THE FIRST AND SECOND BOOKS OF KINGS which form the last part of the series of Old Testament histories known as the Earlier Prophets, were originally reckoned as a single book (Josephus ; Orig. ap. Eus., II. E., vi. 25 ; Peshito; Talmud), though modern Hebrew Bibles follow the biparti-tion which we have derived from the Septuagint. In that version they are called the third and fourth books of king-doms (Bao-i\eiS>v), the first and second being our books of Samuel. The division into two books is not felicitous, and even the old Hebrew separation between Kings and Samuel must not be taken to mean that the history from the birth of Samuel to the exile was treated by two distinct authors in independent volumes. We cannot speak of the author of Kings or Samuel, but only of an editor or successive editors whose main work was to arrange in a continuous form extracts or abstracts from earlier books. The intro-duction of a chronological scheme and of a series of editorial comments and additions, chiefly designed to enforce the religious meaning of the history, gives a kind of unity to the book of Kings as we now read it; but beneath this we can still distinguish a variety of documents, which, though sometimes mutilated in the process of piecing them together, retain sufficient individuality of style and colour to prove their original independence. Of these documents one of the best defined is the vivid and exact picture of David's court at Jerusalem (2 Sam. ix.-xx.), of which the first two chapters of 1 Kings are manifestly an integral part. As it would be unreasonable to suppose that the editor of the history of David closed his work abruptly before the death of the king, breaking off in the middle of a valuable memoir which lay before him, this observation leads us to conclude that the books of Samuel and Kings are not independent histories. They have at least one source in common, and a single editorial hand was at work on both. But the division which makes the commence-ment of Solomon's reign the beginning of a new book is certainly ancient; it must be older than the insertion of the appendix 2 Sam. xxi.-xxiv., which now breaks the continuity of the original history of David's court. From an historical point of view the division is very convenient. The subject of the book of Samuel is the creation of a united Israel by Samuel, Saul, and David. Under Solomon the creative impulse has already died away ; the kingship is divorced from the sympathies of the nation; and the way is prepared for the formation of the two kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah, the fortunes of which up to their extinction by the great empires of the East form the main subject of the book of Kings. It is probable, however, that the editor who made the division had another reason for disconnecting Solomon from David and treating his reign as a new departure. The most notable feature in the extant redaction of the book is the strong interest shown in the Deuteronomic " Law of Moses," and especially in the centralization of worship in the temple on Zion as prescribed in Deuteronomy and enforced by Josiah. This interest did not exist in ancient Israel, and is quite foreign to the older memoirs incorporated in the book ; amidst the great variety in style and manner which marks the several parts of the history it is always expressed in the same stereotyped phrases and unvarying style; in brief, it belongs to the editorial comments, not to the original sources of the history. To the Deuteronomistic editor, then, the foundation of the temple, which is treated as the central event of Solomon's reign, is a religious epoch of prime importance (see especially his remarks in 1 Kings iii. 2 sq.), and on this ground alone he would naturally make Solomon's reign commence a new book—the history of Israel under the one true sanctuary.
When we say in general that the book of Kings was thrown into its present form by a Deuteronomistic redactor we do not affirm that he was the first who digested the sources of the history into a continuous work. Indeed the selection of materials, especially in the earlier parts of the narrative, has been thought to point to an opposite conclu^ sion. Nor, on the other hand, must we ascribe absolute finality to his work. He gave the book a definite shape and character, but the recognized methods of Hebrew-literature left it open to additions and modifications by later hands. Even the redaction in the spirit of Deutero-nomy seems itself to have had more than one stage, as Ewald and other critics recognize. The book was not closed till far on in the exile, after the death of Nebuchad-nezzar and Jehoiachin (2 Kings xxv. 27 seq.); and the fall of the kingdom of Judah is presupposed in such passages as 2 Kings xvii. 19, 20, xxiii. 26, 27. But these passages are mere interjected remarks, which seem to be added to adapt the context to the situation of the Jews in captivity. The main redaction, though subsequent to the reformation of Josiah, which forms the standard with which all previous kings are compared (" the high places were not removed "), does not point to the time of the captivity. Thus, for example, the words " unto this day," 2 Kings viii. 22, xiv. 7, xvi. 6, are part of the " epitome " composed by the main redactor (see below), and imply that he wrote before the destruction of the Judaean state.
Even the second redaction did not absolutely fix a single authoritative recension of the book, as appears in detail by comparison of the LXX. version with the Hebrew text.
