attention to the fact that ordinarily it is either the one or the other title that is given, and when, as is less usual, there are two, then for the most part the prophetic writing is designated as a portion of the Book of the Kings of Israel (xx. 34, xxxii. 32; and, quite vaguely, xxxiii. 18).  The peculiar mode of naming the individual section-1-at a time when chapters and verses were

****************************************** 1 Romans xi. 2:  )EN (HLLLA| TI LEGEI )H GRAFH i.e., How stands it written in the section relating to Elijah? *******************************************

unknown—­has its origin in the idea that each period of the sacred history has its leading prophet [)AXRIBHS TWN PROFHTWN DIADOXH; Jos., c.  Ap. i. 8), but also at the same time involves (according to xxvi. 22, in spite of ix. 29, xii. 15, xiii. 22; 1Chronicles xxix. 29) the notion that each prophet has himself written the history of his own period.  Obviously, this is the explanation of the title prophetae priores borne by the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings in the Jewish canon, and of the view which led to the introduction of 2Kings xviii. 18 seq. into the Book of Isaiah.  The claims of history being slight, it was easy to find the needful propheta eponymus for each section.  Jehu ben Hanani, a northern Israelite of Baasha’s time, has to do duty for Asa, and also for Jehoshaphat as well.  Iddo the seer, who prophesied against Jeroboam ben Nebat, is the anonymous prophet of 1Kings xiii. (Jos., Ant. viii. 8, 5; Jer. on Zechariah i. 1); by this time it was possible, also, to give the names of the wives of Cain, and of the patriarchs.

As regards a more definite determination of the date of the “Book of Kings” which lies at the foundation of Chronicles, a co-ordination of the two series of the Kings of Israel and Judah can only have been made after both had been brought to a close; in other words, not before the Babylonian exile.  And in the Babylonian exile it was that the canonical Book of Kings actually came into existence, and the “Chronicles” of Israel and those of Judah were for the first time worked together by its author; at least he refers only to the separate works and knows of no previous combination of them.  It would seem, therefore, very natural to identify the work alluded to in Chronicles with our present canonical book, which is similar in title and has corresponding contents.  But this we cannot do, for in the former there were matters of which there are in the latter no trace; for example, according to 1Chronicles ix. 1, it contained family and numerical statistics for the whole of Israel after the manner of 1Chronicles i.-ix. (chapters for the most part borrowed from it) and according to 1Chronicles xxxiii 19, the Prayer of Manasseh.  From these two data, as well as from the character of the items of information which may have been conjectured to have been derived from