One searching for a plot in DH might summarize it on this order: It is the story of a tribal people in covenant with God who, after long bondage, acquire a homeland with great effort in the face of opposition from outside and conflicts within, and who transition from tribal life to a monarchic form of government that, in spite of its pomp and prosperity, splits into two states. Increasingly, these states are dominated by foreign powers, against whom they rebel and are defeated, their leadership deported, and their political and religious independence lost. This downfall of the kingdoms is repeatedly explained as the punishment of God for the people’s abandonment of the covenant.
Summarized in this manner, however, the story feels abstract and colorless, lacking the vivid force of the stories about judges, kings, priests, and prophets—brilliant narratives that have earned the praise of Jewish, Christian, and secular readers. Moreover, such a plot summary fails to capture the overarching tension between adhering to or departing from prescribed religious practice that Dtr asserts to be the determining factor in Israel’s history. It is a “tragic” tale, but a course self-chosen by the people who nevertheless should have known better, having been warned of the consequences of disobeying the law of Moses (Deuteronomy 27–28). So one of the abiding attractions of DH consists in the way it introduces its readers to religious and political leaders around whom political and religious forces swirl with an uncertain outcome: led by such leaders, will this people live on or die off?
A more detailed book-by-book account of Joshua through Kings reveals the events of Israel’s past that Dtr counts as of importance in understanding how and why its initial achievements are cut short by the demise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
The book of Joshua is the first chapter in the centuries-long story Dtr records. It begins with Moses handing off leadership of Israel to Joshua with the charge to conquer the land of Canaan. This follows directly on the final verses of Deuteronomy. The significance of Deuteronomy for understanding Dtr is that it presents a body of laws incumbent on Israel to observe (Deuteronomy 12–26), and it is precisely by these laws that Dtr passes judgment on the priests, prophets, and kings of Israel. He gives each of them a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” depending on whether or not they have complied with the laws.
To be sure, Joshua purports to be obeying the laws, but he himself fails to fully obey the divine command to annihilate all the inhabitants of Canaan. Joshua aggressively attacks Jericho, Ai, and Hazor, but he exempts Rahab (Joshua 2; 6:22–25) and the Gibeonite cities (Joshua 9; 10:1–6) from destruction, even though the latter have tricked Joshua into entering a treaty with them. So, although the laws are to be kept in their totality on pain of death (Deuteronomy 28), the first generation after Moses is already knowingly breaking them. Israelites have joined Canaanites in marriage and in worship, which is tantamount to breaking faith with the God of Israel. Much as Joshua has tried to conquer the entire promised land, large parts of Canaan and Transjordan remain unconquered. The stated reason for this failure is that the conquerors have broken divine commands and must accept partial victory as their punishment. However, a bit later in DH, a different reason is given for the continued resistance of Canaanites: they are allowed to stay on in the land in order to train Israel in the arts of war (Judg. 3:1–2).
The most striking feature of the book of Judges is the dramatic change in the protagonist of the story. In Joshua, as throughout the Torah, the subject of the story is a united people, Israel, under the leadership of Joshua, in continuity with the united people under Moses. Suddenly in the stories of Judges, the single entity Israel breaks into its tribal components who act alone or in combinations as they choose. The largest of these intertribal actions is celebrated in the Song of Deborah, where six tribes fight together and four tribes are condemned for failing to show up for battle (Judges 5). This presupposes that Israel consists of tribal units that ought to act in unison but may not do so. In the other episodes in Judges, the actors are single tribes, or at most two or three together, with charismatic military leaders who arise from time to time: Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. Dtr presents these leaders of the moment as the best Israel can muster to carry on the work of Moses and Joshua, yet most of them show no knowledge of the Mosaic law by which Dtr judges them!
Only in the last episode of the book are all the tribes united, save one, to punish the tribe of Benjamin because it is held responsible for the rape and murder of a Levite’s concubine (Judges 19–21). The book ends with a detailed account of this horrific crime, which the narrator insists demands a king, who would presumably prevent such deplorable behavior (21:25). It appears that Dtr wants to conceive of Israel as a unity, but is pressured by his sources into drawing the picture of a seriously fragmented people who repeatedly breach the law of Moses. Only the long-suffering lenience of YHWH allows the story of Israel to continue. The last word of Judges, “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man [tribe?] did what was right in his [its?] own eyes (21:25),” clearly anticipates the kingdom of David, as it also embraces the implicit understanding that the deeds condemned in the book are not only divisive of community but also stand in blatant violation of the law. However, which deeds are condemned? Only those of the Gibeonites, or also of Micah and the Danites (Judges 17–18), as well as the idolatry that leads to the cycles of oppression and deliverance? What about the behavior of the judges who deliver Israel but also engage in actions inimical to the laws? Abimelech, the would-be king, dies in retribution for the murder of his brothers, and the Shechemites who follow him perish as the just punishment for their folly (Judg. 9:56–57), but there is no claim that he is a judge, even a lapsed judge.
