What is your advice for a thesis on 3 Reigns?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2002.
The best I can do for you at the moment is to make one or two general remarks.
My own general strategy would be to consider the textual questions that arise in the case of Rehoboam in the context of all those other many textual disturbances throughout the whole of 3 Reigns.1 It is not, of course, the case that they must all have arisen from the same source, but some of them at least may be on a par with the Rehoboam case.
What early on impressed me in my studies was the phenomenon of 3 Reigns 21:27, where the Greek says, 'Now concerning the statement that Ahab was pricked in his heart . . .'. As it stands, this is part of the Greek text, and yet it appears to be an exegetical comment or explanation of a text that either the translator or some reviser had in front of him. If that is the case, then 21:27 is not by definition an original text in any sense; it is part of a commentary on an original text. In that connection, I also noticed that what I called 'the whitewashing of Ahab's character' that one seems to find in the whole of that chapter, and in particular at verse 25, corresponded with a rabbinic traditional interpretation of Ahab, which again was not founded on an original text, but on what one may loosely call midrash, i.e. a rabbinic commentary on a text from the Hebrew Scripture.
Another thing that has impressed me are the fragments that survive in the church fathers of the work of Demetrios, the Alexandrian Jewish scholar. He seems to have been influenced in his methods by those of the Greek scholars that worked in the museum and the library at Alexandria in the century before him. As Demetrios studies the text he deals with aporiae, just as the Greek scholars did with Homer. Moreover, he uses the technical language of such study. At one point he says epizētein de tina, that is, someone in his group asked a question about a problem in the narrative of Exodus, and he proceeds to explain it. This, it seems to me, points to a good deal of scholarly work being done by Jews in Alexandria on the text of the Septuagint in the second century BC. I think it is wise, perhaps, to keep in mind the possibility that some of the differences between the Greek manuscripts and those of the Masoretic text may have arisen in the Jewish scholarly schools of the Alexandrian commentators.
Another general question that arises in 3 Reigns is the major variance in chronology that comes to vivid expression in chapter 16, and then again in the last chapter of the book. Shenkel, years ago, wrote a masterly monograph on the topic in the then powerful tradition of F. M. Cross Jr. I wrote an extensive review of it in The Journal of Theological Studies.2
The other observation that I have is still more general. You may know what is called 'the problem of the smaller and larger texts'. Early in the eighties, four of us got together to study the story of David and Goliath, not only for its own sake, but because it is a typical example of the longer and shorter text phenomenon that appears in several books of the Old Testament. The papers that we wrote during that research venture were eventually published by Dominique Barthélemy in Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, No. 73. None of us was able totally to convince the others, but at least these papers bring to the fore some of the crucial questions that arise in dealing with these problems in the Old Testament.
Yours sincerely,
1 This refers to the histories of the kings of Israel and Judah as recorded in the Old Testament books of Samuel and Kings.
2 Volume XXI, Issue 1, April 1970, Pages 118–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/XXI.1.118