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.