"Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David unto the house that he had built for her; for he said, No woman shall dwell in the house of David, for the place is holy whereunto the ark of Jehovah hath come" (viii. 11).
There is no further need to speak of viii. 12-16 (1Kings ix. 25); more indifferent in their character are the addition in vii. 12-15, a mere compilation of reminiscences, the embellishment in viii. 3-6, derived from 1Kings ix. 17-19, and the variations in viii. 17 seq., ix. 2I, misunderstood from 1Kings ix. 26 seq., x. 22. The concluding chapter on Solomon's reign (1Kings xi.), in which the king does not appear in his most glorious aspect, is passed over in silence, for the same motives as those which dictated the omission of the two chapters at the beginning.
The history of the son is treated after the same plan and by the same means as that of the father, only the subject accommodates itself more readily to the purpose of the change. The old picture is retouched in such wise that all dark and repulsive features are removed, and their place taken by new and brilliant bits of colour not in the style of the original but in the taste of the author's period,—priests and Levites and fire from heaven, and the fulfilment of all righteousness of the law, and much music, and all sorts of harmless legendary anachronisms and exaggerations besides. The material of tradition seems broken up in an extraneous medium, the spirit of post-exilian Judaism.
VI.II.
VI.II.1. After Solomon's death the history of Israel in Chronicles is traced only through Jehovah's kingdom in the hand of the sons of David, and all that relates to the ten tribes is put aside. For according to the notions of the Judaistic period Israel is the congregation of true worship, and this last is connected with the temple at Jerusalem, in which of course the Samaritans have no part. Abijah of Judah makes this point of view clear to Jeroboam I. and his army in a speech delivered from Mount Zemaraim before the battle.
"Think ye to withstand the kingdom of Jehovah in the hand of the sons of David, because ye are a great multitude, and with you are the golden calves which Jeroboam made you for gods ? Have ye not cast out the priests of Jehovah, the sons of Aaron and the Levites, and made for yourselves priests after the manner of the Gentiles? so that whosoever cometh to fill his hands with a young bullock and seven rams, even he may become a priest for the false gods? But as for us, we have not forsaken Jehovah our God, and our priests minister to Jehovah, the sons of Aaron and the Levites in the service; and they burn unto Jehovah every morning and every evening burnt sacrifices and sweet incense; the shewbread also is upon the pure table; for we have maintained the service of Jehovah our God, but ye have forsaken Him. And behold, God Himself is with us at our head, and His priests, and the loud-sounding trumpets to cry an alarm against you. O children of Israel, fight ye not against Jehovah the God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper" (2Chronicles xiii. 8-12; comp. xi. 13-17).
The kingdom which bore the name of Israel was actually in point of fact in the olden time the proper Israel, and Judah was merely a kind of appendage to it. When Amaziah of Judah after the conquest of the Edomites challenged to battle King Jehoash of Samaria, whose territory had at that time suffered to the utmost under the continual wars with the Syrians, the latter bid say to him:
"The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife;—then passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon and trode down the thistle. Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thy heart hath lifted thee up. Enjoy thy glory, but tarry at home."
(2Kings xiv. 9, 10). And as the other would not listen, he punished him as if he had been a naughty boy and then let him go. Religiously the relative importance of the two corresponded pretty nearly to what it was politically and historically. Israel was the cradle of prophecy; Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha exercised their activity there; what contemporary figure from Judah is there to place alongside of these? Assuredly the author of the Book of Kings would not have forgotten them had any such there been, for he is a Judaean with all his heart, yet is compelled purely by the nature of the case to interest himself chiefly about the northern kingdom. And yet again at the very close it was the impending fall of Samaria that called into life a new phase of prophecy; he who inaugurated it, the Judaean Amos of Tekoah, was sent not to Judah but to Israel, the history of which had the first and fullest sympathy of his inmost soul as that of the people of Jehovah. Isaiah was the first who placed Jerusalem in the centre of his field of vision and turned away from Israel; for at the time of his first public appearance war was raging between the sister nations, and when his activity was at its acme all was over with the northern kingdom and all hope had to cling to the remnant,— the fallen tabernacle of David. As regards the cultus, certainly, matters may have been somewhat less satisfactory in Israel than in Judah, at least in the last century before the Assyrian captivity, but at the outset there was no essential difference. On all hands Jehovah was worshipped as the peculiar divinity of the nation at numerous fanes, in the service at the high places there were wanting neither in the one nor in the other sacred trees, posts, and stones, images of silver and gold (Isaiah ii. 8 seq., xvii. 8, xxxi. 22; Micah v. 12). It is a question whether in the time before Hezekiah the cultus of the kingdom at Jerusalem had so much to distinguish it above that at Bethel or at Dan; against Jeroboam's golden calves must be set the brazen serpent of Moses, and the ark of Jehovah itself—which in ancient times was an idol (1Samuel iv.-vi.) and did not become idealised into an ark of the covenant, ie., of the law, until probably it had actually disappeared. As for the prophetic reaction against the popular cultus, the instance of Hosea shows that it came into activity as early and as powerfully in Israel as in Judah. Even after Josiah's reformation Jeremiah complains that the sister who hitherto had been spared is in no respect better than the other who a hundred years before had fallen a victim to the Assyrians (iii. 6-1O); and though in principle the author of the Book of Kings, taking his stand upon Deuteronomy, prefers Judah and Jerusalem, yet he does not out of deference to this judgment alter the facts which show that old Israel was not further than old Judah from compliance with the Deuteronomic precepts. Chronicles, on the other hand, not only takes the Law—the Penta<teu>chal Law as a whole, but more particularly the Priestly Code therein preponderating—as its rule of judgment on the past; but also idealises the facts in accordance with that norm, and figures to itself the old Hebrew people as in exact conformity with the pattern of the later Jewish community,—as a monarchically graded hierocracy with a strictly centralised cultus of rigidly prescribed form at the holy place of Jerusalem. When, accordingly, the ten tribes fail to exhibit all the marks of the kingdom of God, this is taken to mean their falling away from the true Israel; they have made goats and calves their gods, driven away the priests and Levites, and in a word broken quite away from the institutions which shaped themselves in Judah during the period subsequent to Josiah and received their finishing-touches from Ezra. /1/
— Footnote 1. The Chronicler indeed is unable, even in the case of these schismatics, to divest himself of his legal notions, as appears almost comically in the circumstance that the priests of Jeroboam set about their heretical practices quite in accordance with the prescriptions of the Priestly Code, and procure their consecration by means of a great sacrifice (2 Chron xiii. 9). — Footnote