¹⁹Now set your heart and your soul to seek after the Lord your God; arise therefore, and build ye the sanctuary of the Lord God, to bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and the holy vessels of God, into the house that is to be built to the name of the Lord.
19. and the holy vessels of God] Compare 1 Kings viii. 4.
Chapters XXIII.–XXIX.
The Conclusion of David’s Reign.
Chapter XXIII.
1.
Solomon made King.
¹Now David was old and full of days; and he made Solomon his son king over Israel.
The Chronicler unhistorically ignores the struggle between the parties of Solomon and of Adonijah for the throne (compare xxix. 22 f.; 1 Kings i. 5 ff.), and makes the reign of David culminate in the appointment of Solomon as David’s successor and in a grand organisation of the ecclesiastical and other authorities of the realm. chapter xxiii. 1 intimates the appointment of Solomon and the assembling by royal command of the princes, priests, and Levites of Israel. The topics thus suggested are then, after the prevailing fashion of Chronicles, treated in the reverse order; first the Levites, chapter xxiii.; then the priests, xxiv. (followed by the singers, xxv.; and the doorkeepers, xxvi.); then the civil and military orders. chapters xxviii., xxix. are occupied with the concluding exhortations of King David. Compare xxix. 22–24; 1 Kings i. 5–53.
2–23.
Organisation of the Levites (first account).
²And he gathered together all the princes of Israel, with the priests and the Levites. ³And the Levites were numbered from thirty years old and upward: and their number by their polls, man by man, was thirty and eight thousand.