Evil-Merodach and the Deuteronomist 187 scribes, it would be nothing but easy. If so, in strictly technical terms it would not take a “school” to launch and complete the Deutero- nomistic project in Evil-Merodach’s twenty-two-month reign: even a single individual, and certainly two or three, could do the job without overexerting themselves. Of course, the sheer length is by no means the only concern that could make it difficult to date this project in its entirety to 562-560 BCE. Much more problematic for this dating is the fact that the Former Prophets appears to display multiple conceptual tensions, factual discrepancies, as well as compositional, stylistic, and lexical variations. Would it be plausible to ascribe a corpus that seems to be highly heterogeneous (or even its pre-canonical substrate) to a single individual or a very small group working over a period of less than two years? Three considerations make it possible to answer this question in the affirmative. First, variations and even tensions do not necessarily presuppose multiple authorship. Even a modern text, doubtlessly produced by a single author, can be inconsistent and even self- contradictory in both factual and conceptual terms (37). Furthermore, allegedly discrepant pieces may in fact be mutually complementary, with their juxtaposition adding nuance rather than creating tension. Thus, it has been frequently argued that 1 Kgs 2,4; 6,12; 8,25 cannot come from the same hand as 2 Samuel 7 because they allegedly qualify the Davidic promise by making it contingent on the behavior of individual monarchs (38). However, the proposition that wayward kings (37) In J.R.R. TOLKIEN’s The Lord of the Rings, Lotho Pimple, briefly appearing in the opening chapters only as a “sandy-haired” (not “pimpled”) son of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and entirely eclipsed there by his domineering mother, inexplicably emerges towards the end as an arch-villain in his own right. Mikhail BULGAKOV’s Heart of a Dog cites the age of a character at death first as 28 and just a few pages later as 25. On numerous glaring contradictions in Edgar POE’s Arthur Gordon Pym, see E.A. POE, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales (ed. J.G. KENNEDY) (Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford 1998) 286-288. Chronological discrepancies are especially common: they occur not only in fiction (for several egregious examples in Jules Verne’s novels, see FROLOV, Turn, 199), but also in para-scholarly publications. For instance, according to ASIMOV’S Guide to the Bible. The Old and New Testaments (New York 1981) 122, the reign of Amenhotep IV ended in 1353 BCE, after which Ikhnaton (sic) reigned for seventeen years and was succeeded by Tutankhamon in… 1352 BCE. (38) CROSS, Myth, 287, ascribed 1 Kgs 2,4; 6,11-13; 8,25b to the second, exilic Dtr.