176 Serge Frolov and still choose it as the composition’s terminal point for rhetorical or canonical reasons. If so, Dtr’s opus could be produced decades and even centuries later, well into the post-exilic period. This line of reasoning, allowing for post-exilic, even late post-exilic, Deutero- nomistic literary activity, was initially limited to scattered, often poorly substantiated comments (7). Only in 2002, Raymond Person organized it into a cogent hypothesis (8). The above developments have rendered the historical setting of Dtr vastly indeterminate. Noth placed him or her soon after Jehoiachin’s release, and in any case between this event and the end of the involuntary exile in 538 BCE – a span of slightly more than 20 years. Today, by contrast, Dtr is in effect smudged all the way from the late 700s BCE (Hezekiah’s reign) through 458 BCE (the most likely date of Ezra’s mission that, according to Person, resulted in the demise of the “Deuteronomistic school”), in other words, over an enormous period of circa 250 years. As a result, the concept has lost much of its heuristic value: if a phenomenon is all over the place, in a sense it is nowhere. What follows is an attempt to restore some of this value by demonstrating that the four-verse conclusion of the Former Prophets (2 Kgs 25,27-30) points towards 560 BCE as a relatively secure terminus ante quem of Dtr as an ideological and literary phenomenon. I will argue that, given the Deuteronomistic stance on the monarchy in general and the Davidic kingship in particular, the fact that the corpus ends with an account of Jehoiachin’s release and exaltation by Evil-Merodach suggests that the phenomenon in question did not survive the end of the latter ’s reign and could even be narrowly localized in this reign. II. The Historical Evil-Merodach and the Reception of 2 Kgs 25,27-30 One of the pivotal concepts underlying the Former Prophets is that of YHWH’s irrevocable promise that David’s dynasty will endure forever. The concept in question, first formulated in 2 Samuel 7, (7) See R.F. PERSON, The Deuteronomic School. History, Social Setting, and Literature (SBL Studies in Biblical Literature 2; Atlanta 2002) 33-34 and references there. (8) PERSON, School. Person and his predecessors are diachronic-oriented scholars, but some synchronic studies have likewise assumed post-exilic setting of the Deuteronomistic project, e.g., D. JOBLING, 1 Samuel (Berit Olam; Collegeville 1998) 75-76; B. GREEN, How Are the Mighty Fallen? A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel (JSOTSS 365; Sheffield 2003) 1-19.