KINGS
David took Jerusalem, which till then had been a Jebusite stronghold,
and made it the capital of his kingdom; but he reigned, after as
before, in patriarchal fashion, making, so far as appears, few changes
in the old institutions. Solomon reorganized the monarchy after the
common pattern of Oriental despotisms, dividing the country into
provinces for purposes of taxation, without regard to the autonomy of
the tribes and their liberties. He built a great palace in the
citadel, and, within the same enclosure, a temple, which, as the royal
sanctuary, was also in a sense national. Like other Eastern rulers, he
caused his doings to be recorded in the annals of the kingdom, and
doubtless the priests of the temple kept their own chronicles. From
this time, therefore, sources of a new kind make their appearance in
the history, contemporary records drawn from the royal and priestly
annals. The extracts from these sources in the Book of Kings, like
those of the Assyrian kings, or the Phoenician annals of which
fragments (through Menander) are preserved by Josephus, were brief and
bald records of doings or happenings, not biographical or historical
narratives. But brief and bald as they were they furnished a
groundwork of fact; and, since they set down at the accession of each
king the length of his predecessor's reign, they gave also the data
for a continuous chronology.
It is not to be supposed that the historical literature whose
brilliant beginnings we have seen ceased in the first century of the
kingdom or that the writers occupied themselves solely with the
remoter past. The memorable deeds of great men will not have gone
uncelebrated. The narrative, however, which is the chief source for
the times of Saul and David, breaks off abruptly in 1 Kings 2. The
Books of Kings are of a wholly different fabric. For one thing, while
the two Books of Samuel cover little more than the span of one long
lifetime, Kings, in about the same space, comprises the history of
close on to four centuries. But there is a still greater difference,
as we shall see, in the way in which history is treated.
The grand divisions of the Books of Kings are these: 1 Kings ii.
12-xi. 43 is occupied with the reign of Solomon; the division of the
kingdom after his death is narrated in xii. 1-24; the parallel history
of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the fall of Samaria in 721
B.C. runs to 2 Kings xviii. 12; the history of Judah from that date to
its own fall in 586 fills the rest of the book.
The age of the book is easily determined: it tells of the two sieges
of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (597 and 586 B.C.); the destruction of
the temple and palace and the razing of the city walls, the
assassination of Gedaliah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had made governor over
the devastated land; and the flight of the Jews from the king's
vengeance to Egypt. The last event mentioned is the liberation of King
Jehoiachin by Evil-Merodach (Amil-Marduk) in 561 B.C. It is of course
possible that this detached notice (2 Kings xxv. 27-30) was added by a
later hand; but there is no reason to include the story of Gedaliah in
this suspicion. The book in its present form cannot, therefore, be
earlier than, say, about 580 B.C. In some places in the body of the
book, also, the fall of Judah is spoken of as an accomplished fact,
e.g. 2 Kings xvii. 19 f. (in conflict with vss. 18 and 21 ff.). Such
passages are, however, not very numerous, and they commonly sit loose
in their context, like the verses just cited, as if they were thrust
into the narrative by an editor. The bulk of the work, on the
contrary, seems to suppose the existence of the kingdom. It is,
therefore, the general opinion that the book was written before the
fall of Jerusalem, and that a continuator added the account of the
catastrophe and the events immediately subsequent to it.
The older Kings, from beginning to end, is dominated by the conception
and permeated by the phraseology of Deuteronomy and of the prophet
Jeremiah, and must therefore be placed between 621 B.C. (the date of
the introduction of the deuteronomic law) and the beginning of the
last act of the history, that is to say, probably shortly before the
year 600 B.C.
