The Unstated Premise of the Prose Pentateuch: YHWH is King

The Pentateuch portrays God acting like a king, but almost never applies the title, “king,” to God, in marked contrast to many other parts of the Hebrew Bible. This terminological discrepancy between, on the one hand, all the major pentateuchal sources and, on the other hand, much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, calls for explanation. Attention to a common and ancient rhetorical strategy of argumentation, the enthymeme, provides an explanation in the form of an unstated premise. The premise that YHWH is Israel’s king strengthened the persuasive force of the prose Pentateuch by remaining unstated