The LXX. of Kings is not a corrupt reproduction of the Hebrew receptus, but represents another recension of the text. Neither re-cension can claim absolute superiority. The defects of the LXX. lie on the surface, and are greatly aggravated by the condition of the Greek text, which has suffered much in transmission, and particu-larly has in many places been corrected after the later Greek ver-sions that express the Hebrew receptus of the 2d century of our era. Yet the LXX. not only preserves many good readings in detail, but throws much light on the long-continued process of redaction at the hand of successive editors or copyists of which the extant Hebrew of Kings is the outcome. Even the false readings of the Greek are instructive, for both recensions were exposed to corrupting influences of precisely the same kind. The following examples will serve to illustrate the treatment through which the book has passed.
1. Minor detached notices such as we should put in footnotes or appendices are inserted so as to disturb the natural context. Thus 1 Kings iv. 27 (Heb., v. 7) must be taken continuously with iv. 19, and so the LXX. actually reads. In like manner the LXX. omits 1 Kings vi. 11-14, which breaks the context of the description of the temple. Again, in the LXX., 1 Kings ix. 26 follows on ver. 14, so that Solomon's dealings with Hiram are continuously recorded. The notices intervening in vers. 15-25 (in a very unnatural order) •belong to a class of floating notes about Solomon and his kingdom which seem to have got stranded almost by chance at different points in the two recensions.
2. There are direct or indirect indications of transpositions and insertions on a largei scale. Thus in the LXX. the history of Naboth (1 Kings xxi.) precedes chap. xx. And in fact chaps, xx. and xxii. are parts of one narrative, obviously quite distinct from the history of Elijah. Again the story of Abijah's sickness and Ahijah's prophecy (1 Kings xiv.) is not found in the LXX., but another ver-sion of the same narrative appears at xii. 24, in which there is no reference to a previous promise to Jeroboam through Ahijah, but the prophet is introduced as a new character. This version, which places the prophecy of the destruction of Jeroboam's house between his return from Egypt and his elevation to the throne, is no doubt a mere legend, but it goes to prove that there was once a version of the history of Jeroboam in which chap. xi. 29-39 had no place. In truth, after xi. 26-28 there must once have stood sonm account of a rebellion in which Jeroboam " lifted up his hand " against King Solomon. To such an account, not to the incident of Ahijah _and the cloak related in vers. 29-39, ver. 40 is the natural sequel. Thus all that is related of Ahijah falls under suspicion of being foreign to the original history, and it is noteworthy that in a passage peculiar to the LXX. the incident of the tearing of the cloak is related of Shemaiah and placed at the convention at Shechcm, showing how much fluctuation there was in the tradition.
These instances show that there was a certain want of definiteness about the redaction. The mass of disjointed materials, not always free from inconsistencies, which lay before the editor in separate documents or in excerpts already partially arranged by an _earlier hand, could not have been reduced to real unity without criti-cal sifting, and an entire recasting of the narrative in a way foreign to the ideas and literary habits of the Hebrews. The unity which the editor aimed at was limited to chronological continuity in the events recorded and a certain uniformity in the treatment of the religious meaning of the narrative. Even this could not be per-fectly attained under the circumstances, and the links of the history were not firmly enough rivetted to prevent disarrangement or re-arrangement of details by later scribes.
3. The continued efforts of successive redactors can he traced in the chronology of the book. The chronological method of the narrative appears most clearly in the history after Solomon, where the events of each king's reign are thrown into a kind of stereotyped framework on this type:—"In the twentieth year of Jeroboam, king of Israel, Asa began to reign over Judah, and reigned in Jerusalem forty-one years." . . . "In the third year of Asa, king of Judah, Baasha began to reign over Israel in Tirzah twenty-four years." The history moves between Judah and Israel according to the date of each accession; as soon as a new king has been introduced everything that happened in his reign is discussed, and wound up by another stereotyped formula as to the death and burial of the sovereign ; and to this mechanical arrangement the natural connexion of events is often sacrificed. In this scheme the elaborate synchronisms between contemporary monarchs of the north and south give an aspect of great precision to the chronology. But in reality the data for Judah and Israel do not agree, and Wellhausen, following Ewald, has shown that the synchronisms were not in the sources, but were calculated from the list of the years of each king (Jahrb.f. D. Theol, 1875).
