************************************** 1.  Krey surmises that the last date mentioned, the liberation from prison of, Jehoiachin in the 37th year after his accession to the throne, was originally intended to form the lower limit of the chronology, especially as the periods of 40 years under which, as we have seen, the Jewish figures naturally fall, come exactly to this date.  But if this be the case, we cannot regard the 4th or 5th year of Solomon as the era started from, for then there is no room for the 36 or 37 remaining years of Solomon’s reign.  But such a starting-point is entirely unnatural; Solomon’s 40 years cannot be torn up in this way:  if we are to make a division at all in that period, it must be at the disruption of the monarchy, the natural point of departure for the series of kings of Israel and of Judah.  It deserves remark, that the 37 years of Jehoiachin, at the close of the older mode of calculation, which perhaps only tried to bring out generations of 40 years, but also perhaps a period of 500 years from David (40+40+20+ 41+40+40+81 + 38+ 80 + 79 1/4), answer to the 37 years of Solomon at the beginning of the method now carried through.  That a process of alteration and improvement of the chronology was busily carried on in later times, we see from the added svnchronisms of the kings of Israel and Judah, from the uncertain statements in the Book of Judges, some of them parallel with each other (e.g., the interregna and minor judges, and the threefold counting of the time of the Philistines) and even from the variants of the LXX. ***************************************************

The writer looks back on the time of the kings as a period past and closed, on which judgment has already been declared.  Even at the consecration of the temple the thought of its destruction is not to be restrained; and throughout the book the ruin of the nation and its two kingdoms is present to the writer’s mind.  This is the light in which the work is to be read; it shows why the catastrophe was unavoidable.  It was so because of unfaithfulness to Jehovah, because of the utterly perverted tendency obstinately followed by the people in spite of the Torah of Jehovah and His prophets.  The narrative becomes, as it were, a great confession—­of sins of the exiled nation looking back on its history.  Not only the existing generation, but the whole previous historical development is condemned—­a fashion which we meet with first in Jeremiah (ii. 1 seq., iv. 3), who was actually confronted with the question as to the cause of the calamity. 2

************************************** 1.  The fall of Samaria suggested similar reflections to the earlier prophets with reference to the northern kingdom, but their views are, as a rule (Amos v., Isaiah ix.), not nearly so radical nor so far-fetched.  Hosea does certainly trace the guilt of the present up to the commencement, but he exemplifies the principle (like Micah, chapter vi.) chiefly from the early history of Jacob and Moses:  as for the really historical period he belongs to it too much himself to survey it from so high a point of view.  In this also he is a precursor of later writers, that he regards the human monarchy as one of the great evils of Israel:  he certainly had very great occasion for this in the circumstances of the time he lived in. *******************************************