Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles‪.‬

The two books of Chronicles are forbidding territory for all but the hardiest of readers. As a world full of men, priests, kings, battles, and a vengeful God, only a small band of biblical scholars dare to make Chronicles their home. (1) Rarely if ever does a feminist, gay, lesbian, postcolonial, poststructuralist or even a Marxist critic dare to enter this forbidding text that begins with nine grueling chapters of genealogies. Fortunately, that closed world has begun to open up in the last few years, with utopian studies by Schweitzer (2007a), who builds on my earlier work (Boer 1997, 1999), and the feminist study by Kelso (2007). This refreshing opening also enables the study and critique of masculinity in Chronicles, not despite but because it is a work devoted to the world of men. In what follows, I begin with some theoretical concerns, drawn from Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri, which deal with the unstable nature of hegemonies, the internal conflicts of ideologies and the constitutive power of resistance. From there I introduce two features of Chronicles: its nature as a literary utopia (for whom?) and its central motif of the rigid phallic temple. Yet this phallic world is not as firm as it seems, for the stories in Chronicles continually soften one's initial impression: the overt machismo is a little too camp to be taken seriously; David and Solomon turn out to be expert interior designers; and the crucial sign of one's faithfulness to God is through the correct observance of the temple cult (2)--in terms of cutlery, cooking, spices, oils, incense, fine wine, and singing. What sort of masculinity is this? Let us see.