Digital Logos Edition
This work deals with 1 and 2 Kings as a unified whole, nestled within its canonical context. This canon presumes the reader has prior knowledge of the entire story of Israel and infers the prophetic and New Testament writings. It is examined here as narrative literature with historic and geographic intent, designed to teach its readers about God and the ways of God. The author masterfully draws the reader’s attention to recurring themes in Kings, such as God’s promise and its fulfillment. Provan has succeeded in making Kings a more accessible book.
Save more when you purchase this volume as part of the Sheffield/T & T Clark Bible Guides Collection (44 Vols.)!
“This is not to say, of course, that the book is without its ‘fictive’ elements. It is a story about the past; but it is also a story about the past. The text may clearly seek to tell us about real events and characters in Israel’s history; but it does this in ways that equally clearly owe as much to narrative artistry and literary convention as to any desire to describe things ‘as they really were’. It is at this point that modern readers who have been taught to think of ‘history’ in a particularly narrow way may find some difficulty with Kings. What has narrative artistry to do with the task of describing the past, it may be asked?” (Page 21)
“2 Kgs 18:17–20:19 bears striking similarity to Isaiah 36:1–38:8; 38:21–39:8;” (Page 41)
“There are various forms of theory about secondary editing. The two main lines of thought, however, are that the book of Kings known to us now is an updated version either of an originally pre-exilic book or of an originally exilic book.” (Page 30)
“All this suggests that at least one of the purposes of Kings is to provide its readers with an explanation of their past in terms of the theological programme outlined in Deuteronomy, with a view to promoting that programme in the present. It is this aspect of Kings, and its connection in this respect with books like Joshua, which has led Old Testament scholars in recent times to refer to Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings together as the ‘Deuteronomic’/‘Deuteronomistic History’.” (Pages 24–25)
“It has become fashionable among some historians of Israel, in fact, to distinguish quite self-consciously between ‘biblical Israel’ and ‘historical Israel’.” (Page 46)