KINGS, Books of. These two books in the Hebrew Bible formed originally one work. In the Greek version (the Septuagint), Kings and Samuel were reckoned as four Books of King doms. This fourfold division passed into the Christian Bibles through the Vulgate, and was adopted in the printed editions of the Hebrew. Jerome, however, preferred the title Kings, hence our present name for the second two fold work.
Like Judges, Kings is a product of the era of historical interpretation inaugurated by the publication of Deuteronomy in 621 s.c. (See DEUTERONOMY and Junozs). The reign of Solo mon and the history of the divided kingdom furnished more abundant and varied illustra tion of the central principles of the prophetic law book than even the age of the Judges. The dependence of national prosperity upon abso lute loyalty to Jehovah was illustrated more impressively by the division and downfall of the kingdom than by the vicissitudes of the early struggles, while the second great principle, the sinfulness of worship in the high places and the duty of centralization in the Jerusalem Temple, was exemplified constantly in the his tory from Solomon to the exile. For the pe riod included in Kings, the writers of the exile did- not have, as they did for the time of the Judges, a completed history already at hand, which they needed only to edit. For this era, they must themselves compile the earlier docu ments. Kings is therefore the great, original contribution of the Deuteronomic school of his torians. Some passages, implying that the Tem ple is still standing and the Davidic dynasty un interrupted, suggest that the compilation was undertaken in pre-exilic days, but the work as a whole carries the history in detail to the events following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.c., and cannot have been finished be fore the exile.
The completed work falls into three great sections: (1) The reign of Solomon (1 Kings i-xi) ; (2) The divided kingdom (1 Kings xii 2 Kings xvii) ; (3) Judah after the fall of 'Is rael (2 Kings xviii-xxv). At the dose of the first and second sections, the compilers intro duce at length their own interpretation of the preceding events in characteristic Deuterono mic terms. At the opening and close of each reign they in their judgments on the succes sive kings in stereotyped formulas. These for mulas include also the chronological data in ac cordance with which they arrange the synchron isms of the reigns. For their sources the corn pliers had on hand a book of the Acts of Solo mon and separate Chronicles (Hebrew, Acts of Days) of Isreal and Judah. They also had
collections of stories concerning Elijah, Elisha and other prophets. Reference is made by title to the Acts of Solomon and the Chronicles of Israel and Judah for additional information not included in Kings. Whether these books were the original state documents we cannot be sure. From the time of David a Recorder (Hebrew, Remembrancer) seems to have been a regular officer of the court. Directly or indirectly his records may be supposed to underlie the sources on which the compilers rely for information concerning the public activities of the kings, but jt is commonly felt that the Chronicles to which they refer were not the original court records. They seem, rather, to have been compositions based on these and including also materials that would find no place in official annals. The narratives concerning Elijah, who appears so prominently in the fateful reign of Ahab of Israel, were doubtless composed in prophetic circles not long after his death. The sudden way in which the prophet is introduced (1 Kings xvii, 1) implies that the stories are taken out of a larger work in which fuller informa tion is given concerning him. Some of the other stories in which prophets appear show more traces of the accretions which indicate oral transmission; those may have been handed down by word of mouth for some time before they were committed to writing. As a whole the books of Kings give the national his tory for a period of 400 years from the death of David to the exile, in a form that commends itself as affording one of the most reliable histories composed in pre-Christian times. Taken in connection with the books of Judges and Samuel, they give a comprehen sive survey of Hebrew history, covering a period of nearly 600 years, from the struggles of the tribes for the possession of the land, through the federation into the monarchy, the division into two kingdoms, their inter-related history, and the separate history of Judah after the fall of Israel until her own downfall. In this series of books, Samuel was already in a form which so satisfied the exilic historians that they made very slight editorial additions, but Judges received much editing from their hands, and Kings, as has been indicated, is their own compilation. When their work was accomplished, a century before the time of Herodotus, their nation had a history of re markable completeness and reliability, as com pared with other ancient peoples.