It is not enough to say that Kings was written under the influence of
Deuteronomy; it was written, we might rather say, as a commentary on
the deuteronomic doctrine that falling away from the national religion
is punished by national disaster. In this point of view it resembles
Judges; but while in Judges it is the lapse into Canaanite heathenism,
the worship of the Baals and Astartes, which draws upon Israel
invasion and subjugation, in Kings not only foreign religions but the
worship at the high places, that is, the worship of Jehovah at his
oldest and holiest sanctuaries, provokes the wrath of God; for since
the dedication of Solomon's temple Jehovah had made it his exclusive
abode and all other places of worship were illegitimate. We have seen
that down to Josiah's reform this worship prevailed unchallenged in
both kingdoms. In the author's view, generation after generation,
under bad kings and good, had thus sinned against the organic law of
religion, and all judgments had failed to work amendment. In Israel
idolatry made the case worse; the "golden calves," that is, the small
images of Jehovah in the form of a bull, which Jeroboam had set up at
Bethel and Dan, were worshipped under all his successors. These sins
had in the end brought ruin on Israel, and they were bringing it on
Judah. Manasseh had done even worse than Jeroboam; strange gods from
near and far were installed in the temple itself, and under its walls
men sacrificed their children to "the King" (Moloch). Josiah's reforms
had no lasting results; the reaction under his successors restored the
high places, and heathen cults flourished again. The doom was
imminent; would Judah learn the lesson of history before it was too
late? Some one has said that history is philosophy teaching by
example; for the author of Kings history was prophecy teaching by
example.
It was the lesson of the history that the author was after, and this
ruling motive determined his selection of material as well as the
treatment of it. It explains why he hardly tells anything about some
of the greatest kings and the most glorious periods of the history,
which did not afford illustrations of his thesis, while he dwells on
things of much less historical importance.
The characteristic interests of the author and his highly
characteristic style sharply distinguish his own writing from the
sources which he incorporates. These sources, as will be supposed,
were of different kinds and of various worth; they were naturally not
the same in all parts of the long period he covers, and he has not
always dealt with them in the same way. Part of his material comes,
directly or indirectly, from the annals of the kings, to which the
reader is regularly referred for further information (see e.g., 1
Kings xiv. 19, 29), or from temple records; part of it from more
properly literary sources. Sometimes it has all the marks of
trustworthy tradition originating close to the event; again, it is
embroidered with legendary traits; a smaller part is edifying fiction.
In some cases, as in the stories of Elijah and Elisha, a special
source is recognizable, but in the main the attempt to trace the
literary channels through which the matter reached the author is
fruitless.
In the history of Solomon's reign the central place is taken by a
description of the palace and temple he erected (1 Kings 6-7), for
which c. 5 is a preparation, and c. 8, the dedication of the temple,
the sequel. The interesting account of the provincial organization and
system of taxation in c. 4 is evidently from an authoritative source;
the cession of cities in Galilee to Hiram, the list of cities
fortified, the (mutilated) account of the revolt of Edom, the rise of
the kingdom of Damascus, and the (mutilated) history of the revolt of
Jeroboam, the prelude to the separation of Israel and Judah, are also
of good authority.
By the side of these are stories celebrating the magnificence and
wisdom of Solomon, the beginnings of the exuberant Solomonic legend.
The judgment of Solomon in the case of the two harlots and of the
visit of the Queen of Sheba are examples of the popular tale, and
relatively old. The dedication of the temple has been much expanded by
the author of the Book of Kings; 1 Kings viii. 14-66 are wholly his
composition; ix. 1-9 is an appendix to c. 8. In viii. 1-12 an older
account of the dedication has been improved by various hands.
Comparison with the Greek translation shows that this process went on
to very late times; the latest additions are akin to the priestly
stratum in the Pentateuch. Chapter xi. 1-13 also is by the author of
the Book of Kings, built about a few words from his source in vs. 7;
vss. 29-40 are of the same sort.
1 Kings 12-2 Kings 17 contains the parallel history of Israel and
Judah. The method of the author is to follow the reign of a king, say
of Israel, to its end and then go back to take up the king of Judah
who came to the throne during this reign, follow him to his death, and
return to pick up the Israelite history again in the same way. The
result is, thus, interlocking histories, rather than a parallel
history. The length of each reign is given, probably ultimately from
the annals, with a computed synchronism which is at some points
demonstrably in error. With the introduction of each king a
comprehensive judgment by the standard of the deuteronomic law is
pronounced upon his reign. Thus, "In the eighteenth year of the king
Jeroboam the son of Nebat [king of Israel], began Abijah to reign over
Judah. Three years reigned he in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was
Maacah the daughter of Abishalom. And he walked in all the sins of his
father which he had done before him," etc. "In the third year of Asa
king of Judah began Baasha the son of Abijah to reign over all Israel
in Tirzah, and he reigned twenty and four years. And he did that which
was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of Jeroboam,
and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin." These judgments are
so stereotyped that they are pronounced even on kings who reigned but
a short time--Zimri, for instance, who lasted only seven days. In the
case of godly kings of Judah, even of such as are credited with
commendable zeal against the worships that Deuteronomy denounces as
Canaanitish heathenism, the reproach of leaving the worship of Jehovah
at the "high places" unmolested is not spared them; see, e.g., 1 Kings
xv. 1-14; xxii. 43.
