Konrad
Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel ’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible
(p. 127) Eisenbrauns, 2010
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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