Authorship of Kings

The Books of Kings (1–2 Kings, originally a single book) are anonymous. They narrate Israel and Judah from the death of David to the Babylonian exile, evaluating each king by faithfulness to the LORD.

Jewish tradition (the Talmud, Baba Bathra 15a) ascribed the work to the prophet Jeremiah, whose lifetime overlapped its closing events. Most readers since have seen it instead as the work of an anonymous prophetic compiler — the so-called ‘Deuteronomistic’ historian — who gathered older court and prophetic records into a single, theologically shaped history.