The conflict between the tribes to whom the name Israel by historical
right belonged, headed by Ephraim, intent on reclaiming the ancient
liberties which Solomon had curtailed and securing adequate guarantees
for them, and Rehoboam, obstinate to maintain the despotism which his
father had established and the supremacy of Judah, ended in the
Israelite tribes refusing to acknowledge the succession and setting up
a kingdom of their own with Jeroboam the son Nebat as king. These
critical events are narrated in the source, 1 Kings xii. 1-20, with
noteworthy impartiality; a comparison with the treatment of the matter
by the author of the Book of Kings himself in xi. 29-39; xii. 21-24,
is instructive. The account of Jeroboam's religious foundations and
innovations in c. xii. 26-33 (with which xiii. 33^b belongs) is
probably based on an old Israelite source (the temples Jeroboam built,
etc.), on which the author of the book has put his own construction
and made his own comments. 1 Kings 13 is a specimen of the edifying
stories--religious fiction--which were added to the historical books
at a very late time and are especially numerous in Chronicles; the
reference to it in 2 Kings xxiii. 17 f. is an interpolation in a
context itself post-exilic. The story of the visit of Jeroboam's wife
to the prophet Ahijah (1 Kings xiv. 1-18) is in the manner of the
author, but seems to have an older basis. The fluid state of the text
at a very late time is again shown by the fact that in some recensions
of the Greek version the story is not found in this place, but,
together with other matter about Jeroboam (in part variant parallel to
1 Kings xi. 26 ff., 40), in a long passage which stands in c. 12
between vss. 24 and 25.
The invasion of Shishak, king of Egypt (1 Kings xiv. 25-28), is
introduced by the author with a catalogue of the deuteronomic
transgressions which provoked God to punish the kingdom in this way;
the similarity to the introduction to the oppressions in Judges is
apparent. So in the following chapters: the author's facts probably
come from annalistic sources which can in places be recognized, but
the religious interpretation of the events, which he sometimes gives
in his own quality as historian, sometimes puts into the mouth of a
prophet (e.g. xvi. 1-7, cf. xiv. 1-18), is from the point of view of
the deuteronomist school.
Another characteristic of the author's method is illustrated by his
treatment of the reign of Omri (1 Kings xvi. 23-28). Omri was the
founder of the greatest dynasty of the northern kingdom, and was one
of its greatest kings. From an inscription of the Moabite king Mesha,
we learn that Omri subjugated the lands east of the Jordan (see also 2
Kings i. 1; iii. 4 ff.), and it is probable that his conquests were
pushed to the north-east into Syria; the Assyrian kings long after his
death call Israel the "house of Omri." But the long and brilliantly
successful reign of a king who in religion followed in the footsteps
of the kings of Israel before him, "golden calves" and all, obviously
could not be made to exemplify the doctrine that such sins are
regularly visited by condign judgment in national disaster.
Consequently, all that our author records of Omri, beyond the
revolutions which paved for him the way to the throne (1 Kings xvi.
16-18), is contained in one verse, 1 Kings xvi. 24--he built a capital
on a new site, Samaria!
In the following reign, however, Israel had troubles enough; the
conquests east of the Jordan were lost, and the long chapter of Syrian
wars began. This was material more to the author's purpose, and he
makes good use of it. Here also, in addition to the annals and
whatever other sources were at his hand for the preceding period, he
had a new and peculiarly grateful source in the stories of Elijah and
Elisha. To the fact that these prophets were outstanding figures in
some of the crises of the Syrian wars we owe it that so much of the
history of that struggle is preserved; for what the author has
extracted from the annals is as meagre as elsewhere.
