Leuenberger, Martin, Art. Kingship of God (OT), in: Das Wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (www.wibilex.de), 2012
The earthly kingship in Israel and Judah as well as the kingship of Yhwh form a section of ancient oriental concepts of rule and can only be understood historically or in terms of the history of religion and theology against this background or within these concepts. […]
King Hammurabi thus sees himself as “the shepherd appointed by Enlil” in parallel with the appointment of the god Marduk to an “eternal kingship (šarrūtum darītum)” (Hammurabi Stele 1:21) by Anu and Enlil (1:1ff) […]
In the wake of the global political rise of the Persian king Cyrus, Deutero-Isaiah visionarily proclaims the imminent, definitive, “eschatological” fulfillment of salvation for Israel in the near future. The (original) book gradient leads to Isa 52,7-10*, where the phrase “your [sc. Zion’s] God has become king and reigns” (מָלַךְאֱלֹהָיִךי mālakh ‘älohājikh; qatal-x) emphasizes the dawning of the kingship of Yhwh (at least in the divine world), which will now inevitably lead earthly events to their goal.
In the process, Yhwh’s “Messiah” Cyrus (Isa 45:1) inherits the worldly kingship of the Davidids, which is thus boldly globalized in the course of Deutero-Isaiah’s confrontation with the Babylonian dominant culture – in correspondence with the worldwide kingship of Yhwh over all “gods” (whose divinity is famously disputed) and all peoples. […]
[Deutero-Isaiahs] integration into the book of Isaiah results in a new dynamic: the exilic problematization is caught up in literary terms by the sequence of the present kingship of Yhwh (Isa 6) and the eschatological (new) dawn (Isa 40-52*). The same applies to the earthly level, when the royal texts Isa 7; Isa 9; (Isa 11), historicized in the course of the book to the Davidides, are continued through Isa 45 with the Messiah Cyrus. […]
[In the apocalyptic literature] the theme is never explicitly at the center, but Yhwh is not infrequently dubbed king and the (secular) enforcement of his kingship is consistently maintained against secular resistance of very different kinds – ultimately for the sake of God’s divinity (see in detail Camponovo, 1984, 230ff; Lindemann, 1986, 196ff; Collins, 1987, 88ff). […]
[In book of Daniel] God allows his “everlasting kingship (מַלְכוּת עלַם malkhût ‘ālam)” (Dan 3:33) to be realized in the succession of time by changing (world) rulers (see especially Kratz, 1991, 148ff; Seow, 2004). Only in the following (Hebrew) book redactions do eschatological-apocalyptic upheavals take place, which bring the earthly and divine kingship into an intensifying opposition (see Dan 2:44; Dan 7:14.18; Dan 10-12). […]
Finally, the Psalter, which was successively formed in the post-exilic period, is conceptually characterized by the kingship of Yhwh in its younger two theocratic books IV-V as well as in the present final composition (see Leuenberger, 2004, 392f [lit.]; Janowski, 2010, 301ff). Various conceptions can be distinguished, which locate Jhwh’s kingship in the course of the book in cosmic (natural order), large-scale political (world of nations / legal order), priestly (cultic legal order) and finally everyday (elementary salvation and provision in Ps 101-150) areas of experience; the spatial and temporal universality of Jhwh’s kingship is also spelled out in detail. The theological climax and final accent of the Psalter is then reached in the artfully constructed hymn Ps 145:
V. 1 I will exalt you, my God and King, / and praise your name forever and ever. (…) V.13 Your “kingdom” is a “kingdom” for all time, / and your reign lasts from generation to generation.
Ps 145
A historical analysis of the Yhwh-related מלך * mlk statements (king) in their literary (near) contexts brings to light a quite extensive field of words and concepts of “kingship of Yhwh”: on the one hand, there are more or less close parallel terms to מלך * mlk “to be / become king” or מֶלֶךְ mælækh “king” or the abstracts for “kingship” such as משׁל mšl “to rule”, שׁפט špṭ “to judge / rule”, Aramaic שׁלט šlṭ “to rule” or מוֹשׁל môšel “ruler”, מָשִׁיחַ māšîaḥ “anointed one” (Messiah), שֹׁפֵט šofeṭ “judge”, רֹעֵה ro’eh “shepherd”, רֹאשׁ ro’š “head”, נָגִיד nāgîd “prince” resp. מֶמְשָׁלָה mæmšālāh and Aramaic מָשִׁיחַ šālṭān “rule” etc. On the other hand, there are also numerous royal or imperious attributes (such as גֵּאוּת ge’ût “majesty”, הוֹד hôd “majesty”, הָדָר hādār “splendor”, עֹז ‘oz “power”, אַדִּיר ‘addîr “mighty” [s. especially the superiority over the chaos waters] etc.), functions (e.g. ישׁב jšb “to throne / dwell”, עלה ‘lh “to ascend / be exalted”) and conceptual elements (e.g. כִּסֵּא kisse’ “throne”, סוֹד sôd “throne council” [council of the gods], אַרְמוֹן ‘armôn “palace”, הֵיכָל hêkāl “temple / palace” and more) should be included: They all characterize Yhwh – admittedly in different forms and accentuations – as king. […]
3) brk ∙ jhw[h …] (4) brk ∙ bgj[m … j]mlk … (6) brk ‘dn[j] jh … (3) Blessed is / be Jhw[h …,] (4) Blessed is / be he among the nations who reigns / will reign as king. … (6) Blessed is / be the Lord; jh[…]”
Inscription from En Gedi
The Lord Yhwh is thus blessed (lines 3/6), whom the central statement (line 4) describes in a nationwide perspective (cf. ‘šr “Assur” line 1)[…]
The following should be mentioned: mlkj(h)w “(my) king is Jh(wh)” or jhwmlk “Jh(wh) is king” (cf. parallel formations such as mlkj’l “king is God” or ‘dnmlk “the Lord is king”). In addition, there are semantically related ruler names of the type “name of God + ruler terminus”, i.e. above all jh(w) “Yhwh”, ‘l “God” or ‘dn “Lord” with rwm “to rise / to be exalted”, qwm “to rise / to be high” or ‛lj / ‛lh “to ascend / to be high”, whereby the order of the two elements can change.
