Thing

Second Book of Kings

The biblical book carrying the history of the divided Hebrew monarchy to its end — the miracles of Elisha, and the destruction of both Israel and Judah.

The Second Book of Kings is the book of the Hebrew Bible that carries the history of the Israelite monarchy from the mid-ninth century BCE to the Babylonian exile — the final stretch of a single long narrative that the oldest tradition counted as one work with First Kings, divided only later. The split is editorial rather than thematic: Second Kings opens in the middle of a story it does not pause to introduce, with the prophet Elijah still on the scene and the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah already several generations old.

Its first chapters belong to Elisha, Elijah’s successor, and to the cycle of wonders attached to him — the purified spring, the multiplied oil, the Shunammite woman’s son raised from death, the Syrian commander Naaman cured of leprosy in the Jordan. After the prophet leaves the foreground, the book becomes a chronicle of reigns, measuring each king of the two kingdoms against a single standard: whether he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, or followed the worship the writers condemn. Kings rise and fall; Jehu’s purge of the house of Ahab, the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, and the recovery of a lost book of the law in the Temple all turn on that one measure.

The book ends in catastrophe. The northern kingdom of Israel falls to Assyria and its capital Samaria is taken, its population deported; later Judah falls in turn, Jerusalem and its Temple are burned by the armies of Babylon, and the last kings are led away captive. The narrative closes on the exiled king Jehoiachin released from a Babylonian prison — a small mercy at the bottom of a long descent, and the only door the book leaves open.

Scholarship reads Kings as the close of the Deuteronomistic History, the long account running from Deuteronomy through these books, shaped by editors who explained the loss of land and Temple as the consequence of broken covenant. The composition is held to be layered, reaching something near its final form during or after the exile it describes, and several of the regnal events it reports — the Assyrian conquests above all — are independently attested in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. For the traditions that received it as scripture, the book is something more than a record of defeat: it is the account of how a people understood their own ruin as judgment rather than accident, and the explanation is itself the consolation. The history is told so that the disaster might be made to mean something.

Sources

Cogan and Tadmor 1988