It appears further that these latter data are not all derived from historical tradition, but are in part due to conjectural subdivision of the cycle 480 (twelve generations of forty years) which appears in 1 Kings vi. 1 as the period from the Exodus to the foundation of the temple, and according to the Judsan list of kings as the period from the foundation of the temple to the end of the captivity (536 B.C.). In the early part of the Judajan history the first dates not accessions are connected with the temple, and apparently derived from temple records. Of these the most important is the twenty-third year of Joash, which the chronological scheme makes the one hundred and sixty-first year of the temple, trisecting the four hundred and eighty years cycle. Other one hundred and sixty years bring us to the death of Hezekiah, and the last third of the cycle begins with the accession of Manasseh, whose sins are treated as the decisive cause of the exile. Within these limits a few dates were given by the sources ; the rest, as can easily be shown, were filled in with reference to a unit of forty years. Again the duration of the kingdom of Israel, according to the northern lists, was two hundred and forty completed years, viz., eighty years before the first expedition of Benhadad, eighty years of Syrian wars, forty of prosperity under the victorious Jeroboam II., whose first year belongs to the period of war, and forty years of decline. The trisections in each case and the round numbers of 480 and 240 point strongly to a systematization of the chronology on the basis of a small number of given dates, and the proof that it is so is completed when we learn from the exactly kept lists of Assyrian chronology that the siege of Samaria fell in 722, whereas the system dates the captivity from 737 (535 + 480-37-241).
The key to the chronology is 1 Kings vi. 1, which, as Wellhausen has shown, was not found in the original LXX., and contains inter-nal evidence of post-Babylonian date. In fact the system as a wdiole is necessarily later than 535 B.C., the fixed point from which it counts back.
4. Another aspect in the redaction may be called theological. Its characteristic is the application to the old history of a standard belonging to later developments of the Old Testament religion. Thus, as we have already seen, the redactor in 1 Kings iii. regards worship in high places as sinful after the building of the temple, though he knows that the best kings before Hezekiah made no attempt to suppress these shrines. So too his unfavourable judg-ment on the whole religion of the northern kingdom was manifestly not shared by Elijah and Elisha, nor by the original narrator of the history of these prophets. This feature in the redaction displays itself, not only in occasional comments or homiletical excursuses, but in that part of the narrative in which all ancient historians allowed themselves free scope for the development of their reflexions—the speeches placed in the mouths of actors in the history. Here also there is textual evidence that the theological element is somewhat loosely attached to the earlier narrative, and underwent successive additions. We have seen that the LXX. omits 1 Kings vi. 11-14, and that both prophecies of Ahijah belong to the least certain part of the textual tradition. So too an indication that the long prayer of Solomon, 1 Kings viii. 14-53, the Deuteronomic colour of wdrich is recognized by all critics, did not stand in the oldest account of the dedication of the temple is preserved in the fact that the ancient frag-ment, vers. 12, 13, which in the Hebrew text is imperfect, appears in the LXX. after ver. 53 in completer form and with a reference to the book of Jashar as source (0i[SAiov TTJS <pt>y5 = yg>r\ "1ED=1SD "IE"!"!). The redactional insertion displaced it in one recension and led to its mutilation in the other. The older parts of this chapter have also been retouched in conformity with later (even post-exile) ritual and law. The Levites who appear at ver. 4 in contrast to the priests, in a way unknown to the pre-exile history, are not named in the LXX., and the post-exile " congregation " ('edah) at ver. 5 is also wanting. The processes illustrated by these examples were doubtless at work in many places where external evidence fails us, and may often be detected by a careful use of internal evidence alone. See especially Wellhausen's detailed analysis in the last edition of Bleek's Einleitung.
