Book 42

The Trouble with Kings

by Stephen McKenzie

Published 2 April 1991
This book analyzes the book of Kings on the basis of Noth's compositional model for the Deuteronomistic History, while also taking account of recent literary critical treatments of Kings. Consistent with Noth's theory, McKenzie sees Kings and the DH as originally being the work of a single author/editor that has received numerous later additions, some of them quite extensive. He dates Dtr, with Cross, to the reign of Josiah, seeing the final two and one-half chapters of Kings as an addition. But he believes that tensions among the additions to Kings show they are not the result of systematic editing (e.g., Dtr2).