Books of Samuel and Kings: The United Kingdom
The history of the united kingdom of David and Solomon is told in one long stretch in 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings 1–11. Dtr accords so much space to telling the story of the establishment of the monarchy in part because his sources were especially abundant for this era, but also because he wants to describe the historical roots of the Davidic dynasty and the Jerusalem temple, the two institutions that rival the law of Moses in importance, which are not necessarily in conflict, but become so as the post-Solomonic rulers undermine the moral foundations of dynasty and temple. Extended attention is given to tracing the rise of David to the kingship, with the intention to exonerate him of all suspicions that he conspired against Saul. The reported decline of Saul is intertwined with the ascent of David as his rival and eventual successor. Once established on the throne, serious conflicts erupt within David’s family following his murder of Uriah in order to acquire Bathsheba as wife. These family conflicts are intertwined with his struggle to retain the throne against rebellions, one being led by his own son, Absalom. Although David is rebuked by Nathan the prophet, and David even “repents” of the Bathsheba affair, he is not required to give her up (2 Sam. 12:1–25), and it is Bathsheba’s cunning advocacy that secures the throne for her son Solomon (1 Kgs. 1:11–21, 28–31).
The achievements of David as king, beyond his military successes against the Philistines and Transjordanian kings, are lightly touched on. His rule over his subjects is pictured as being much less onerous than that of Solomon. David aspires to build a permanent temple for YHWH in Jerusalem, but is prevented from doing so by the prophet Nathan, who declares God’s extreme displeasure with “a man of blood” honoring the deity in this fashion (2 Samuel 7). David proves very indulgent of his adult sons and seems to have been lax in his duties as chief justice in the system of criminal law. All in all, David is portrayed as remarkably human in showing his failings as well as his accomplishments. The David described here is far from the paragon of virtue and piety elsewhere venerated as preeminent psalmist (2 Sam. 23:1) and the very model of the messianic ruler to come (Isa. 9:1–7; 11:1–9). Solomon becomes successor to David after a bitter dynastic fight in which he forcibly suppresses a powerful faction backing his brother Adonijah.
Opening his reign with an iron fist, Solomon is emboldened to launch an ambitious program to increase the wealth and extend the power of his kingdom. His basic resources were heavy taxation on the agricultural surpluses of his peasant subjects, supplemented by income from tolls on caravans in transit, as well as shrewd commercial deals as middle man for the arms sales of Anatolian horses and Egyptian chariots to other states. In order to secure his booming economic empire, Solomon reaches for military superiority by building massive fortifications and equipping large chariot forces. With his newfound wealth, he builds the temple in Jerusalem that his father had been forbidden to build, along with a palace that greatly exceeds the temple in size. This temple would have been little more than a royal chapel rather than the national shrine that Dtr anachronistically envisions as the sole legitimate place of worship in Israel.
To facilitate state administration, Solomon redistricts his kingdom and appoints officials in each of the new districts, centralizing his command structure to secure delivery of taxes and to forestall rebellion against his regime, such as the rebellions David had to put down (1 Kgs. 4:1–28). In short, Solomon is pictured as hugely successful in securing a luxurious and privileged life for a small upper class in government and trade, but only with contradictory policies that threaten agricultural production by pulling peasants off the land to form labor battalions for his pet building projects (5:13–18; 9:10–21). He overspends to the point that he has to pay off a debt to the king of Tyre by surrendering a sizable area of his kingdom (1 Kgs. 9:10–14).
One would think that the enhancement of the power and wealth of his kingdom would have secured Solomon the unalloyed approval of Dtr. This, however, is not the case. It is true that the king’s successes are attributed to wisdom bestowed on him by God (1 Kgs. 3:3–28; 4:29–34). Moreover, the lavish adornment of the temple and its appointments and the pomp of its dedication are reported in great detail, because for Dtr the building of the temple is Solomon’s principal achievement (1 Kings 5–6; 7:9–51). In fact, Dtr insists that this Jerusalem temple is the sole site where YHWH worship can henceforth be carried out, and it becomes the litmus test by which Dtr judges all later kings: Did they or did they not restrict worship to Jerusalem? In glaring contrast to his noble start, Solomon eventually falls into idolatry by adopting the gods of the many wives he has acquired in diplomatic alliances with other countries (1 Kgs. 11:1–13)
A further contradiction arises when it becomes evident that Jeroboam, the leader of the northern labor battalions, rebels against Solomon, not because of idolatry in the narrow religious sense, but because of the heavy social and economic burdens Solomon’s policy of forced labor has imposed on the north (1 Kgs. 11:27; 12:1–20). To further complicate Dtr’s account, the split of the kingdom approved as divine punishment on Solomon automatically consigns all northern worship of YHWH to idolatry, since the northerners no longer recognize the religious legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty in Jerusalem and will henceforth have nothing to do with worship in what has now become a foreign state (12:25–33). In effect, Jeroboam is damned if he does separate from Judah and damned if he doesn’t!