To gain an exacter idea of the main redaction of Kings and of the nature of the original sources, we may divide the history into three sections :—(1) the conclusion of the " court history," 1 Kings i. ii., the further consideration of which belongs tc the criticism of SAMUEL (q.v.); (2) Solomon, 1 Kings iii. —xi.; (3) the kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah. For (2) the main source, as we learn from 1 Kings xi. 41, was a book called Acts of Solomon. This work can hardly have been a regular chronicle, for the history founded on it contains no continuous narrative. All that is related of Solomon's reign is grouped round the description of the royal buildings, particularly of the temple, and the account of the dedication of the house (chaps, vi. -ix. 9); and the greater part of the latter account is either due to the redactor or largely rewritten. The whole section is descrip-tive rather than narrative, and the accurate details might have been got by actual observation of the temple at a date long subsequent to Solomon. In fact, they are not all due to a single hand. Thus we can still reconstruct a shorter text of vi. 17-21, which says only that " the house before the oracle was forty cubits long, and the oracle in the midst of the house within where the ark of Jehovah's covenant was to be placed was twenty cubits in length, breadth, and height; and he overlaid it with gold and made an altar of cedar [the table of shewbread] before the oracle and overlaid it with gold." The original author used the book of Jashar for the account of the dedication, and had access to some exact particulars as to dates, the artist Hiram, &c, which may have been contained in the temple re-cords. The immediate environment of this section, if we set aside the floating elements in chap. ix. already referred to, is occupied with Solomon's dealings with King Hiram, who aided him in his architectural schemes and in the com-mercial enterprises which procured the funds for such costly works (chap. v. [Heb., v. 15-32] and ch. ix. 10 sq.). On each side of this context lies a complex of various narra-tives and notices illustrating Solomon's wisdom and great-ness, but also, in chap, xi., his weakness and the incipient decay of his kingdom. It is evident that the rise of the adversaries who, according to xi. 25, troubled Solomon through all his reign cannot originally have been related as the punishment of the sins of his old age. The pragmatism as usual belongs to the redactor (xi. 4). We have seen that there was once another version of the history of Jeroboam.
In the history of the divided kingdom the redactor, as we have seen, follows a fixed scheme determined by the order of accessions, and gives a short epitome of the chief facts about each king, with an estimate of his religious character, which for the schismatic north is always unfavourable. The epitome, as the religious standpoint shows, belongs to the same hand throughout, i.e., to the Deuteronomistic redactor; but so much of it as relates to Judah is plainly based on good written sources, which from the nature of the particulars recorded may be identified with the book of Koyal Chronicles referred to under each reign, which seems to have been a digest of official notices.
A similar chronicle is named for the kings of Israel, but if it actually lay before the editor he at least did not make such excerpts from it as we find in the Judsean history, for the epitome for Ephraim is very bare of concrete details. Besides the epitome, however, and the short excerpts from the Judaean chronicles which go with it, the history includes a variety of longer narratives, which alike in their subject-matter and their treatment are plainly distinct from the somewhat dry bones of the official records. The northern narratives are all distinguished in a greater or less degree by the prominence assigned to prophets. In the southern kingdom we hear less of the prophets, with the great exception of Isaiah; but the temple occupies a very pro-minent place.
The history of the man of God from Judah (1 Kings xiii.) is indubitably of Judsean origin. Its attitude to the altar at Bethel—the golden calf does not appear as the ground of offence—is not only diverse from that of Elijah and Elisha, but even from that of Hosea. The other nar-ratives that deal with the history of Ephraim are all by northern authors (see, for example, 1 Kings xix. 3; 2 Kings ix. 6), and have their centre in the events of the Syrian wars and the persons of Elijah and Elisha. But they are not all of one origin, as appears most clearly by comparing the account of the death of Naboth in the his-tory of Elijah, 1 Kings xxi., and the history of Elisha and Jehu, 2 Kings ix. In the latter narrative Naboth's " field" lies a little way from Jezreel, in the former it is close to Ahab's palace (query, in Samaria 1—see ver. 18 and variants of LXX. in ver. 1), and is described as a vineyard. The " burden " quoted by Jehu is not in the words of 1 Kings xxi., and mentions the additional fact that Naboth's sons were killed. In other words, the history of Jehu pre-supposes events recorded in the extant accounts of Elijah, but not these accounts themselves. And the narrative in 2 Kings seems to be the more accurate; it contains precise details lacking in the other.
