17.  With the division of Solomon’s kingdom under his son Rehoboam into two hostile nations begins the second period of the history.  This division was brought about by God’s appointment as a chastisement for Solomon’s sins, and in it the national power received a blow from which it never recovered.  The religious effect also was unspeakably calamitous so far as the kingdom of the ten tribes was concerned; for Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, established idolatry as a matter of state policy, thus corrupting the religion of his whole kingdom with a view to the establishment of his own power, a sin in which he was followed by every one of his successors.  The sacred historian carries forward the history of these two kingdoms together with wonderful brevity and power.  Sometimes, as in the days of Elijah and Elisha, the history of the ten tribes assumes the greater prominence, because it furnishes the fuller illustrations of God’s presence and power; but as a general fact it is kept in subordination to that of Judah.  It is a sad record of wicked dynasties, each established in blood and ending in blood, until the overthrow of the kingdom by the Assyrians about two hundred and fifty-four years after its establishment.  Meanwhile there was in Judah an alternation of pious with idolatrous kings, and a corresponding struggle between the true religion and the idolatry of the surrounding nations, which the sacred writer also describes briefly but vividly.

18.  It was during the reign of the good king Hezekiah that the extinction of the kingdom of Israel took place, and the third period of the history began.  Hezekiah’s efforts for the restoration of the true religion were vigorous and for the time successful.  But after his death the nation relapsed again into idolatry and wickedness.  The efforts of Josiah, the only pious monarch that occupied the throne after Hezekiah, could not avail to stay the progress of national degeneracy, and the kingdom of Judah was, in its turn, overthrown by the Chaldeans, and the people carried captive to Babylon.

19.  The chronology of certain parts of the history embraced in the books of Kings is perplexed and uncertain.  But the beginning of the Babylonish captivity is generally placed B.C. 588, three hundred and eighty-seven years after the beginning of Rehoboam’s reign, and one hundred and thirty-three years after the extinction of the kingdom of Israel.  Reckoning in the forty years of Solomon’s reign, we have for the period included in the books of Kings to the beginning of the captivity four hundred and twenty-seven years.  To this must be added twenty-six more years for the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin’s captivity (2 Kings 25:27), the last date given by the sacred historian.  The author of the books of Kings is unknown.  Jewish tradition ascribes them to Jeremiah, perhaps on the ground that the last chapter of Jeremiah is mostly a repetition of 2 Kings from chap. 24:18 to the end of the book.  But Jeremiah and the author of these books may both have made use of common documents.  We only know that the writer lived after the accession of Evil-merodach to the throne of Babylon (2 Kings 25:27), and during the full pressure of the Babylonish captivity, since he nowhere gives any intimation of its approaching close.