From such "lives and times" of the prophets is derived much the
greater part of 1 Kings 17-2 Kings 10, with 2 Kings xiii. 14-21. The
stories of Elijah (1 Kings 17-19; 21; 2 Kings 1; ii. 1-18) are among
the most striking in the Old Testament; the supernatural in them seems
the natural setting for a figure of such heroic mould, and is a
stronger testimony than any record of fact could be to the impression
of the superman on the imagination of ordinary mortals. Through the
vesture of legend, we too have the impression of a something titanic
in the man who dared solitary to stand for his God against kings,
priests, prophets, and people, and, worse than all, the vengeful fury
of a woman! We can see, also, that his conflict against the prophets
of Baal makes an era in the history of religion in Israel. "If Jehovah
be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him," he thunders at the
people on Mt. Carmel. It was not the first assertion of the jealousy
of Jehovah and the exclusiveness of the true religion; but the issue
had never before been so dramatically joined. The intolerant
monotheism of Judaism had found its war cry.
1 Kings 17-19, Elijah at Sarepta, on Carmel, and at Horeb, belong
together; the beginning, which must in some way have brought Elijah
upon the stage, is not preserved; 1 Kings 21 (Naboth's vineyard) may
very well be from the same source; in the end of the chapter (vs.
20^b-26) the author of the Book of Kings has the word, and in the
other chapters there are slight traces of the same hand. With these
small exceptions the stories are old, and probably received their
present literary form in the ninth century, certainly before the
prophetic movement of the eighth. 2 Kings i. 2-17 is a legend of a
different kind and presumably considerably younger. 2 Kings ii. 1-18,
on the other hand, is akin to the older stories in 1 Kings 17-19, 21;
it forms the connecting link with Elisha.
Among the stories of Elijah stand other episodes of the Syrian wars in
which prophets figure, 1 Kings 20; xxii. 1-38. The second of these,
Micaiah ben Imlah before Ahab and Jehoshaphat, is of peculiar
interest. They are apparently of the same age with their surroundings.
In both a few verses are from later editors. To the same cycle
probably belong 2 Kings iii. 4-27, the campaign against Moab, as well
as 2 Kings ix. 1-x. 27, Jehu's revolt instigated by Elisha, the murder
of King Ahaziah and of the queen mother, Jezebel, the massacre of the
princes of the house of Omri and the extirpation of the worship of
Baal.
Beside these are a group of stories about Elisha, chiefly celebrating
him as a wonder-worker, and bringing him into connection with the
"sons of the prophets," who seem to have formed a kind of dervish
order. The collector or editor has accumulated them all in one reign,
probably against their original intention. Scattered through the
narratives drawn from the lives of the prophets are brief notices from
the annals and the usual deuteronomist appraisals by the author of
Kings.
The attempt of Jehu to exterminate the dynasty of Omri, involving the
slaughter of the Judæan princes, had the unintended result of enabling
the queen mother, Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, to seize
the throne. The revolution, planned by the chief priest of Jerusalem,
which overthrew the usurper and brought the true heir, the
seven-year-old Joash, to his own, is told in 2 Kings xi. 1-20; a
somewhat minute account of the restoration of the temple in his reign
follows in c. xii. 4-16, both from a good Judæan source, perhaps
ultimately a temple chronicle. The author of Kings has his usual
formulas, including the tolerated high places, in c. xii. 1-3. The
extract from the annals at the end of the chapter, the straits into
which Hazael of Syria brought Joash, and his death by a treasonable
conspiracy, which might be thought to prove that piety is not always
crowned with prosperity, is anticipated by the author of Kings in 2
Kings xii. 3--Joash's piety lasted only as long as he was in the
leading strings of the priest Jehoiada.
In the following reigns the material derived from narrative sources is
more scanty; a noteworthy passage of this kind is the account,
evidently from an Israelite writer, of the chastisement Jehoash of
Israel inflicted on the presumptuous Amaziah of Judah (2 Kings xiv.
8-14). The contemporary reigns of Jeroboam II of Israel and Azariah,
or Uzziah, of Judah, lasting half a century, a period of great
prosperity in both kingdoms, are dispatched with extreme brevity, and
are followed by the swiftly successive conspiracies and revolutions in
which the northern kingdom declined to its fall. The story of treason
and bloodshed is suspended to tell of the reign of Ahaz in Judah (2
Kings 16) from a source chiefly interested in the temple, and then the
last act of Israel's tragedy opens. To the brief account of the fall
of Samaria in 2 Kings xvii. 1-6, is appended the moral of the whole
history, VSS. 7-41. This homiletic improvement of the catastrophe was
an inviting task, and besides the author of Kings, the exilian
continuator and perhaps still later editors contributed to draw it out
and emphasize it.
