Politics in the Hebrew Bible

There's been an efflorescence recently of scholarship on “political Hebraism,” an evocative heading that can be understood in one of two ways. In historical terms, scholars seek to disclose the ways that readings of the Hebrew Bible and related texts informed the theory and practice of politics during a given period. In substantive terms, scholars seek to disclose distinctive insights about politics in the Hebrew texts and traditions themselves. The latter approach—which has generally been the road less traveled—is the one undertaken by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes in The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel.