CHAPTERS XXIII.‒XXIX. THE CONCLUSION OF DAVID’S REIGN. CHAPTER XXIII. =1.= SOLOMON MADE KING. ¹Now David was old and full of days; and he made Solomon his son king over Israel. The Chronicler unhistorically ignores the struggle between the parties of Solomon and of Adonijah for the throne (compare xxix. 22 f.; 1 Kings i. 5 ff.), and makes the reign of David culminate in the appointment of Solomon as David’s successor and in a grand organisation of the ecclesiastical and other authorities of the realm. chapter xxiii. 1 intimates the appointment of Solomon and the assembling by royal command of the princes, priests, and Levites of Israel. The topics thus suggested are then, after the prevailing fashion of Chronicles, treated in the reverse order; first the Levites, chapter xxiii.; then the priests, xxiv. (followed by the singers, xxv.; and the doorkeepers, xxvi.); then the civil and military orders. chapters xxviii., xxix. are occupied with the concluding exhortations of King David. Compare xxix. 22‒24; 1 Kings i. 5‒53. =2‒23.= ORGANISATION OF THE LEVITES (first account). ²And he gathered together all the princes of Israel, with the priests and the Levites. ³And the Levites were numbered from thirty years old and upward: and their number by their polls, man by man, was thirty and eight thousand. =3.= _the Levites were numbered from thirty years_] Two accounts are here given of the organisation of the Levites. According to the first the Levites were admitted to service at thirty years of age; verse 3; compare Numbers iv. 3, 23, 30, where the period from thirty to fifty is fixed as the period for service. According to the second account (verses 24‒27) the Levites were taken from twenty years old and upwards; this was apparently the later custom; compare 2 Chronicles xxxi. 17; Ezra iii. 8. The discrepancy probably arises from an actual variation in practice. The original age of admission for Levites was probably thirty, but owing to the scarcity of their numbers it seems to have been necessary to reduce the limit of age to twenty. But see also the note on pp. 51 f. _by their polls_] Literally _by their skulls_. “Poll” is an almost obsolete word for “head,” retained in the compound word, “poll-tax.” _thirty and eight thousand_] Numbers iii. 39 gives 22,000, and Numbers xxvi. 62, 23,000, as the number of male Levites from a month old and upwards in the time of Moses. ⁴Of these, twenty and four thousand were to oversee the work of the house of the LORD; and six thousand were officers and judges: =4.= _twenty and four thousand_] These were divided into courses (verse 6), serving by turn, apparently twenty-four in number, consisting each of a thousand men. See, however, the note on verses 6‒23 below.