The Judgments of the Israelite and Judahite Kings in Diachronic and Historical Perspective

What is it about?

The biblical books of 1–2 Kings are structured through short biographies of each king of Israel and Judah. As part of these biographies, the book presents a judgment on the king and his reign, as to whether he "did good" or "evil in the eyes of the Lord." For the kings of Judah, these judgments are related to the establishment and maintenance of illicit sanctuaries called "high places" first established by the son of Solomon. For the kings of Judah, the judgments invoke the "Sin of Jeroboam"—the construction of golden calves at the Israelite cities of Bethel and Dan. Following well-established theories on the formation of the books of Kings, this article argues that much of the narrative foundations for these cultic sins in 1 Kgs 11–14; 2 Kgs 17, 23 are the result of later editing of the book and were not present in the earliest edition. It concludes that the earliest book of Kings, written during the time of King Josiah of Judah (late 7th cent. BCE), initially judged the kings of Israel and Judah based on two criteria: For Israel, the kingdom had already been destroyed, and so this circumstance was "retrojected" upon its kings, so that the fall of the kingdom must have meant that all Israelite kings "did evil." For Judah, the judgments seem to be based on whether or not the king, bound to support only the temple to the Lord in Jerusalem, allowed foreign powers to influence cultic matters in Jerusalem, as occurred with the Israelite House of Ahab and the Neo-Assyrian empire.

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