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.
In the Books of Kings, it is true, the tradition is not
systematically translated into the mode of view of the Law, as
is the case in Chronicles. What reminds us most strongly of
Chronicles is the introduction from time to time of a prophet who
expresses himself in the spirit of Deuteronomy and in the
language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and then disappears.
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