The Formulaic Epilogue for a King in the Book of Kings in Light of Royal Funerary Rites in Ancient Israel and the Levant

In the biblical narrative of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah found in the Deuteronomistic History, the end of a king's rule is summed up in a series of stock statements that begins with the poetic idiom for death: "and [the king] lay with his fathers." The summary statements all revolve around the problem of royal death and succession, encapsulated in a brief epilogue that consisted typically of a notice of burial (in the royal tombs) and the introduction of the successor---the crown prince. While previous studies focused on the literary role of the epilogues as framing devices within the Deuteronomistic History, this dissertation examines the formulaic statements of the epilogue within the socio-political context of death in the ancient Levant. The formulaic statements of the epilogue conveyed royal legitimacy through the ideals of political continuity and the linear descent of power. The central component to this complex of ideals is the concept of ancestral identity, here expressed through the Hebrew term 'abot (literally, the 'fathers'). The political ideology found in the royal epilogues of Kings is consistent with the political landscape of the Levant during the Iron Age, where kingdoms were often labeled according to the ancestral identity of their ruling dynasty, such as the 'House of Omri' for Israel. The formulaic epilogues of Kings reflected the importance of funerary rituals and royal tombs in their ability to confront the political problem posed by a king's death and the subsequent act of dynastic succession.