An Introduction to the Old Testament Author:Samuel Davidson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the nation, he would have contented himself with referring textit{onee to it as the source of fuller information. Movers's conjecture that the compiler used anot... more »her source which he has not specified, viz., an older book of Kings (referred to in 1 Chron. ix. 1, 2 Chron. xx. 34, intermediate in date between contemporary annals and the compiler himself) is unnecessary.1 The similarity in manner and language between 2 Sam. vii. and 1 Kings viii., which seems to be the critic's main reason for thinking so, is by no means characteristic. Such are all the sources which appear to have been at the disposal of the compiler of Kings. Thenius indeed thinks it probable that besides textit{the book of t/te acts of Solomon the writer had other single constituent parts of the larger work, as textit{the book of Jehu the son of Hanani (2 Chron. xx. 34), from which he took 1 Kings xvi. 1-4 ; textit{the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite (2 Chron. ix. 29), from which he got Ahijah's prophecy about Jeroboam, 1 Kings xi. 31-39 ; textit{the words of the seers (2 Chron. xxxiii. 18), whence he derived the discourse to Manasseh, 2 Kings xxi. 12-15 ; but there is no good reason for thinking that such monographs had then formed part of textit{the book of the chronicles of the Kings so often cited, if indeed they ever did.2 At the commencement of his work the compiler had another source of information, viz., the books of Samuel in their original text, containing an account of David's sickness and death as well as a history of Solomon. These together with textit{the book of the acts of Solomon served for the first part of his history; the lives of the succeeding kings being mostly derived from the large work containing an account of textit{the kings of Israel and Judah, or at least from its two parts. It i...« less