Voices of Hope in the Book of Kings: Reading from the Margins in Northeast India

In the literature dealing with theological interpretations of the Deuteronomistic History (DH), interpretations that relate to final judgement and doom have tended to prevail. A seminal reading along those lines is that provided by Martin Noth. However, such readings conceal the voices of the marginalized protagonists within those texts. In turn, optimistic messages are rendered lost to marginalized readers of those texts. This thesis addresses the hermeneutical question of the possibility of identifying the marginalized voices in the texts and using their voices as tools to counter-read the currently dominant viewpoint(s). Within this approach, I propose a Deuteronomistic hope hypothesis as a framework for hermeneutics from the perspective of the marginalized people. In particular, the thesis takes as its example the tribes in Northeast India (NEI) who embraced Christianity in the face of oppression by the Hindu majority in India as well as the legacy of colonisation by Western powers. For them, the Bible has become a source of hope and communal identity. However, this has eventually led to increasing tensions over the place of NEI identity in a post-colonial India where the ideology of Hindutva has marginalized the tribal peoples and views Christianity as an alien legacy of the colonizers. Thus, the Bible is an intrinsic part of the current situation both as a problem and as a resource for liberation. This thesis looks for voices in the text that might speak on behalf of the Christian tribes in NEI in a way that provides them with resource for resistance. This thesis offers suggestions for developing a contextual hermeneutics through the critical reading of 1 Kings 12 and 2 Kings 22-23, passages which usually read as reflecting a high imperial and dynastic ideology, to find even there the voices of the oppressed which express their hopes and aspirations in the face of imperial domination.