Prolegomena eBook

Chronicles, on the other hand, not only takes the Law—the Pentachal Law as a whole, but more particularly the Priestly Code therein preponderating—as its rule of judgment on the past; but also idealises the facts in accordance with that norm, and figures to itself the old Hebrew people as in exact conformity with the pattern of the later Jewish community,—as a monarchically graded hierocracy with a strictly centralised cultus of rigidly prescribed form at the holy place of Jerusalem. When, accordingly, the ten tribes fail to exhibit all the marks of the kingdom of God, this is taken to mean their falling away from the true Israel; they have made goats and calves their gods, driven away the priests and Levites, and in a word broken quite away from the institutions which shaped themselves in Judah during the period subsequent to Josiah and received their finishing-touches from Ezra. 1

*************************************** 1. The Chronicler indeed is unable, even in the case of these schismatics, to divest himself of his legal notions, as appears almost comically in the circumstance that the priests of Jeroboam set about their heretical practices quite in accordance with the prescriptions of the Priestly Code, and procure their consecration by means of a great sacrifice (2 Chron xiii. 9). ****************************************

Like other heathen, therefore, they are taken account of by the sacred history only in so far as they stood in relations of friendship or hostility with the people of Jehovah properly so called, the Israel in the land of Judah (2Chronicles xxiii. 2), and in all references to them the most sedulous and undisguised partisanship on behalf of Judah is manifested, even by the inhabitants of the northern kingdom itself. 2 If one seriously

*********************************** 2. Compare xi. 16, xv. 9, xix. 2, xx. 35 seq.. xxv 7, xxviii. 9 seq., xxx. 6. ***********************************

takes the Pentateuch as Mosaic law, this exclusion of the ten tribes is, in point of fact, an inevitable consequence, for the mere fact of their belonging to the people of Jehovah destroys the fundamental pre-supposition of that document, the unity and legitimacy of the worship as basis of the theocracy, the priests and Levites as its most important organs, “the sinews and muscles of the body politic, which keep the organism together as a living and moving whole.”

VI.II.2. The reverse side is, of course, the idealisation of Judah from the point of view of the legitimate worship,—a process which the reader can imagine from the specimens already given with reference to David and Solomon. The priests and Levites who migrated from Israel are represented as having strengthened the southern kingdom (xi. 17), and here constitute the truly dominant element in the history. It is for their sake that kings exist as protectors and guardians of the cultus, with the internal arrangements of which, however, they dare not intermeddle (xxvi. 16 seq.); to deliver discourses and ordain spiritual solemnities (which figure as the culminating points in the narrative) are among the leading duties of their reign. 1