Revealing texts: a postcolonial reading of 1 Samuel 8-15 as ancient Israel's claim to independence

• Main Author: Twum-Baah, Emmanuel Gyimah Louis
• Published: University of Leeds 2011
• Subjects: 222.43
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.578694

This thesis presents postcolonial theory and the use of analogy as an effective critical apparatus for resolving some of the problems pertaining to the rise of kingship and nation in ancient Israel where both historical criticism and literary criticism appear to miss the inherent postcolonial dimensions ofthe texts. In particular, the thesis argues that by using postcolonial theory and criticism to read 1 Samuel 8-15 the narrative reveals the story of ancient Israel's rise to political independence and nation status amongst the nations of the ancient Near East. This is not made explicit in the existing scholarship. The study uses aspects of the processes by which the people of modern Ghana became a nation with political independence to illuminate the realities of the complex relationships between ancient Israelites and the Philistines in the Hebrew Bible that engendered the demand for a king in order to be like all the nations and to re-evaluate the reign of Saul which emerged from that situation. The strength of this approach is that some of the peculiarities of Saul's reign turn out to have unexpected parallels in the career of Nkrumah. Therefore, just as postcolonial theory can explain some of the ambivalences and tensions that surround Ghana's struggle for independence, so too, by analogy, it can help to explain a series of seeming problems and inconsistencies in the story of ancient Israel.