A remarkable criticism on this estimate of the Samaritan worship follows immediately afterwards in the avowal that that of Judah was not different at the time, at any rate not better.  In the report of Rehoboam’s reign we read (1Kings xiv. 22 seq.):  “They of Judah also set up high places and pillars on every high hill, and under every green tree, and whoredom at sacred places was practiced in the land.”  This state of things continued to exist, with some fluctuations, till near the time of the exile.  If then the standard according to which Samaria is judged never attained to reality in Judah either, it never existed in ancient Israel at all.  We know the standard is the book of the law of Josiah:  but we see how the facts were not merely judged, but also framed, in accordance with it.

One more instance is worthy of mention in this connection.  King Solomon, we are told, had, besides the daughter of Pharaoh, many foreign wives, from Moab, Ammon, and other peoples, intermarriage with whom Jehovah had forbidden (Deuteronomy xvii 17).  And when he was old, they seduced him to the worship of their gods, and he erected on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem high places for Chemosh of Moab, and for Milcom of Ammon, and for the gods of his other wives.  As a punishment for this Jehovah announced to him that his kingdom should be torn from him after his death and given to his servant, and also raised up adversaries to him, in Hadad the Edomite, who freed Edom, and in the Syrian Rezon teen Eliadah, who made Damascus independent.  And by the prophet Abijah of Shiloh, he caused the Ephraimite Jeroboam, who then had the supervision of the forced labour of the house of Joseph in the fortification of the city of David, to be nominated as the future king of the ten tribes.  So we read in 1Kings xi.  But Edom, and, as it appears, Damascus as well, broke away from the kingdom of David immediately after his death (xi. 2I seq., 25); and the fortification of the citadel, in which Jeroboam was employed when incited to revolt by Abijah, though it falls somewhat later, yet belongs to the first half of Solomon’s reign, since it is connected with the rest of his buildings (ix. 15, 24).  Now Solomon cannot have been punished by anticipation, in his youth, for an offence which he only committed in his old age, and the moral connected with these events is contradicted by chronology and cannot possibly be ascribed to the original narrator.  The Deuteronomistic revision betrays itself, in fact, in every word of xi. 1-13.  To the original tradition belongs only the mention of the many wives—­without the reprobation attached to it,—­and the statement about the building of the altars of Chemosh and Milcom and perhaps Astarte, on the Mount of Olives, where they stood till the time of Josiah (2Kings xxiii. 13).  The connection of the two events, in the relation of cause and effect, belongs to the last editor, as well as the general statement that the king erected altars of the gods of all the nationalities represented by his wives.