The Fate of the Man of God from Judah: A Literary and Theological Reading of 1 Kings 13

A problem of interpretation in the case of 1 Kings 13 is that scholarship has not reached a consensus as to what its main theme is, mainly due to the lack of any agreed hermeneutical principles to employ for the interpretation of the story. This dissertation will make it an aim to get at the narrator’s (or the implied author’s) intention and, based on the hermeneutical principles framed by the aim, will argue that a) the main theme of 1 Kings 13 is the certainty of God’s judgment on Jeroboam, which is visualized in the prophecy and fulfillment structure of the story and b) the story is best categorized as consisting of prophetic symbolic acts in which the narrator configured the actions of prophets in a way to illustrate and prefigure the fate of Jeroboam’s dynasty. My thesis is an attempt to read the story literarily and theologically—an approach that has not been undertaken enough for this chapter—and to present a coherent interpretation of the story in light of this approach.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD