The Books of the Kings were originally one book, and ought to have remained one. The manuscript was torn in two by some scribe or copyist long ago, in the middle of the story of the reign of King Ahaziah; the first word of Second Kings goes on without so much as taking breath, from the last word of First Kings. There is no excuse for this bisection of the narrative; it must be due to some accident, or to the arbitrary and unintelligent act of some person who paid no attention to the meaning of the document. As the Books of Samuel carry the history from the birth of Samuel down to the end of David's reign, so the Books of the Kings take up the story in the last days of David and carry it on to the time of the Exile, a period of four hundred and fifty years. The name of the author is concealed from us; there is a tradition, not altogether improbable, that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah. If you will compare the last chapter of Second Kings with the last chapter of Jeremiah, you will discover that they are almost verbally the same. Here, again, if Jeremiah was not the author, either writer may have copied the passage from the other, or both may have taken it from some older book. But this passage gives us a note of time. It tells us that Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon, in the first year of his reign, released the captive king of Judah, Jehoiachin, from his long confinement, and gave him a seat at his own table. The book must have been written, then, after the beginning of the reign of Evil-Merodach; and there is plenty of history to show that his reign began 561 B.C.. And inasmuch as the book gives no hint of the return of the Jews from their captivity, which began in 538 B.C.., we may fairly conclude that the book was written some time between those dates. Let us suppose that Jeremiah wrote it; even he, as prophet of the Lord, certainly used the materials of history which had accumulated in the archives of the two nations.
It is evident that, after the establishment of the kingdom, considerable attention was paid to the preservation of the records of important national events. The kings kept chroniclers who not only preserved and edited old documents, but who wrote the annals of their own times. In I Kings xi. 41, at the conclusion of the narrative of Solomon's reign, we read, "Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?" For his history of Jeroboam the writer refers in the same way to "The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel," and for his history of Rehoboam to "The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah." The same is true of the reigns of other kings. These were not, of course, our Books of Chronicles, for these were not written for two hundred years after the Book of Kings was finished. It is thus evident, as one modern writer has said, "that the author laboriously employed the materials within his reach, very much as a modern historian might do, and further that he was as much puzzled by chronological difficulties as a modern historian frequently is." [Footnote: Horton's Inspiration and the Bible, p. 182.] Prophet or not, he took the materials at his hands, and put them together in this history.
The splendid but corrupt reign of the son of David; the secession of the ten tribes under Jeroboam; the hostile relations of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah for two hundred and fifty years, by which both were weakened, and through unholy alliances corrupted, and the result of which was the final destruction of both, are described in this book in a spirited and evidently veracious manner. The two great prophets, Elijah and Elisha, are grand figures in this narrative; much of the story revolves around them. As witnesses for the righteous Jehovah they stand forth, warning, rebuking, counseling kings and people; the moral leadership by which Israel is chastened and corrected and led in the way of righteousness expresses itself largely through their ministry. The words of Lord Arthur Hervey, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary," none too strongly convey the historian's sense of the value of this part of the Old Testament:--
"Considering the conciseness of the narrative and the simplicity of the style, the amount of the knowledge which these books convey of the characters, conduct, and manners of kings and people during so long a period is truly wonderful. The insight which they give us into the aspect of Judah and Jerusalem, both natural and artificial, with the religious, military, and civil institutions of the people, their arts and manufactures, the state of education and learning among them, their resources, commerce, exploits, alliances, the causes of their decadence, and finally of their ruin, is most clear, interesting, and instructive. In a few brief sentences we acquire more accurate knowledge of the affairs of Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and other neighboring nations than had been preserved to us in all the other remains of antiquity up to the recent discoveries in hieroglyphical and cuneiform monuments." [Footnote: Vol. iii. p. 1561, American Edition.]
The substantial historical veracity of these books has been confirmed in many ways by these very monuments to which Lord Hervey refers. And yet this substantial historical accuracy is found, as in other histories of the olden time, in the midst of many minor errors and discrepancies. It would seem as if Providence had taken the utmost pains to show us that the essential truth and the moral and religious value of this history could not be identified with any theory of verbal or even plenary inspiration.
Take, for example, some of the chronological items of this record. Mr. Horton's clear statement will bring a few of them before us:--
"The author seems to have been content, in dealing with an Israelite king, to give the date reckoned by the year of the reigning king in Judah just as he found it stated in the Israelite chronicles, and then to do the same in dealing with the dates of the reigning kings of Israel; but he did not consider whether the two chronicles harmonized. We may take some illustrations from the latter part of the work. Hoshea began to reign in Israel (2 Kings xv. 30) in the twentieth year of Jotham the king of Judah. So far writes our author, following the records of the Northern Kingdom. For his next paragraph he turns to his records of the Southern Kingdom, and naively tells us that Jotham never reached a twentieth year, but only reigned sixteen years (xv. 33); but even this is not the end of the difficulty; in chapter xvii. he goes back to the Northern Kingdom and tells us that Hoshea began to reign, not in Jotham's reign at all, but in the reign of Ahaz, Jotham's successor; and if now he had said, 'in the fourth year of Ahaz,' we might see our way through the perplexity, for the fourth year of Ahaz would, at any rate, be twenty years from the beginning of Jotham's reign, though Jotham himself had died after reigning sixteen years; but he says, not in the fourth, but 'in the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah.' We may give it up, and exclaim with the Speaker's commentator, 'The chronological confusion of the history, as it stands, is striking,' and then perhaps we may exclaim at the Speaker's commentator, that he and the like of him have given us so little account of these unmistakable phenomena, and the cause of them, in the history.
"One other illustration may suffice. King Ahaz, according to one authority, lived twenty years and then came to the throne and reigned for sixteen years. (2 Kings xvi. 2.) At his death, therefore, Ahaz was thirty-six years of age. In that year he was succeeded by his son Hezekiah, who was twenty-five years of age. This would mean that King Ahaz was married at the age of ten, which, making all allowance for the earlier puberty of Eastern boys, does not seem probable; and the explanation is much more likely to be found in the chronological inaccuracies of our author, to which, if we have been observantly reading his book through, we shall by this time have become quite accustomed." [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, pp. 189-191.]
Observe that we are not going to any hostile or foreign sources for these evidences of inaccuracy; we are simply letting the book tell its own story. Such phenomena as these appear throughout this history. They lie upon the very face of the narrative. Probably few of the readers of these pages have noted them. For myself, I must confess that I read the Bible through, from cover to cover, several times before I was thirty years old, but I had never observed these inaccuracies. The commentators, for the most part,--the orthodox commentators,--carefully keep these facts out of sight. Sometimes they attempt, indeed, to explain or reconcile them, but such explanations generally increase the incredibility of the narrative. The latest verdict of ultra-conservatism is that these dates and chronological notes are interpolated by some later hand; but this, too, is quite out of the question. The only true account of the matter is, that the author took these records from the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah and the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, and pieced them together without noticing or caring whether they agreed. His mind was not fixed upon scientific accuracy of dates. He was thinking only of the great ethical and spiritual problems working themselves out in this history,--of the question whether or not these kings "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord," and of the effects of their right doing and their evil doing upon the lives of the people. What difference, indeed, does it make to you and me whether Jotham reigned sixteen years or twenty years? It seems to me that these inaccuracies are suffered to lie upon the face of the narrative that our thoughts may be turned away from these details of the record to the great principles of morality and religion whose development it reveals to us.
These errors which appear upon the surface are obvious enough to any careful reader. But other facts, most important and suggestive, are brought to light when we compare these narratives of Samuel and Kings as we find them in the Hebrew text with the same narrative in the Greek text, the Septuagint. The Old Testament, as we have seen, was translated into the Greek language, for the benefit of those Jews who spoke only Greek, early in the third century before Christ. Undoubtedly it was a pretty faithful translation at the time when it was made. But a careful comparison of the two texts as they exist at the present time shows that considerable additions have been made to both of them; and that some changes and misplacements have occurred in both of them. Sometimes it is evident that the Hebrew is the more correct, because the story is more orderly and consistent; and sometimes it is equally evident that the Greek version, which, as you remember, was commonly used by our Lord and his apostles, is the better. This comparison gives us a vivid and convincing illustration of the freedom with which the text was handled by scribes and copyists; how bits of narrative--most commonly legends and popular tales concerning the heroes of the nation--were thrust into the text, sometimes quite breaking its continuity; they make it plain that that preternatural supervision of it, for the prevention of error, which we have frequently heard about, is itself a myth. It is in these books of Samuel and the Kings that these variations of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text are most frequent and most instructive.