From this point the historian has only Judah to deal with. The reign
of Hezekiah is narrated at some length in 2 Kings 18-20. A
considerable part of these chapters (xviii. 13-XX. 19) is found also
in the Book of Isaiah (Isa. 36-39), with variations which are of much
interest for the history of the text. The psalm, Isa. xxxviii. 9-20,
for instance, is not found in Kings; 2 Kings xviii. 14-16 is not in
Isaiah, and minor differences occur in almost every verse. The
introduction to the reign of Hezekiah by the author of Kings is
somewhat longer than usual, and attributes to him not only the
destruction of the serpent idol in the temple which Moses was
believed to have made (cf. Num. xxi. 8 f.), and of other apparatus of
heathenism, but the removal of the high places, making him thus
anticipate the reforms of Josiah a century later (2 Kings xviii. 4).
This probably exaggerates Hezekiah's good works, but for the bronze
serpent to which sacrificial worship had been paid from time
immemorial, as well as for vs. 7 f. (Hezekiah's rebellion), which is
the antecedent of vs. 13 ff., he may have had the authority of the
annals.
From the annals probably come also 2 Kings xviii. 13-16, with their
brief record of the penalty Hezekiah paid for his revolt. Of this we
have also Sennacherib's account in his inscriptions, where he tells
how he took the cities of Judah and shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem
"like a bird in a cage," and gives the figures of the heavy indemnity
he imposed upon him. There follow two longer accounts of Sennacherib's
operations, 2 Kings xviii. 17-xix. 8 and xix. 9-37, which are commonly
regarded as parallel and somewhat discrepant relations of the same
campaign, but by some are thought to refer to two different occasions,
at an interval of ten years or more. 2 Kings xx. 1-11 (cf. Isa. 38) is
perhaps from a life of Isaiah, who is the chief figure in it; vs.
12-19 (Isa. 39), the embassy of the chronic Babylonia rebel, Merodach
Baladan, presumably to undermine Hezekiah's shaky loyalty to his
Assyrian lord, seems to belong at an earlier point in the story; in it
also Isaiah is the central person. In the closing paragraph the
author of Kings has preserved an interesting annalistic notice of an
aqueduct and reservoir which Hezekiah constructed, not improbably the
Siloam tunnel and the reservoir it feeds.
Of the fifty-five years' reign of Manasseh, and the two years of his
son Amon, a half-century of peace and prosperity in which the country
recuperated from the disasters Hezekiah had brought upon it, nothing
is told. Instead we have a long catalogue of Manasseh's religious
obliquities, which includes all the crimes most abhorrent to the
seventh-century prophets and laws, and the proclamation of God "by his
servants the prophets" that these sins sealed the doom of Judah. This
prediction is made from the standpoint of the accomplished fact, and
indeed most of the chapter seems to be by the exilian continuator of
Kings or a still later writer.
With the reforms of Josiah (621 B.C.; 2 Kings 22-23) we arrive at
events which, if not within the personal knowledge of the author of
Kings, were known to his older contemporaries. This does not, of
course, exclude the use of written records or narratives, and, in
fact, there seem to be traces of such in the chapters. More certain it
is that the continuator of the book made some changes in the account;
the oracle of Huldah, for example, seems to have been revised in the
light of the event.
To this continuator, as has already been said, the history of the two
sieges of Jerusalem, the deportations, and the misfortunes of those
who were left in the land are to be attributed. In several places in
earlier parts of the history we have had occasion to observe that
additions and changes continue to be made by the editors or
scribes--and every scribe who copied a book in those days wielded an
editor's pen when he chose--until a time close to the age of the Greek
translation, that is, the third century B.C.
The age in which the Pentateuch and the several Historical Books
(Joshua-Kings), the product of the long and obscure process which we
have attempted to outline in the preceding chapters, were adjusted and
connected so as to make a continuous history from the creation to the
fall of the Judæan state, can be fixed only by the fact that the
author of Chronicles (about 300 B.C. or somewhat later; see below)
seems to have read these books in the order and, so far as his use of
them permits a judgment, substantially with the contents of our
present Old Testament. This arrangement, or edition, if we choose to
call it so, as has been shown, did not put an end to additions and
alterations, though they gradually became less frequent and less
important in the following centuries. A standard and stable Hebrew
text was established only in the second century after the Christian
era.