Book of Kings: The Two Kingdoms
It is axiomatic for Dtr that Solomon built a temple intended to be the sole place of worship in his kingdom and in the reigns of all his successors. In his account of the two kingdoms, Dtr holds fast to this prohibition of worship at any other site than the Jerusalem temple. This immediately means that any and all worship practiced in the northern kingdom is condemned by Dtr, even though the northern prophets (Elijah and Elisha and later Hosea), while lambasting their rulers for infidelity to YHWH, do not include failure to worship at Jerusalem as one of these infractions. It also means that every subsequent ruler in Judah is judged by a religious requirement that did not come into force until centuries later under Kings Hezekiah and Josiah. Consequently, even when Dtr has some good things to say about particular kings, he counts their rule as a failure if they allow worship at any other place in the kingdom (characteristically, “on the high places” of false worship).
In spite of this grossly contradictory and flagrantly anachronistic religious criterion that Dtr has applied to the post-Solomonic rulers of both kingdoms, his account provides a considerable body of information about social, political, and religious conditions. Much of this information appears to have been drawn from court documents cited as “the Book of the Records of the Kings of Israel,” paired with a similar source for the kings of Judah. Where the chronology of the royal reigns intersects with events also reported by Assyrian and Babylonian texts, its dates are confirmed. There is also information about religious developments in both kingdoms, which disclose practices outlawed by Deuteronomy. In addition, there is a sizable body of traditions about the northern prophets Elijah and Elisha, who worship apart from Jerusalem without Dtr’s censure. These inconsistencies in the criteria in the historical books for valid worship are indicative of a document that tells us the views of Dtr and his several sources without much of an attempt to reconcile them.
Instead of recounting the two histories one after the other, or interweaving their fortunes so as to emphasize certain phases or aspects of the two histories, Dtr treats political events in Israel and Judah in self-contained literary panels devoted to each ruler. Moreover, the sequence of these panels switches back and forth between north and south. The result is a staggered recital of the two kingdom histories, entailing some repetitions and a certain amount of chronological “backtracking.” Into this synchronic framework are inserted annalistic accounts of diplomatic maneuvers, battles, political coups and purges, deeds of prophets, and religious reforms. Chronicles follows the same regnal formulas for Judah as does 1-2 Kings but lacks the latter’s synchronisms, since it does not recount the full history of the north but only episodes involving Judah.
Ingenious as is this interweaving of the northern and southern histories, it fails to give a balanced, coherent account, broken as it is into brief glimpses of the reigns of a majority of the kings, but alternating with fuller accounts of others. This creates a pronounced disproportion in coverage, such that we have in effect two styles of presentation, one consisting of little more than a chronicling of events and the other going into greater detail about rulers who initiated religious reforms centered on the Jerusalem temple (Jehoash, Hezekiah, Josiah) or who interacted with prophets (Ahab, Hezekiah), while saying surprisingly little about kings whom we otherwise know or suspect to have been major political figures (Omri, Jeroboam II, Manasseh).
Why did Dtr resort to such a tortuous manner of recounting the histories of the two kingdoms? He did so, it seems, in order to underscore his belief that the history of the two kingdoms was actually the history of one people with a common religion. Politically, there were two kingdoms, but they spoke the same language, shared the same culture, and practiced the same religion, albeit in regional variations. Following the acclaimed reigns of David and Solomon, the rulers of the two kingdoms, with a few exceptions, are described as a sorry lot, unacceptable to YHWH because of the political corruption, social injustice, and religious apostasy they practiced or permitted. The exceptions are Hezekiah and Josiah, who undertook religious reforms that cleansed the Jerusalem temple of foreign accretions and reestablished it as the sole legitimate place of worship. The reforms of Josiah so closely correspond to the religious demands of Deuteronomy that the book on which Josiah is said to have based his actions is generally taken to be Deuteronomy or some version thereof. The reforms of Hezekiah manage to spare Jerusalem from destruction by the Assyrians, but in spite of Josiah’s laudable, more extensive reforms, they do not prevent Josiah from execution by the Egyptians or the eventual destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Neo-Babylonians. These political catastrophes following earnest reforms are so troubling to Dtr that he explains them as due to the evil deeds of King Manasseh, which outweigh the reformers’ achievements.