Saul and the Social Contract: Constructions of 1 Samuel 8-11 in Cowley's 'Davideis' and Defoe's 'Jure Divino.'

I. To extent that we can identify a in seventeenth century England, we must acknowledge that it was a public sphere constructed, maintained, and negotiated by near-absolute rhetorical legitimacy of English Bible.(1) During this century of revolution, Bible served as both an agent for radical change and as basis for preserving status quo. Christopher Hill goes so far as to assert that seventeenth-century English Bible was the source of virtually all ideas, [and] it supplied idiom in which men and women discussed them (34). Hans Frei, commenting on this same phenomenon, describes three basic interpretive assumptions at center of 17th century, s understanding of biblical history: 1) that stories in Bible referred to and described actual historical occurrences; 2) that different narratives in Bible reflected a single, continuous narrative thread in which it was possible to make all of different narratives constituent elements of one great story; and 3) that, since continuous narrative of Bible reflected the one and only real world, it must in principal embrace experience of any present age and (2-3). What these assumptions ultimately mean is that English public during seventeenth century was involved in a collective effort to write themselves into a sustained master narrative of sacred history. This great narrative began in Garden of Eden as described in Book of Genesis and would not end until Battle of Armageddon as described in Book of Revelation, somewhere within narrative framework established by these events could be found supposedly accurate representations of all of turmoil that seventeenth century produced. Writing about way Dryden engaged biblical themes for ends, Steven Zwicker coins phrase political to describe kind of narrative construction in which contemporary events were connected to biblical narratives as integral parts of same coherent whole. According to Zwicker, purpose of typology is to shape contemporary events in a manner that allows reader to see how present day embodies past and, through that association, comes itself to participate in an eternal repetition of events that Bible records. Dryden, like all of great writers and thinkers of his day, was intimately involved with construction not merely of a history, but of a historical totality. And, as Zwicker concludes, the biblical metaphor ... and contemporary applications are all working to transform Restoration present and biblical past into a symbolic eternal tense (101). In such a rhetorical environment, any debate about social, political, cultural, or economic policy was, at least to some degree, a debate about what Bible said or meant for modern world. And since modern world in seventeenth-century England revolved, to a great extent, around questions of kingship and royal prerogative, what Bible had to say about kings was of critical importance to almost everybody. As century marched from Parliamentary Revolution through Regicide, Interregnum, Exclusion Crisis, Glorious Revolution, and towards next century's succession crisis, both royalists and revolutionaries alike found themselves obliged to construct their visions of both present and future of England around interpretations of biblical narratives involving kingship and royalty. Fortunately, there is no shortage of such narratives. Seventeenth-century literature, philosophy, and discourse regularly featured contemporary allusions cast in guise of writings about Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennarcherib, Jeroboam, and Jehosophat, and nearly every other monarch mentioned in Old or New Testaments. By far, though, most important royal narratives are those contained in Books of Samuel, centering on pivotal and controversial figure of King David. …