Ezekiel carried out this negative criticism of the past to greater lengths, with particular reference to the abominations of the older worship (chapter xvi., xx., xxiii.); and it is also to be found in Isaiah xl.-xlvi. (xlii. 24, xliii. 27), though here it is supplemented by a positive and greatly more suggestive view; we find it also in Deuteronomy xxviii.-xxx., and in Leviticus xxvi.  The whole of the past is regarded as one enormous sin, which is to be expiated in the exile (Jeremiah xxxii. 30; Ezekiel xviii. 2, xxxiii. 10; Isaiah xl. 1); the duration of the punishment is even calculated from that of the sin (Leviticus xxvi. 34).  The same attitude towards old times is continued after the return (Zechariah viii. 13 seq., ix. 7 seq.; Nehemiah ix. 7 seq.).

The treatment is naturally from a Judaean point of view.  Outside of Jerusalem the worship of Jehovah is heretical, so that the political revolt of the Northern Israelites was at the same time an ecclesiastical schism.  Yet they are not excluded in consequence from community with the people of God, as in the Chronicles:  the old traditions are not thrown so completely overboard as yet:  only after the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians does Judah continue the history alone.  Almost the same reverence is paid to David and his house as to the city and the temple.  His house has the promise of eternal continuance, with regard to which the writer likes to make use of the words of Jeremiah xxxiii. 17.  The book closes, doubtless not by chance, with the liberation from prison of the Davidide Jehoiachin; this is the earnest of greater things yet in store.  In the words of Abijah to Jeroboam, also, when he says that the humiliation of the house of David and the revolt from it of the ten tribes will not last for ever, we see the Messianic hope appear, which, as we learn from Haggai and Zechariah, largely occupied the minds of the Jews at the time of the exile and after it.

In the case of the books of Judges and Samuel it is not perhaps possible to decide with perfect certainty what was the norm applied by the last reviser in forming his estimates of the past.  In the Books of Kings there can be no doubt on this point.  The writer deals not only in indefinite references to the will of Jehovah, which Israel ought to obey, but resists; he speaks now and again (1Kings ii. 3, 2Kings xiv. 6, xvii. 37) of the written Torah in which the judgments and statutes of Jehovah are contained, a difference which indicates, one must allow, a historical feeling.  Now the code which is implicitly regarded as the standard is that the discovery of which under Josiah is circumstantially narrated in 2Kings xxii. xxiii., viz., Deuteronomy.  We are led to this conclusion, it is allowed on all hands, both by the phraseology of the reviser and by the spirit of his judgments.  He condemns those sins specially against which Deuteronomy and the reformation of King Josiah were directed.