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Article: Solomon: Israel's Ironic Icon of Human Achievement.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Shofar
- Article date:
- January 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 University of Nebraska Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Solomon: Israel's Ironic Icon of Human Achievement, by Walter Brueggemann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 301 pp. $44.95.
Willa Cather wrote that "some memories are realities," which leaves room to suggest that some memories are not. In this book, Walter Brueggemann explores the collective Israelite memories of the singular personage, Solomon, whom Brueggemann deems "a complex interpretive construct" (p. xii). Thus, though Brueggemann does deal initially, in his first chapter, with the question of the historical Solomon, that question is not the main subject of his study. Finding Solomon to have been "a modest historical character from the ...