I'm currently working on a paper and am reading through my primary sources to better understand the topic. However, I lack any expertise on the topic and was hoping that perhaps someone could break down some of the basic principle's to guide me in my readings. I'm currently trying to analyze the Stele of Vultures, Stele of Hammurabi, Deuteronomy, and Samuel.
What It seems to me is that certain kings validated their kingship by claiming to have the divine right to kingship. Then they simply went on to do whatever they wanted for their own agendas.
Thanks a ton.
Also, did leaders who fought solely for their own glory adopt certain methods?
What secondary sources are you looking at? Also, I would suggest expanding your primary sources to cover texts that more directly address policy-making and statecraft(memoranda, letters between kings and officials, decisions, and so on). The Neo-Assyrian corpus is especially good for this because not only are the royal inscriptions available online but so are a massive group of administrative documents(see the RINAP and SAA projects). What we see in this corpus is a tension between the kinds of ideals projected in inscriptions as fit for a king-divinely perfected, unstoppable, and a protector of Assyria-and the practical needs of statecraft, balancing competing interests, and trying to deal with the limits of power projection in premodern societies. I don't know if you want to expand your study to Neo-Assyrian texts, and that is probably a bad idea simply because it would be too much material for a term paper but you could certainly look for instance at the correspondence between Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim of Mari to get a sense of how Hammurabi's foreign policy actually played out. One last point-be very careful with the Stele of the Vultures, as it is extremely fragmentary.