It is not enough to say that Kings was written under the influence of Deuteronomy; it was written, we might rather say, as a commentary on the deuteronomic doctrine that falling away from the national religion is punished by national disaster. In this point of view it resembles Judges; but while in Judges it is the lapse into Canaanite heathenism, the worship of the Baals and Astartes, which draws upon Israel invasion and subjugation, in Kings not only foreign religions but the worship at the high places, that is, the worship of Jehovah at his oldest and holiest sanctuaries, provokes the wrath of God; for since the dedication of Solomon's temple Jehovah had made it his exclusive abode and all other places of worship were illegitimate. We have seen that down to Josiah's reform this worship prevailed unchallenged in both kingdoms. In the author's view, generation after generation, under bad kings and good, had thus sinned against the organic law of religion, and all judgments had failed to work amendment. In Israel idolatry made the case worse; the "golden calves," that is, the small images of Jehovah in the form of a bull, which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel and Dan, were worshipped under all his successors. These sins had in the end brought ruin on Israel, and they were bringing it on Judah. Manasseh had done even worse than Jeroboam; strange gods from near and far were installed in the temple itself, and under its walls men sacrificed their children to "the King" (Moloch). Josiah's reforms had no lasting results; the reaction under his successors restored the high places, and heathen cults flourished again. The doom was imminent; would Judah learn the lesson of history before it was too late? Some one has said that history is philosophy teaching by example; for the author of Kings history was prophecy teaching by example. It was the lesson of the history that the author was after, and this ruling motive determined his selection of material as well as the treatment of it. It explains why he hardly tells anything about some of the greatest kings and the most glorious periods of the history, which did not afford illustrations of his thesis, while he dwells on things of much less historical importance.