Further:--We are told that Amaziah "did that which was right in the sight of Jehovah: he did according to all things _as Joash his father did_." The Chronicler also bestows his eulogy on Amaziah; but having told such dark stories of the apostasy of Joash to Asherah-worship and his murder of the prophets, he could hardly add "as Joash his father did"; so he omits those words. The reservation that Amaziah did right, "yet not like David his father" (2 Kings xiv. 3), "but not with a perfect heart" (2 Chron. xxv. 2), is followed by the stock abatement about the _bamoth_, and the sacrifices and incense burnt in them. This was a crime in the eyes of writers in B.C. 540, but certainly not in the eyes of any king before the discovery of the "Book of the Law" in the reign of Josiah, B.C. 621. We are compelled, therefore, by simple truth, to ask, How came it that Amaziah should be so scrupulous as to observe the Deuteronomic law by not slaying the sons of his father's murderers, while he does not seem to be aware, any more than the best of his predecessors, that while he obeyed one precept he was violating the essence and spirit of the entire code in which the precept occurs? The one main object, the constantly repeated law of Deuteronomy, is the centralisation of all worship, and the rigid prohibition of every local place of sacrifice. Strange that Amaziah should have selected for attention a single precept, while he is profoundly unconscious of, or indifferent to, the fact that he is setting aside the regulation with which the law, as Deuteronomy represents it, begins and ends, and on which it incessantly insists!