Part 4 (1/2)
It is impossible here to pursue the a.n.a.lysis of the sources further.
It must suffice to say that the further on we go, the more the older and better of the histories predominates. In 2 Samuel almost the whole is from this source (c. 7 is a notable exception, in the spirit and manner of the seventh century). Abridgment and transposition have brought matters into disorder at some points; but 2 Sam. 9-20 is a well-preserved piece of continuous narrative, of which 1 Kings 1-2 is the sequel. 2 Sam. xxi. 1-14 and c. 24 are from the same source, but must originally have stood at an earlier point in the history; their present position is best explained by supposing that they were once omitted--which their contents make very natural--and subsequently restored from a completer copy, not in their proper connection but in an appendix. Chapter xxiii. 8-39 is a very ancient roster of David's ”valiant men,” the companions of his days as an outlawed freebooter on the Philistine border; xxi. 15-22 is of the same character. Two poems attributed to David are also included in this appendix, c. 22, which, with many variants, is found also in the Psalter (Ps. 18), and xxiii.
1-7.
The history of Saul and David gave little invitation to a moralizing improvement such as we have found in Judges and shall find again in Kings. Whatever faults those heroes had, a propensity to the wors.h.i.+p of heathen G.o.ds could not be laid to them. The national uprising against the Philistines was, in fact, a revival of religion. If in times of peace men sought the blessing of the G.o.ds of the soil (the Baals) upon their tillage, in war their only reliance was on Jehovah, the G.o.d of Israel. Nor was the wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah at the village sanctuaries (high places) or upon altars erected for the nonce, illegitimate, even in deuteronomic theory, till G.o.d had taken up his sole abode in Solomon's temple. Accordingly there is, after 1 Sam. 12, once the close of a history of the judges, small trace of the motives or phrases of the seventh-century school of historians; and only in a few pa.s.sages can the hand of post-exilic editors be suspected. For the rest we have in our hands a product of the oldest Hebrew historiography.
From a literary point of view the older source in the history of David is unsurpa.s.sed. It has in perfection all the qualities that distinguish the best Hebrew prose such as are conspicuous in the Judaean author of the patriarchal stories in Genesis. In the art of narrative Herodotus himself could do no better.
Its historical value is also very high. The account of David's later years in 2 Sam. 9-20; 2 Kings 1-2 bears all the marks of contemporary origin. It comes from one who not only knew the large political events of the reign, but was intimately informed about the life of the court, and the scandals, crimes, and intrigues in the king's household which clouded the end of his glorious career. These things are narrated with an objectivity and impartiality which cannot fail to impress the reader. The author has a high admiration for David, but this does not lead him to gloze over his faults or even his grave sins, nor to disguise the weakness of his rule in his own house which was the cause of so much unhappiness. His development of this domestic tragedy is, indeed, truly dramatic, and the discrimination of the characters--say of Absalom and Adonijah--shows fine insight. He tells without comment how only the distrust of some of the Philistine chiefs kept David, as a va.s.sal of Achish of Gath, from fighting upon the Philistine side against Saul in the fatal battle of Mt. Gilboa. So, too, he is loyally minded to Solomon, but he does not conceal the strings of the harem-intrigue by which the doting old King David was brought to declare for his succession, or to pa.s.s over the ominous beginning of Solomon's ”new course,” with the execution of Adonijah, the deposition of the priest Abiathar, and the murder, at altar where he had sought asylum, of Joab, to whom more than any other the house of Jesse owed the throne. The official pretexts are duly recorded, but the facts speak for themselves. In 1 Kings ii. 5 f. the death of Joab is enjoined in David's testament; opinions differ whether these verses are from the same source with ii. 12 ff., or are by the late seventh-century writer to whom vs. 1-4 are ascribed by all. Without idealizing David, we may at least allow ourselves the conjecture that, if his last words decided the death of his old companion in arms and most loyal servant, Nathan or Bathsheba was at his dying ear.
The crisis in the history of the Israelite tribes which the Philistine invasion created; the long struggle with these foes, very different from their conflicts with their petty neighbours; the emergence in this struggle of a national consciousness at once political and religious; the union of the tribes in a national kingdom; the conquest of independence; the following wars of expansion and the foundation of a short-lived Israelite empire--these were achievements to stir the soul of a people and be celebrated in song and story. The leaders too, in these memorable doings were such heroes as ancient history loves to have in the middle of its stage--Saul with his chivalric son Jonathan; David with Joab, Abner, and the rest of his gallant band.
The making of great history has often given a first impulse to the writing of history, and we may well believe that it was so in Israel, and that the beginning of Hebrew historical literature, in the proper sense of the word, was made with Saul and David. Around such figures the popular imagination always weaves a more or less translucent tissue of legend, and particularly about their youth before they come out on the stage of history, or the manner of their first appearance.
The historians gathered up tribal tales such as the exploits of the judges (that is, in the original sense, deliverers, or defenders), the sacred legends of holy places, the traditions of a wonderful escape from the Egyptians, a visit to the Mount of G.o.d and an agreement to wors.h.i.+p the G.o.d of the place as their G.o.d, of another sanctuary in the desert at Kadesh, conflicts with the Bedouins, and attempts to force an entry into Canaan--in short, all the diverse material which is preserved in the older narratives in Exodus and Numbers--and combined them as best they could into a continuous history of the people of Israel.
The continuity is, however, only a narrative continuity; historically there are great gaps in it, or, more exactly, the traditions cl.u.s.ter about only a few points, such as the exodus and the invasion of Palestine, and these are embellished with a wealth of legendary and mythical circ.u.mstance beneath which the facts are effectually hidden.
The nature of this material may be judged from the fact that between Joshua and Eli there are only the episodes of the judges, strung on a chronological string, generalized as experiences of all Israel, and put under a theological judgment--invaluable as pictures of civilization, but as a history of a couple of centuries (the chronology says four) evidently insufficient. On the other side of the exodus are, according to the genealogies, three or four generations (the chronology again makes it four hundred years) of total ignorance; beyond that lies the patriarchal story, the realm of pure legend.
Out of such materials Judaean authors in the tenth and following centuries constructed the history of their people from the remotest antiquity, and, as commonly happens with the first precipitation of national traditions, preformed all subsequent representations.
This earliest book of history is commonly designated in the Pentateuch and Joshua by the symbol J. It is disputed whether the oldest history of the founding of the kingdom in Samuel should be regarded as a continuation of J. If it were meant thereby to affirm unity of authors.h.i.+p of this strand from Genesis to Samuel, that would be saying much more than the facts warrant; but there is through the whole so noteworthy a congruity of conception and sameness of excellence in style that it is not inappropriate to use for it the one symbol J in the sense of the oldest Judaean history.
CHAPTER XI
KINGS
David took Jerusalem, which till then had been a Jebusite stronghold, and made it the capital of his kingdom; but he reigned, after as before, in patriarchal fas.h.i.+on, making, so far as appears, few changes in the old inst.i.tutions. Solomon reorganized the monarchy after the common pattern of Oriental despotisms, dividing the country into provinces for purposes of taxation, without regard to the autonomy of the tribes and their liberties. He built a great palace in the citadel, and, within the same enclosure, a temple, which, as the royal sanctuary, was also in a sense national. Like other Eastern rulers, he caused his doings to be recorded in the annals of the kingdom, and doubtless the priests of the temple kept their own chronicles. From this time, therefore, sources of a new kind make their appearance in the history, contemporary records drawn from the royal and priestly annals. The extracts from these sources in the Book of Kings, like those of the a.s.syrian kings, or the Phoenician annals of which fragments (through Menander) are preserved by Josephus, were brief and bald records of doings or happenings, not biographical or historical narratives. But brief and bald as they were they furnished a groundwork of fact; and, since they set down at the accession of each king the length of his predecessor's reign, they gave also the data for a continuous chronology.
It is not to be supposed that the historical literature whose brilliant beginnings we have seen ceased in the first century of the kingdom or that the writers occupied themselves solely with the remoter past. The memorable deeds of great men will not have gone uncelebrated. The narrative, however, which is the chief source for the times of Saul and David, breaks off abruptly in 1 Kings 2. The Books of Kings are of a wholly different fabric. For one thing, while the two Books of Samuel cover little more than the span of one long lifetime, Kings, in about the same s.p.a.ce, comprises the history of close on to four centuries. But there is a still greater difference, as we shall see, in the way in which history is treated.
The grand divisions of the Books of Kings are these: 1 Kings ii.
12-xi. 43 is occupied with the reign of Solomon; the division of the kingdom after his death is narrated in xii. 1-24; the parallel history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the fall of Samaria in 721 B.C. runs to 2 Kings xviii. 12; the history of Judah from that date to its own fall in 586 fills the rest of the book.
The age of the book is easily determined: it tells of the two sieges of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (597 and 586 B.C.); the destruction of the temple and palace and the razing of the city walls, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Gedaliah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had made governor over the devastated land; and the flight of the Jews from the king's vengeance to Egypt. The last event mentioned is the liberation of King Jehoiachin by Evil-Merodach (Amil-Marduk) in 561 B.C. It is of course possible that this detached notice (2 Kings xxv. 27-30) was added by a later hand; but there is no reason to include the story of Gedaliah in this suspicion. The book in its present form cannot, therefore, be earlier than, say, about 580 B.C. In some places in the body of the book, also, the fall of Judah is spoken of as an accomplished fact, e.g. 2 Kings xvii. 19 f. (in conflict with vss. 18 and 21 ff.). Such pa.s.sages are, however, not very numerous, and they commonly sit loose in their context, like the verses just cited, as if they were thrust into the narrative by an editor. The bulk of the work, on the contrary, seems to suppose the existence of the kingdom. It is, therefore, the general opinion that the book was written before the fall of Jerusalem, and that a continuator added the account of the catastrophe and the events immediately subsequent to it.
The older Kings, from beginning to end, is dominated by the conception and permeated by the phraseology of Deuteronomy and of the prophet Jeremiah, and must therefore be placed between 621 B.C. (the date of the introduction of the deuteronomic law) and the beginning of the last act of the history, that is to say, probably shortly before the year 600 B.C.
It is not enough to say that Kings was written under the influence of Deuteronomy; it was written, we might rather say, as a commentary on the deuteronomic doctrine that falling away from the national religion is punished by national disaster. In this point of view it resembles Judges; but while in Judges it is the lapse into Canaanite heathenism, the wors.h.i.+p of the Baals and Astartes, which draws upon Israel invasion and subjugation, in Kings not only foreign religions but the wors.h.i.+p at the high places, that is, the wors.h.i.+p of Jehovah at his oldest and holiest sanctuaries, provokes the wrath of G.o.d; for since the dedication of Solomon's temple Jehovah had made it his exclusive abode and all other places of wors.h.i.+p were illegitimate. We have seen that down to Josiah's reform this wors.h.i.+p prevailed unchallenged in both kingdoms. In the author's view, generation after generation, under bad kings and good, had thus sinned against the organic law of religion, and all judgments had failed to work amendment. In Israel idolatry made the case worse; the ”golden calves,” that is, the small images of Jehovah in the form of a bull, which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel and Dan, were wors.h.i.+pped under all his successors. These sins had in the end brought ruin on Israel, and they were bringing it on Judah. Mana.s.seh had done even worse than Jeroboam; strange G.o.ds from near and far were installed in the temple itself, and under its walls men sacrificed their children to ”the King” (Moloch). Josiah's reforms had no lasting results; the reaction under his successors restored the high places, and heathen cults flourished again. The doom was imminent; would Judah learn the lesson of history before it was too late? Some one has said that history is philosophy teaching by example; for the author of Kings history was prophecy teaching by example.
It was the lesson of the history that the author was after, and this ruling motive determined his selection of material as well as the treatment of it. It explains why he hardly tells anything about some of the greatest kings and the most glorious periods of the history, which did not afford ill.u.s.trations of his thesis, while he dwells on things of much less historical importance.
The characteristic interests of the author and his highly characteristic style sharply distinguish his own writing from the sources which he incorporates. These sources, as will be supposed, were of different kinds and of various worth; they were naturally not the same in all parts of the long period he covers, and he has not always dealt with them in the same way. Part of his material comes, directly or indirectly, from the annals of the kings, to which the reader is regularly referred for further information (see e.g., 1 Kings xiv. 19, 29), or from temple records; part of it from more properly literary sources. Sometimes it has all the marks of trustworthy tradition originating close to the event; again, it is embroidered with legendary traits; a smaller part is edifying fiction.
In some cases, as in the stories of Elijah and Elisha, a special source is recognizable, but in the main the attempt to trace the literary channels through which the matter reached the author is fruitless.
In the history of Solomon's reign the central place is taken by a description of the palace and temple he erected (1 Kings 6-7), for which c. 5 is a preparation, and c. 8, the dedication of the temple, the sequel. The interesting account of the provincial organization and system of taxation in c. 4 is evidently from an authoritative source; the cession of cities in Galilee to Hiram, the list of cities fortified, the (mutilated) account of the revolt of Edom, the rise of the kingdom of Damascus, and the (mutilated) history of the revolt of Jeroboam, the prelude to the separation of Israel and Judah, are also of good authority.
By the side of these are stories celebrating the magnificence and wisdom of Solomon, the beginnings of the exuberant Solomonic legend.
The judgment of Solomon in the case of the two harlots and of the visit of the Queen of Sheba are examples of the popular tale, and relatively old. The dedication of the temple has been much expanded by the author of the Book of Kings; 1 Kings viii. 14-66 are wholly his composition; ix. 1-9 is an appendix to c. 8. In viii. 1-12 an older account of the dedication has been improved by various hands.