and notables (xxiii. 1, xxviii. 1), has Solomon anointed as king, and Zadok as priest (xxix. 22), and in a long discourse hands over to the former along with the kingdom the task of his reign, namely, the execution of what he himself has prepared and appointed; on this occasion yet more precious stones and noble metals--among them gold of Ophir and Persian darics--are presented by David and the princes for the sacred building. The whole section 1Chronicles xxii.-xxix. is a startling instance of that statistical phantasy of the Jews which revels in vast sums of money on paper (xxii. 14), in artificial marshallings of names and numbers (xxiii.-xxvii.), in the enumeration of mere subjects without predicates, which simply stand on parade and neither signify nor do anything. The monotony is occasionally broken only by unctuous phrases, but without refreshing the reader. Let the experiment of reading the chapters through be tried. According to 1Kings i., ii., King David in his closing days was sick and feeble in body and mind, and very far from being in a condition thus to make preparations on behalf of his successor shortly before his own death, or to prepare his bread for him so far that nothing remained but to put it into the oven. His purpose of building a house to Jehovah is indeed spoken of in 2 Samuel vii. in connection with vi. 17, but it is definitively abandoned in consequence of Jehovah's refusal, on the ground that it is not man's part to build a house for God, but God's to build a house for man. In strange contrast with this explanation is that of Chronicles that David is a man of war and has shed much blood, and therefore dare not set up the temple; that he had waged the wars of Jehovah, that Jehovah had given victory by his hand, would in the older warlike time have seemed no reason against but rather an argument establishing his fitness for such a work. But the worst discrepancy is that between the solemn installation of Solomon as king and of Zadok as priest with all the forms of law and publicity as related in 1Chronicles xxviii., xxix. (comp. xxii., xxiii. 1) and the older narrative of 1Kings i., ii. According to the latter it was much more an ordinary palace intrigue, by means of which one party at court succeeded in obtaining from the old king, enfeebled with age, his sanction for Solomon's succession. Until then Adonijah had been regarded as heir-apparent to the throne, by David himself, by all Israel, and the great officers of the kingdom, Joab and Abiathar; what above all things turned the scale in favour of Solomon was the weight of Benaiah's six hundred praetorians, a formidable force in the circumstances of the period. The author of Chronicles naively supposes he has successfully evaded all difficulties by giving out the coronation of Solomon related by himself to be the second (xxix. 22),--an advertence to 1Kings i., ii. which does not remove but only betrays the contradiction.