This is the thing that ye shall do. — 2 Kings 11:5 : “And he charged them saying, This is the thing,” (&c. There he charges the captains of the guard as being the leaders of the conspiracy.
A third. — The third. So 2 Chronicles 23:5. “The third of you who come in on the Sabbath” is read also in 2 Kings 11:5. The chronicler has added the explanatory words: “belonging to the priests and to the Levites.” This can hardly be harmonised with 2 Kings 12:4-12 - The chronicler may have misunderstood the words, which in the older account designate the royal guard; and it might have appeared to him impossible that any but members of the sacred orders would be called together in the Temple by the high priest. (Comp. 2 Chronicles 23:5-6 with 2 Kings 11:4 : “brought them into the house of the Lord.”) But he may also have had before him an account in which the part taken by the sacerdotal caste in the revolution was made much more of than m the account of Kings. Moreover the priests and Levites would be likely to play a considerable part in a movement tending to the overthrow of a cultus antagonistic to their own, especially when that movement originated with their own spiritual head, and was transacted in the sanctuary to which they were attached. The chronicler, therefore, cannot with fairness be accused of “arbitrary alterations,” unless it be presupposed that his sole authority in writing this account was the Second Book of Kings. The priests and Levites used to do duty in the Temple from Sabbath to Sabbath, so that one course relieved another at the end of each week. (See 1 Chronicles 24; Luke 1:5.) That the companies of the royal guards succeeded each other on duty in the same fashion is clear from the parallel narrative.
Shall be porters of the doors. — Warders of the thresholds, that is, of the Temple (1 Chronicles 9:19; 1 Chronicles 9:22). 1 Kings 11:5 says: “The third of you that come in on the Sabbath, they shall keep the guard of the king’s house; “the latter part of which answers to the first sentence of the next verse: “And the third part (shall be) at the king’s house.” The king’s “house” in Kings means the royal palace; the chronicler appears to mean by it his temporary dwelling within the Temple precincts.