Hermisson, Hans-Jürgen, Art. Deutero-Isaiah, in: Das Wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (www.wibilex.de), 2017
One of the elements of the promise of help is the mention of the redemption of Israel. The term comes from family law and refers to the redemption of clan members from debt slavery (redeemer / ransom); in DtIsa it is used exclusively as a predicate of Yahweh: Yahweh is Israel’s “redeemer”, now therefore from the Babylonian exile. However, the idea is significantly modified: Israel’s “ransom” does not, after all, mean that Yahweh pays a ransom to the previous overlord Babylon. Isa 43:3 comes closest to the conventional idea: Yahweh pays “Egypt, Cush and Sheba” as a ransom for Israel, but not to the previous owner, but to the future owner, to Cyrus, the conqueror of Babylon. It is different in Isa 44:22, where the word of Israel’s “redemption” follows the statement of the redemption of its sin and guilt: Admittedly, “redeem” there also means specifically to free from Babylonian captivity, but this is a consequence of Israel’s guilt towards its God. The payment of a ransom to Cyrus or Babylon is disputed by later authors (Isa 45:13bβ; Isa 52:3), but that is not DtIsa’ problem: it is concerned with the analogy of the familial relationship and the resulting duty to liberate: Yahweh has declared such a relationship to his people with the word of redemption. […]
Here we must speak of the earthly agents of Yahweh with DtIsa. There is Cyrus, addressed in two oracles of calling: In Isa 45:1-7 he is to conquer Babylon as Yahweh’s “anointed one”, in Isa 42:5-8* he is to release the captives.
This is the earthly-concrete form of the divine victory over Babylon and the repatriation of the “spoils” after the final part of the prologue: Cyrus is commissioned and authorized by Yahweh to do so. […]
The great “imperative poem” in Isa 51,9-10.17-23; Isa 52,1-2, which is linked to the text of the jubilantly welcomed entry of Yahweh into his city in Isa 52,7-10 and the concluding call to the exiles in Isa 52,11f. The plaintive call to Yahweh’s arm to wake up and prove his power in Israel’s favor, as he once did at the Exodus, at the Red Sea (Isa 51:9f.), is answered with the counter-call to the woman Jerusalem / Zion to rise in her turn (Isa 51:17), to rise from the dust, put on her festive garments and sit on the throne (Isa 52:1-2). Zion is drawn here in contrast to the woman Babylon, who loses her throne (Isa 47), but unlike Babylon, she is not Yahweh’s rival: she receives her royal role as the wife of King Yahweh, who now moves into Jerusalem and begins his world reign there: “Yahweh has bared his holy arm in the sight of all nations, and all the ends of the earth see the salvation of our God” (Isa 52:10).[…]
DtIsa’s message is presented in a wealth of vivid images that cannot all be set off against each other, but which in essence amount to the same thing. They can be summarized in a few sentences. The prophet proclaims the liberation of Yahweh’s people from exile and their return through the desert to the land of promise as a Yahweh miracle, in which Yahweh proves his saving creative power as the only God before all peoples. He needs three earthly agents for this: the chosen, created in the womb and called prophet. The chosen prophetic servant of God, created and called in the womb, who brings the despondent and unbelieving Israel to faith and on the way, as his “active witness”, the chosen servant of God Jacob / Israel, created and called in the womb, who then sets off and allows the miracles to happen to him, as the (initially) “passive witness”, and Cyrus, called and created by Yahweh, as his “shepherd” and “anointed one”, whom he “raised up” for the warlike conquest of the world empire of Babylon and thus for the liberation of the exiled people of Yahweh. All three are portrayed as royal figures with similar predicates. The triumph of Cyrus also serves as an example in which Yahweh proves his uniqueness as God, because he brings it about through his word of creation, which he had previously given to the world through his prophetic servant. In the end, Yahweh will reign from Jerusalem as King of Israel and King of the world, and all nations will confess him as the only God who saves: Thus, in the sum of his message, the prophet proclaims an eschatological event.
The fourth servant song after the death of the prophet goes beyond this by seeing the whole event as initiated by the suffering and death of the prophetic servant and by the miracle of Yahweh in his deceased servant (servant of God).
