That the historical books of the Old Testament should have been written with a ‘tendency’ is therefore natural. And literary criticism has successfully pointed out in the case of one of these books what the ‘tendency’ was. If we compare the books of Chronicles with those of Samuel and Kings, the contrast between them strikes the eye at once. The interest of the Chronicler is centred in the history of the Jewish temple and ritual, of its priests and Levites, and the manifold requirements of the Law. His history of Israel accordingly becomes a history of Israelitish ritual; all else is put aside or treated in the briefest fashion. The incidents of David’s reign narrated in the books of Samuel are subordinated to elaborate accounts of his arrangements for the services in the tabernacle or temple; the history of the northern kingdom of Israel, which lay outside that of the temple at Jerusalem, is passed over in silence; and the Passover held in Hezekiah’s reign, about which not a word is said in the books of Kings, is dwelt upon to the exclusion of almost everything else. Nor, had we only the Chronicler in our hands, should we know that the pious Hezekiah had entered into an alliance with the Babylonian king and boastfully displayed to his ambassadors the treasures of the Jewish kingdom, thereby bringing upon himself the rebuke of the prophet Isaiah. All that the Chronicler has to say on the matter is that ‘in the business of the ambassadors of the prince of Babylon, who sent to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart’; and even here a theological turn is given to the occurrence by the motive assigned for the embassy. As a matter of fact, we know from the cuneiform inscriptions that the real object of Merodach-baladan was to form a league with the princes of the West against their common Assyrian enemy, to which, as the books of Kings inform us, was naturally added a polite inquiry after Hezekiah’s health.