Can you comment on the literary structure of 1 and 2 Kings?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2009.

I see that you are a person after my own heart, in that you cannot bring yourself to think of the historical books, either in the Old Testament or the New, as a series of randomly selected incidents, with little or no connection between them. Any theory of divine inspiration, surely, must imply that the selection was deliberate, and the compilation coherent.

So let me make a few tentative remarks about 1 and 2 Kings. At first sight, the proportions of the narrative seem to be very strange. But the proportions will be determined by what the dominant theme or themes of the historian are. One theory that commends itself to me is that the house which Solomon built for God is certainly one of the dominant themes of the two books. Second Samuel tells us that David wanted to build the house, but God would not allow him to. Instead, God announced that his son, Solomon, would be allowed to build the house. Kings, therefore, records at length how God's promise of the building of the house of God was fulfilled by Solomon. Moreover, Solomon's long prayer at the dedication of the house (see 1 Kings 8), indicates that this house was to be a panacea for all Israel's trouble. It was God's provision for their maintenance as the people of God; for their rescue when their enemies came against them; and the centre to which they might look when, under God's discipline for their sins, the nation had been scattered, but now in repentance sought the mercy of God to restore them.

Now this dominant theme is not one that any reader has thought up or imagined. It is explicitly stated in 1 Kings 8. Seeing, then, that the building of the Lord's house was to be so crucial in the subsequent experience of God's people, it is not surprising that the plans and designs for that house are spelled out in detail in chapters 6 and 7.

Five major portions of the text comprise these plans and designs:

1. The structure of the house: many side-rooms, but only one house; with particular attention paid to the relationship between the side-rooms and the house itself (1 Kings 6:1–10).

2. Inserted here among the plans is a special plea by God for obedience (see 1 Kings 11–13).

3. The division of the house internally into the Most Holy Place containing the ark and the Holy Place outside the screen, plus the furniture and the decor of the house (1 Kings 6:14–38).

4. Direction for the building of Solomon's royal house, in the sense of his palace, the women's quarters, the great reception hall, and so forth. The house of the Lord and the king's royal palace were together a unit of government for the people of Israel (see 1 Kings 7:1–12).

5. The major furniture for the outer court of the Lord's house, in particular the two large free-standing pillars, both with their ornamental capitals; and then the laver---so large that it was called a sea—and the ten subsidiary lavers (see 1 Kings 7:13–51).

If this, then, was God's provision for the maintenance of his people, it strikes me that it would be worth studying what Israel's attitude was in the course of the centuries to these provisions. Let me take some examples:

Plan 1 laid it down that there was to be only one house, though there were many side-rooms where the priests and Levites would go about their differing tasks. Now this fact, that in Israel there was only one temple to God throughout the whole land, is in striking contrast to the habit of the pagan nations. In Greece, for instance, there were multitudinous temples to Zeus all over the country, and temples to other gods as well, of course. But in Israel there was meant to be only one house of the Lord. In later centuries, there came to be many synagogues all over Palestine and in those foreign cities in which there were communities of Jews, such as Babylon, Egypt, and Rome; but there never was more than one God-authorized temple in Israel.

Now for the subsequent history. Under Jeroboam, the ten tribes rejected Solomon's son, Rehoboam. They not only went off and established a separate kingdom for the ten tribes, as distinct from the two, but Jeroboam instituted another house of God in Bethel and yet another in Dan. And from that sin, the ten tribes of Israel never recovered.

Or take plan 4, which was concerned for the building of the royal house and quarters for the son of David and David's royal successors down the ages. Later in 2 Kings, we read that a time came when Athaliah, the evil daughter of Ahab of Israel, who was married to Jehoshaphat's son in Judah, rose up and murdered all the royal house of David, i.e. all David\'s royal descendants, and had herself installed as queen, sitting on the throne of David in David's royal apartments. The appropriate chapters in 2 Kings end by telling us how Athaliah's attempt to destroy the royal line of David was defeated. Athaliah was herself executed and the royal house of David reinstituted.

Or take plan 5. At the end of 2 Kings, because of Judah's persistence in idolatry, God allowed Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to come to Jerusalem to destroy the house of God, and in particular to smash the two pillars and their capitals, the large laver, and the ten subsidiary lavers.

These few observations encourage me to look more deeply and in greater detail at the possible thesis: the house of the Lord was God's provision for the maintenance and, if need be, the restoration of his people. When Israel were unfaithful and behaved contrary to God's provision, they got themselves into great trouble. But from time to time, there came revivals, and the secret of those revivals was the return to the principles and plans of the house of the Lord, not just in mechanical obedience to the material directions, but to the moral and spiritual principles to which the symbolism of the house of the Lord pointed.