Secret_History

464 The Secret History of the World
We may never know, but such questions need to be asked, and such texts need to
be considered when one is deciding whether or not to believe that the Bible is the
divinely inspired word of God. My thought is that the story of Hezekiah and
Manasseh is just another doublet of the story of Omri and Ahab. One begins to
wonder if the exile of the Jews really began with the fall of the Northern Kingdom
and if everything that was added after that, the whole history of the Southern
Kingdom and its kings and so on, wasn’t just simply made up by priests in exile?
Another problem that the writer of this history had to deal with was the promise
of Yahweh that King Solomon’s Temple would last forever. He had already
written, obviously under some kind of “guidance”, 348 that God said:
“I have sanctified this house that you have built to set my name there forever, and
my eyes and my heart will be there all the days.” 349
Well, that’s pretty definite! But now, the writer was facing the fact that
everything was gone, ashes, destroyed. What to do? He obviously wasn’t ready to
give up the idea that this had been promised to Israel. So, he enfolded the promise
in the conditional nature of the Mosaic covenant. He added four sentences wherein
God tells the people that if they do not keep the commandments he has given
them, he will exile them and reject the Temple.
He then did something else: a long list of curses was added to the text of
Deuteronomy proper. This list of curses that would fall on the people if they did
not keep the covenant is still about the most awful passage in the text. It included
diseases, madness, blindness, military defeats, destruction of crops and livestock;
starvation and cannibalism and then, the clincher: the last curse of Deuteronomy is
“And Yahweh will send you back to Egypt”.
The last sentence of 2 Kings is: “And the entire people, from the smallest to the
biggest, and the officers of the soldiers, arose and came to Egypt, because they
were afraid of the Babylonians”.
And so, until the return of the exiles, the biblical texts warred with each other as
the weapons of the battle of the priests for the control of the peoples’ minds. It was
the final editor in Babylon who put it all together, blending and combining the four
documents, cutting and pasting, adding and subtracting, glossing and enhancing in
so marvelous a way that most people read the text and get the feeling that it is one
continuous story. Only occasionally did he slip and make it obvious to even the
untrained eye that something was wrong. But for the trained eye, for the seeker of
the deeper truths of the Bible, the winding and turning of the text, first this way
and then that, becomes evident. It finally reveals itself as a maze with something at
348 We will deal in a future volume with the possible “source” of this guidance.
349 The Bible, 1 Kings, 9:7.