David took Jerusalem, which till then had been a Jebusite stronghold, and made it the capital of his kingdom; but he reigned, after as before, in patriarchal fashion, making, so far as appears, few changes in the old institutions. Solomon reorganized the monarchy after the common pattern of Oriental despotisms, dividing the country into provinces for purposes of taxation, without regard to the autonomy of the tribes and their liberties. He built a great palace in the citadel, and, within the same enclosure, a temple, which, as the royal sanctuary, was also in a sense national. Like other Eastern rulers, he caused his doings to be recorded in the annals of the kingdom, and doubtless the priests of the temple kept their own chronicles. From this time, therefore, sources of a new kind make their appearance in the history, contemporary records drawn from the royal and priestly annals. The extracts from these sources in the Book of Kings, like those of the Assyrian kings, or the Phoenician annals of which fragments (through Menander) are preserved by Josephus, were brief and bald records of doings or happenings, not biographical or historical narratives. But brief and bald as they were they furnished a groundwork of fact; and, since they set down at the accession of each king the length of his predecessor's reign, they gave also the data for a continuous chronology. It is not to be supposed that the historical literature whose brilliant beginnings we have seen ceased in the first century of the kingdom or that the writers occupied themselves solely with the remoter past. The memorable deeds of great men will not have gone uncelebrated. The narrative, however, which is the chief source for the times of Saul and David, breaks off abruptly in 1 Kings 2. The Books of Kings are of a wholly different fabric. For one thing, while the two Books of Samuel cover little more than the span of one long lifetime, Kings, in about the same space, comprises the history of close on to four centuries. But there is a still greater difference, as we shall see, in the way in which history is treated. The grand divisions of the Books of Kings are these: 1 Kings ii. 12-xi. 43 is occupied with the reign of Solomon; the division of the kingdom after his death is narrated in xii. 1-24; the parallel history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the fall of Samaria in 721 B.C. runs to 2 Kings xviii. 12; the history of Judah from that date to its own fall in 586 fills the rest of the book.