Now it is plain that 1 Kings xxi. belongs to the same history of Elijah with chaps, xvii.-xix. The figure of the prophet is displayed in the same weird grandeur, and his words (omitting the addition already noted in verses 20b sq.) have the same original and impressive force. That history, a work of the highest literary art, has come down to us as a fragment. For in 1 Kings xix. 15 Elijah is commanded to take the desert route to Damascus, i.e., the route east of the Jordan. He could not, therefore, reach Abel Meholah in the Jordan valley, near Bethshean, when he "departed thence" (ver. 19), if "thence" means from Horeb. The journey to Damascus, the anointing of Hazael and Jehu, must once have intervened ; but they have been omitted because another account ascribed these acts to Elisha (2 Kings viii. ix.). Now there is no question that we possess an accurate historical account of the anointing of Jehu. Elisha, long in opposition to the reigning dynasty (2 Kings hi.), and always keeping alive the remembrance of the murder of Naboth and his sons (vi. 32), waited his moment to effect a revolution. It is true that the prime impulse in this revolution came from Elijah ; but, when the history in 1 Kings represents Elijah as per-sonally commissioned to inaugurate it by anointing Jehu and Hazael as well as Elisha, we see that the author's design is to gather up the whole contest between Jehovah and Baal in an ideal picture of Elijah and his work. In doing this he also places Ahab in a different light from that in which he appears in the other extant histories. Had we only his account we might suppose that Ahab had altogether rejected Jehovah and aimed at introducing a new national worship. But, in fact, we learn from the other records that, while like Solomon before him he gave countenance to his wife's religion, Ahab still regarded Jehovah as the God of Israel, consulted His prophets, and gave to his sons names expressive of devotion to the old faith. The ideal delineation of Elijah conveys a vivid picture of his imposing personality and permanent influence ; but it records the impression he left behind him rather than the literal details of his life, and is nr> doubt of younger date rhan the more photographic picture of the accession of Jehu, though prior to the rise of the new prophecy under Amos and Hosea.
The episode of Elijah and Ahaziah, 2 Kings i., is certainly by a different hand, as is seen even from the new feature of revelation through an angel; and the ascension of Elijah, 2 Kings ii., is related as the introduction to the prophetic work of Elisha.
The narratives about Elisha are not all by one hand; for example, iv. 1-7 is separated from the immediately subsequent history by a sharply marked grammatical peculiarity (the suffix 13); moreover, the order is not chronological, for vi. 24 cannot be the sequel to vi. 23; and in general those narratives in which the prophet appears as on friendly terms with the king, and possessed of influence at court (e.g., iv. 13, vi. 9, vi. 21 compared with xiii. 14), plainly belong to the time of Jehu's dynasty, though they are related before the fall of the house of Oniri. In this disorder we can distinguish portions of an historical narrative which speaks of Elisha in connexion with events of public interest, without making him the central figure, and a series of anecdotes of properly biographical character. The historical narrative embraced 2 King? iii., vi. 24-vii. 20, ix. 1-x. 28, in fact, the whole account of the reign of Joram and the revolution under Jehu; ani, as 2 Kings iii. has much affinity to the history of Ahab and Jehoshaphat in 1 Kings xxii., we may add the earlier history of the Syrian wars (1 Kings xx., xxii.) to the series. The evidence of style is hardly sufficient to assign all these chapters to a single hand (for example, 331 is a single chariot in the history of Jehu, but in 1 Kings xx. a collective, the single chariot being n33")D); but they are all full of fresh detail and vivid description, and their sympathy with the prophets of the opposition, Micaiah and Elisha, and with the king of Judah, who takes the prophets' part, does not exclude a genuine interest in Ahab and Joram, who are painted in very human colours, and excite our pity and respect. To the historian these chapters are the most valuable part of the northern history; and the most surprising details have received striking verification from modern research. The stone of Mesha supplies details to 2 Kings iii. 5 ; the method of obtaining water suggested by Elisha (iii. 16, 17) is that which still gives its name to W. el-Hasa at the southern end of the Dead Sea (see Wetzstein in Delitzsch, Gen., 4th ed., p. 567); and the sudden retreat of the Syrians in 2 Kings x. is very intelligible when we know that they were already at that time pressed by the Assyrians (see on all these points Wellhausen, op. cit.).
In the more biographical narratives about Elisha we may distinguish one circle connected with Gilgal, Jericho, and the Jordan valley to which Abel-meholah belongs (iv. 1-7?, 38-44; ch. v.?; vi. 1-7). Here Elisha appears as the head of the prophetic guilds, having his fixed residence at Gilgal. Another circle, which presupposes tha accession of the house of Jehu, places him at Dothan or Carmel, and represents him as a personage of almost superhuman dignity. Here there is an obvious parallelism with the history of Elijah, especially with his ascension (compare 2 Kings vi. 17 with ii. 11; xiii. 14 with ii. 12); and it is to this group of narratives that the ascension of Elijah forms die introduction.1
Of the Judsean narratives there is none to rival the past and there was no answer to the prophets of Baal, Elijah inter-vened. Thus we get time for the events which as the text stands could not have all happened the same evening. In 2 Kings iii. 20 for rimon read inert-
1 The Gilgal of Elisha is near the Jordan—comp. vi. 1 with iv. 38, VJE? D,3K'*>—al"l cannot be other than the great sanctuary 2 miles from Jericho, the local holiness of which is still attested in the Onomastica. It is true that in 2 Kings ii. 1 Bethel seems to lie between Gilgal and Jericho ; but ver. 25 shows that Gilgal was not originally represented as Elisha's residence in this narrative, which belongs to the Carmel-Dothan series. Hence Robinson's Gilgal (Jiljilia) seems not to be Biblical.
