In his new study, Kevin Killeen seeks to establish the Bible as one of the primary political languages of seventeenth-century England. The Political Bible in Early Modern England focuses explicitly on the lexicon of kingship and polity that early modern preachers and commentators gleaned from the biblical annals of ancient Israel and Judah in the monarchic period (1050 BCE-930 BCE). An underutilized, if somewhat forbidding source base, with its welter of dynasts and regicides, prophets and apostates, the historical works of the Old Testament are deemed here to be “the root of the Bible's political energy” (48). Killeen is staking out a very a particular terrain. He seeks to place the scriptural idiom on a par with both the humanist bequest of classical political thought and the native English tradition of common law thinking and the ancient constitution; and yet, he resists the so-called “Hebraism” of recent scholars, who posit the historical specificity of the Israelite monarchies as a unique font of early-modern constitutional thought. Ancient Israel provided seventeenth-century England with a tonality for politics rather than a template, one that must be grasped in its interpretive polyphony rather than simply translated away into more secular or less recondite political idioms.
The Bible participated most publicly in seventeenth-century politics as a standard of what is here called “exemplarity,” the exegetical work of refiguring the present moment in light of the divine action registered in scripture. Historians, Killeen observes, are often disappointed in the relative paucity of direct reference to contemporary political events in early modern sermons. But direct reference, he argues, seldom exhausts their contemporary applicability. Instead, the textual gymnastics of what he labels “scriptural hopscotch” (205), bounding from reference to reference in a single religious performance, was thought to convey God's politics. For instance, sermons in the 1620s, which piled up biblical instances of divine punishment for a failure to act—Meroz's reluctance to aid the Israelites or Saul's sparing of Agag—scarcely required any mention of Bohemia or the Spanish Match to constitute a critique of James's unduly pacific foreign policy.
Most of the chapters, however, invert this interpretive approach. Rather than documenting how the copia of biblical allusions cohere into a singular political critique, chapters tend to explicate the variety of applications which diverse preachers and commentators could wring out of discrete Biblical topoi or figures. The figure of Hezekiah, for instance, pervaded the idiom in which royal and aristocratic responses to the plague could be variously evaluated. In the era of the civil war, the figures of Rehoboam and Jeroboam structured the discursive field in which questions of oppression, usurpation, and popular sovereignty could be discussed. Similarly, Jehu's regicide of Jehoram provided a framework for evaluating the execution of Charles I.
Even confined to printed sources, these political deployments of the Scriptural idiom are quite richly documented. Still, Killeen's method of simply stacking references to these biblical incidents end to end, from sources of heterogeneous political and religious commitment, often at decades remove from one another, can be wearying. At one point, Killeen characterizes a 1643 fast sermon to parliament as a “delirious sheet-rain of references” (202). The reader can sympathize. The Political Bible in Early Modern England is, at times, similarly relentless. And the author is far more interested in demonstrating a universal fluency in the vernacular of biblical politics than engaging with the disparate ideologies it was capable of communicating in a sustained way. This method is more than adequate to confirm the author's supposition of “the discursive fluidity and interpretive complexity that surrounded” (4) scriptural reference in seventeenth-century England. But one wonders if this extraordinary adaptability undermines, rather than affirms, the Bible's status as a political language.
Killeen's excavations ably demonstrate the ubiquity of the figures of the Israelite monarchies in seventeenth-century civic discourse. But their pervasiveness throughout the religious and political spectrum does not indicate their mutual intelligibility. In radical texts, Ahab and Jezebel's expropriation of Naboth's vineyard was an emblem of the abuse of the royal prerogative. Amongst royalist voices, the same swindle was invoked in condemnation of the treacherous deprivation of King Charles's royal patrimony, the kingdom of England itself. The ideological capaciousness of the figures, so comprehensively illustrated in this volume, seem to problematize the author's claim that “the biblical idiom was its own and sufficient political comment,” (53), one which obviated transposition into alternative political registers. One might look for a clearer sense of how to distinguish a political language from what often appears to be a political cypher. Killeen's ultimate description of the Bible as “the aether of early modern thought” (243) may signal more than intended. The aether, after all, was an element whose imagined ubiquity finally rendered it analytically superfluous.
More convincing is Killeen's claim that the Bible reveals the sound and feel of English politics in the seventeenth century, that its triumphs and desolations, its laments and judgments provided, above all else, the emotional color in which politics was popularly painted. The book works best when it illuminates the extent to which national life in Stuart England remained imaginatively enmeshed in that of Israel. This, Killeen usefully suggests, served to set the age off from the less turbulent one that followed it, wherein Britons were far less likely to see their tribulations reflected in those of the ancient monarchies.
