YHWH's accession to the throne

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The enthronement festival of YHWH was the view of some Old Testament scholars, the main festival at the temple in Jerusalem before its destruction by the Babylonians . It marked the beginning of the new year on Tishri 1st  . However, the festival and the festival liturgy can only be accessed indirectly from the Old Testament. Because even where the Old Testament contains pre-exilic texts, they have been revised and updated post-exilic.

Ancient oriental parallels

According to Sigmund Mowinckel , YHWH's accession to the throne was the Jerusalem adaptation of a north-west Semitic myth, which can be recognized in the Ugaritic text KTU 1–2 and in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish : The deity ( Baal in Ugarit , Marduk in Babylonia) throws the embodiment of the primeval sea in a battle (Jam or Tiamat ) and triumphs over the chaos. It corresponds to mythical thinking that the deity loses strength in the course of the year, so that it regenerates itself in ritual and then reigns supreme.

Reconstruction of the festival liturgy

Psalm 24 , Psalm 29 and Psalm 93 form the basis for the reconstruction of the Jerusalem feast:

  • At dawn, YHWH defeated the primordial sea (and its companion, the mythical serpent Leviathan ).
  • At sunrise he entered his temple in a festival procession - possibly represented by the Ark of the Covenant (mentioned only in Ps 132).
  • Inside the temple, he ascended the throne and was proclaimed King of all the earth.

In Psalm 24: 7-10, the proponents of the accession festival see a particularly well-preserved fragment of the pre-exilic festival liturgy: This is the moment when the festival procession reached the temple, where it was greeted by the temple guards. The pre-exilic pieces in Psalms 29 and 93, on the other hand, celebrated YHWH's triumph in the battle with the sea.

For Mowinckel the pre-exilic Jerusalem cult was a holy drama and the accession festival of YHWH was its center. Since then, research has become much more cautious about reconstructing cultic inspections. The sources offer too little evidence to be able to get an idea of ​​the pre-exilic worship service.

Further development since the Babylonian exile

Sigmund Mowinckel also put forward the much discussed hypothesis that the tradition of the YHWH accession to the throne had been eschatologically developed since the exile , and that the “peoples roaring against Zion” had taken the place of the Chaos Sea. The model for this transfer of a natural myth into the world of history and politics was possibly Assyrian royal inscriptions from the 7th and 8th centuries. The text Isa 8, 6-8 shows Assyrian coloring.

"YHWH is King!"

The cheering shout of the festival participants “YHWH mālak!” (“YHWH is king” or “YHWH has become king”) introduces the so-called accession psalms by Mowinckel (Ps 47, 93, 95-99). This is - regardless of whether there was really a YHWH accession to the throne - a central sentence for the Jerusalem cult. “Central to him is the notion that Yhwh, the splendidly dressed, endowed with honor, prevails against powers that are hostile to him. Where and how exactly the rulership and presence of Yhwh were celebrated in the Jerusalem temple does not emerge from the Old Testament. "

reception

In the rabbinical tradition, the daily recitation of Shma Yisrael and accompanying prayers was understood as a "daily new proclamation and thus the enactment of divine royal rule," which, according to Karl-Erich Grözinger, represents a certain proximity to an annual proclamation of the royal rule of YHWH.

literature

  • Sigmund Mowinckel : Psalms studies II. Yahwa's accession to the throne and the origin of eschatology . Kristiana 1922.
  • Werner H. Schmidt : Kingship of God in Ugarit and Israel: On the origin of Yahweh's king predication . 2nd edition Berlin 1966.
  • Otto Kaiser : The one God of Israel and the powers of the world: God's way in the Old Testament from the Lord of his people to the Lord of the whole world. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-53602-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Kaiser : The one God of Israel . S. 138 .
  2. ↑ Otto Kaiser: The one God of Israel . S. 141 .
  3. ↑ Otto Kaiser: The one God of Israel . S. 139 .
  4. ↑ Werner H. Schmidt: Introduction to the Old Testament . 4th edition. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1989, p. 302-303 .
  5. ^ Sigmund Mowinckel : Psalms Studies . tape 2 , p. 226 .
  6. ↑ Otto Kaiser: The one God of Israel . S. 137-138 .
  7. ↑ a b Otto Kaiser: The one God of Israel . S. 141 .
  8. ^ Hans-Peter Mathys: Divine service . In: Walter Dietrich (ed.): The world of the Hebrew Bible: scope - content - basic topics . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2017, p. 265 .
  9. ^ Karl Erich Grözinger: Jewish thinking: theology, philosophy, mysticism . tape 1 . Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2004, p. 116 .