Introduction: The political Bible -- Early modern hermeneutics and the Old Testament -- The sermon, the listener and enemy theory in the Thirty Years War -- Hezekiah, the politics of municipal plague and the London poor -- Constitution and resistance : the language of civil war political thought -- Dividing the kingdom : Rehoboam and Jeroboam -- Hanging up kings : regicide and political memory -- Preaching on the ramparts : Hezekiah at war -- How Jezebel became sexy : Ahab, Naboth's land and Jezebelian hermeneutics -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Chronology of Biblical kings
Summary
"Looks at the political uses of the biblical kings and the Old Testament in the Renaissance ... the work explores the scriptural ambivalence to and suspicion of monarchy and constitutes a reception history of the biblical texts on kingship across the seventeenth century; the study also provides an account of the biblical idiom of politics in the era"--Author's University of York web page
