Note 565 — Chapter XXXI

"Cette version," says Munk (Palestine, p. 314), "a probablement pris naissance dans l'esprit de rigorisme qui animait plus tard les écrivans Juifs." "This," says Dr. Robertson Smith, "is a mere pragmatical inference from the story in Kings." See his further remarks in The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, chap. ii., p. 146. He regards parts of the Books of Chronicles as being, in fact, a Jewish Midrash. "It is not History, but Haggada, moralising romance. And the chronicler himself gives the name of Midrash (R.V., 'story') to two of the sources from which he drew (2 Chron. xiii. 22, xxiv. 27), so that there is really no mystery as to the nature of the work when it departs from the old canonical histories" (p. 148).