northern histories in picturesque and popular power. The history of Joash, 2 Kings xi., xii., of Ahaz's innovations, xvi. 10 sq., and of Josiah's reformation, xxii. 3-xxiii. 27, have their common centre in the temple on Zion, and may with great probability be referred to a single source. The details suggest that this source was based on official docu-ments. Besides these we have a full history of Hezekiah and Sennacherib and of Hezekiah's sickness, xviii. 13-xx. 19, repeated in a somewhat varying text in Isa. xxxvi.-xxxix. (compare ISRAEL, vol. xiii. p. 413 sq.). The history of Amaziah and Joash in 2 Kings xiv., with the character-istic parable from vegetable life, may possibly be of northern origin.
When we survey these narratives as a whole we receive an increased impression of the merely mechanical character of the redaction by which they are united. Though editors have added something of their own in almost every chapter, generally from the standpoint of religious pragma-tism, there is not the least attempt to work the materials into a history in our sense of the word ; and in particular the northern and southern histories are practically inde-pendent, being merely pieced together in a sort of mosaic in consonance with the chronological system, which we have seen to be really later than the main redaction. It is very possible that the order of the pieces was considerably readjusted by the author of the chronology ; of this indeed the LXX. still shows traces. But with all its imperfec-tions, as judged from a modern standpoint, the redaction has the great moiit of preserving the older narratives in their original colour, and bringing us much nearer to the actual life of the old kingdom than any history written throughout from the standpoint of the exile could possibly have done.
Literature.—Since 'Ewa.lds History, vols. i. and iii., andKuenen's Onderzoek, the most thorough and original investigation of the struc-ture of the book is that in Wellhausen's edition of Bleek's Einleit-ung (1878), with wdiich the corresponding section of his GeschicMe (1878) should be compared. There are modern commentaries by Thenius (Leipsic, 1849, 2d ed. 1873) and Keil (2d ed. 1876, English translation, 1872); by Bahr in Lange's Bibelwerk (1868, English translation, 1877); by Rawlinson in the S2Jeaker's Commentary; and in Reuss's Bible. The Assyrian material, which is of the highest value, but requires to be still further sifted, is collected in Schrader's Keilinsehriften mid altes Testament (Giessen, 1872), Smith's Assyrian Eponym Canon, and other works. Translations of the chief inscrip-tions are given in Becords oftlie Past, London, v.y. (W. R. S.)
Footnotes
See this proved in detail, Wellhausen-Bleek, EM., §114. The verses 1 Kings ii. 1-12 have no connexion with the rest of the chapter, and are due to a later hand.
With this it agrees that the later appendix 2 Sam. xxi.-xxiv. does not seem to have passed under the hand of the Deuteronomic redaction. See Wellhausen-Bleek, § 134.
In the Alex, and other MSS. it is added from the version of Aquila.
Compare Krey's investigations in .¿7. /. w. Th., 1877, p. 404 sq.
See the details in an article by W. R. Smith. Journal of Philology, vol. x. No. 20.
Kings xiii., is clearly erroneous ; the old prophet did not come from Samaria. Another and later Jewish prophet foretold the fall of the altar of Bethel, viz., Amos of Tekoa.
The standing phrases common to 1 Kings xxi. 20b sq., 2 Kings ix. 7-10a, belong to the redaction, as is plain in the latter case from ix. 3.
Some expressions that point to a later date are certainly added by another hand, e.g., the last part of xviii. 18. In old Israel, up to the time of Hosea, the Baalim (pi.) are the golden calves, which have no place in this context. A late insertion also is the definition of time by the stated oblation in the temple at Jerusalem, xviii. 29, 36. At ver. 36 this is lacking in the LXX. ; at ver. 29 the longer insertion of the LXX. reveals the motive for the interpolation, viz., to assimilate Elijah's sacrifice to the legal service. The true text says that, when noon was