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New
book talks about ‘Knowing Kings’
By
Amy Geiszler-Jones
Stuart
Lasine is a biblical scholar and comparatist, and he’s taken
on the lofty subject of kings in his new book.
Lasine,
associate professor in the Ransom-Butler department of religion
at WSU, has written the book, "Knowing Kings: Knowledge, Power
and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible," which is being released
this month.
One
of the book’s main themes is the critical role information
management plays in any monarchy or leadership situation. While
some might think that so-called spin doctors are a recent phenomenon
in politics, controlling information and image-building is actually
a rather ancient practice, according to Lasine’s book.
Inside
WSU
Biblical scholar Stuart Lasine likes to make what he calls
"popular culture-high culture analogies, and ancient
and modern analogies" in his new book "Knowing Kings:
Knowledge, Power and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible."
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Some
of the more famous biblical kings, like Saul and David, employed
the practice of having court informers or using disinformation to
achieve their means.
Lasine
even takes that vein of information management back to the Garden
of Eden and the ultimate biblical king, Yahweh, God’s Hebrew
name in the Old Testament.
"In
that sense, Adam and Eve and the serpent are his courtiers, and
the serpent, by leaking God’s information to Eve and taking
his words out of context, becomes a kind of informer," Lasine
says.
Eve
particularly gets a bad rap, says Lasine. Her alleged temptation
– the Old Testament doesn’t say she actually tempted Adam
to eat of the forbidden fruit – "is told in order to associate
her evil with women’s reputation by gossipers. I trace the
history of how women as gossipers goes all the way back to the Garden
of Eden and all the way up to the Ku Klux Klan and their use of
women gossipers in their whisper campaigns."
Lasine
uses some interesting comparisons with biblical kings. In one chapter,
for example, he compares Solomon and the Wizard of Oz.
Solomon
exerts his "power over people through a kind of screen of words,"
Lasine says, just like he Wizard of Oz uses a screen from behind
which he manipulates a larger-than-life presence until Toto upsets
the screen.
"I
like making popular culture-high culture analogies, and also ancient
and modern analogies," Lasine says, of his comparisons.
He
uses a number of techniques to convey his comparisons and his study
of biblical kings. A couple of dream sequences crop up in the book,
and there’s one chapter in which a biblical scholar visits
a psychologist and presents some theories that are analyzed in another
chapter.
He
compares biblical kings to non-biblical monarchs, such as Ramesses
II and King Oedipus, and even to more recent kings.
He
isn’t debunking biblical kings, Lasine says. Rather he’s
just showing how the Bible reflects in many different ways things
going on in different cultures and in our own cultures now.
Lasine,
who has taught at WSU since 1984, took considerable effort in publishing
this book. He’d actually written a book that was to be published
a decade ago by the same publishing firm, but then he decided it
really wasn’t the type of book he’d intended to write.
For
the past 10 years, he’s painstakingly researched and tested
his theories and comparisons for his current book by presenting
them at conferences. One paper on King Solomon, which ended up as
a chapter in "Knowing Kings," got the attention of an
A&E "Biography" producer and landed him a spot on
a feature about Solomon.
The
book was published by the Society of Biblical Literature. It retails
for $39.95.
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