rather annalistic national histories composed by prophets, partly from the archives of the kingdom and other public documents, partly from prophetic monographs containing prophecy and history, either composed and continued by various prophets in succession during the existence of both kingdoms, or brought together in a connected form shortly before the ruin of the kingdom out of the then existing contemporary historical documents and prophetic records. Two circumstances are strongly in favour of the latter supposition. On the one hand, the references to these annals in both kingdoms do not extend to the last kings, but end in the kingdom of Israel with Pekah (2Ki 15:31), in the kingdom of Judah with Jehoiakim (2Ki 24:5 and 2Ch 36:8). On the other hand, the formula “until this day” occurs in reference to various events; and since it for the most part refers not to the time of the exile, but to times when the kingdom still existed (cf. 1Ki 8:8 with 2Ch 5:9; 1Ki 9:13, 1Ki 9:21, with 2Ch 8:8; 1Ki 12:19 with 2Ch 10:19; 2Ki 8:22 with 2Ch 21:10; 2Ki 2:22; 2Ki 10:27; 2Ki 14:7, and 2Ki 16:6), it cannot be from the hand of the authors of our canonical books of Kings and Chronicles, but must have come down to us from the original documents, and is in them possible only if they were written at some shorter or longer period after the events. When Bähr, in the place already quoted, says, on the contrary, that the time shortly before the fall of the kingdom, the time of complete uprooting, would appear to be the time least of all suited for the collection and editing of national year-books, this arises from his not having fully weighed the fact, that at that very time prophets like Jeremiah lived and worked, and, as is clear from
