Ahaz was a king of little worth, and yet he got fairly well out of the difficulty into which the invasion of the allied Syrians and Israelites had brought him by making his kingdom tributary to the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser (2Kings xvi. 1 seq.).  But Chronicles could not possibly let him off so cheaply.  By it he is delivered into the hand of the enemy:  the Israelites alone slaughter 120,000 men of Judah, including the king’s son and his most prominent servants, and carry off to Samaria 200,000 women and children, along with a large quantity of other booty.  The Edomites and Philistines also fall upon Ahaz, while the Assyrians whom he has summoned to his aid misunderstand him, and come up against Jerusalem with hostile intent; they do not, indeed, carry the city, but yet become possessors, without trouble, of its treasures, which the king himself hands over to them (xxviii. 1-21).

The Book of Kings knows no worse ruler than Manasseh was; yet he reigned undisturbed for fifty-five years—­a longer period than was enjoyed by any other king (2Kings xxi.1-18).  This is a stone of stumbling that Chronicles must remove.  It tells that Manasseh was carried in chains by the Assyrians to Babylon, but there prayed to Jehovah, who restored him to his kingdom; he then abolished idolatry in Judah (xxxiii. 11-20).  Thus on the one hand he does not escape punishment, while on the other hand the length of his reign is nevertheless explained.  Recently indeed it has been sought to support the credibility of these statements by means of an Assyrian inscription, from which it appears that Manasseh did pay tribute to Esarhaddon.  That is to say, he had been overpowered by the Assyrians; that is again to say, that he had been thrown into chains and carried off by them.  Not so rapid, but perhaps quite as accurate, would be the inference that as a tributary prince he must have kept his seat on the throne of Judah, and not have exchanged it for the prison of Babylon.  In truth, Manasseh’s temporary deposition is entirely on the same plane with Nebuchadnezzar’s temporary grass-eating.  The unhistorical character of the intermezzo (the motives of which are perfectly transparent) follows not only from the silence of the Book of Kings (a circumstance of no small importance indeed), but also, for example, from Jeremiah xv. 4; for when it is there said that all Judah and Jerusalem are to be given up to destruction because of Manasseh, it is not presupposed that his guilt has been already borne and atoned for by himself.

To justify the fact of Josiah’s defeat and death at Megiddo, there is attached to him the blame of not having given heed to the words of Necho from the mouth of God warning him against the struggle (xxxv. 21, 22).  Contrariwise, the punishment of the godless Jehoiakim is magnified; he is stated to have been put in irons by the Chaldaeans and carried to Babylon (xxxvi. 6)—­an impossibility of course before the capture of Jerusalem, which did not take place until the third month of his successor.  The last prince of David’s house, Zedekiah, having suffered more severely than all his predecessors, must therefore have been stiff-necked and rebellious (xxxvi.12, 13),—­characteristics to which, according to the authentic evidence of the prophet Jeremiah, he had in reality the least possible claim.