In this chapter, König examines an array of ‘literary interactions’ in Pliny’s 10th book of Letters. She draws particular attention to the book’s ‘heteroglossia’ – the multiplicity of linguistic registers and literary genres that it evokes and adopts – and she shows how that heteroglossia enables Pliny to accrue increasing authority and expertise as the book progresses. Starting with letters 10.1-14, she first explores intertexts between Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan and other close-contemporary literature (in particular, the Panegyricus and Frontinus’ De Aquis). Her focus then shifts to Pliny’s incorporation of a range of specialist discourses (architectural, religious, legal, financial, hydraulic, etc.) across the rest of the book, discourses which gradually flesh out his credentials as an administrator with the ability to command many different areas of government. She ends by exploring Pliny’s interaction with Trajan via an allusion to Pliny the Elder’s address to Titus at the start of his encyclopaedic Natural History. In drawing attention to the range and impact of different kinds of intertexts across Letters 10 – from specific textual allusions to generic interdiscursivity – she underlines what this seemingly ‘administrative’ correspondence can teach us about Roman reading and writing habits and the blurred boundary between ‘literary’ and non/less-‘literary’ texts.

Chapter 1 addresses five topics preliminary to the exegetical portions of this study: Kings’ compositional history, genre (especially in light of comparisons to Greek historiography), and rhetorical purpose, as well as a canonical approach to Kings and an agrarian reading strategy applied to Kings. As opposed to either factual history or fictional story, this volume argues that Kings is best described as a scripture directed at its readers’ theological imaginations. Such an observation suggests the validity of approaching the book from a canonical frame of reference, where its origins, shaping, and reception are understood to sit within a single field of compositional activity. Finally, Chapter 1 describes an agrarian hermeneutic as one reading strategy especially compatible with a canonical approach to the Bible at large.

This volume begins by introducing the reader to a leading question at the heart of contemporary Kings research: does hope characterize the biblical book in question, or only despair? Within this frame of reference, the introduction serves as an entry point to the scholarly debates surrounding Kings’ compositional history and genre, as well as the canonical approach and agrarian hermeneutic by which the exegetical portions of the present study proceed. Such an approach provides readers with a fresh perspective on the kerygmatic contribution that the Elijah narratives (1 Kings 17–2 Kings 2) make to the overall text. Placed in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, these prophetic stories portray Yhwh’s life-restoring power under circumstances that pre-enact the removal of the Davidic monarchy and Solomonic temple – precisely the situation in which the book of Kings resolves (2 Kings 25). The Elijah narratives therefore declare that Yhwh maintains his interest in Israel’s life and land even under such conditions; in so doing, they contribute to a “life typology” in Kings that signals hope for David’s (and thus Israel’s) future in the open-ended aftermath of destruction.