The agency of assemblages and power of things: A mew materialist interpretation of the journeys of the Ark in 1 Samuel 5-6 and 2 Samuel 6

The forces that drive the biblical narrative are not just divine and human. Things have power too. Indeed, as new materialist theorists have stressed, it is the material stuff of the world that creates, shapes and constrains possibilities for events to happen on our planet. And while the Bible is written from a human perspective, it nonetheless reflects this thing-power. This article employs this new materialist perspective to explore the accounts of the ark’s journeys in 1 Samuel 5–6 and 2 Samuel 6. These accounts demonstrate the power of heterogenous beings, who do not act independently but intra-act in assemblages. The narrative is propelled by intra-connected assemblages of mice-tumours-and-gold, livestock-cart-and-sacrifice, cart-and-oxen, music-and-dance, and sacrifice-and-food. These assemblages are dynamically re-presented in a textual form which varies across versions. But they always display the power of the material beyond simply the human or divine.