latter it was much more an ordinary palace intrigue, by means of which one party at court succeeded in obtaining from the old king, enfeebled with age, his sanction for Solomon’s succession.  Until then Adonijah had been regarded as heir-apparent to the throne, by David himself, by all Israel, and the great officers of the kingdom, Joab and Abiathar; what above all things turned the scale in favour of Solomon was the weight of Benaiah’s six hundred praetorians, a formidable force in the circumstances of the period.  The author of Chronicles naively supposes he has successfully evaded all difficulties by giving out the coronation of Solomon related by himself to be the second (xxix. 22),—­an advertence to 1Kings i., ii. which does not remove but only betrays the contradiction.

Yet this is as nothing over against the disharmony of the total impression.  See what Chronicles has made out of David!  The founder of the kingdom has become the founder of the temple and the public worship, the king and hero at the head of his companions in arms has become the singer and master of ceremonies at the head of a swarm of priests and Levites; his clearly cut figure has become a feeble holy picture, seen through a cloud of incense.  It is obviously vain to try to combine the fundamentally different portraits into one stereoscopic image; it is only the tradition of the older source that possesses historical value.  In Chronicles this is clericalised in the taste of the post-exilian time, which had no feeling longer for anything but cultus and torah, which accordingly treated as alien the old history (which, nevertheless, was bound to be a sacred history), if it did not conform with its ideas and metamorphose itself into church history.  Just as the law framed by Ezra as the foundation of Judaism was regarded as having been the work of Moses, so what upon this basis had been developed after Moses—­particularly the music of the sanctuary and the ordering of the temple personnel—–­was carried back to King David, the sweet singer of Israel, who had now to place his music at the service of the cultus, and write psalms along with Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, the Levitical singing families.

VI.I.3.  With regard to Solomon, Chronicles (2Chronicles i.-ix.) nowhere departs very far from the lines of the Book of Kings.  As the story of 1Kings i., ii., which is not an edifying one, and mercilessly assails that of 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix., required to be omitted, the narrative accordingly begins with 1Kings iii., with Solomon’s accession, sacrifices on the great altar at Gibeon, and the revelation of Jehovah, which was thereupon communicated to him in a dream.  This last is transcribed with slight alterations, but at the outset a characteristic divergence is found.  “Solomon loved Jehovah, walking in the statutes of David his father, only he sacrificed and burnt incense on the high places (because there was no house built unto the name of Jehovah until those days).