Kings closes the Deuteronomistic History's long argument that covenant faithfulness, understood specifically as worship centralized at the Jerusalem Temple, determines political survival, a thesis the book applies with remarkable consistency across roughly four centuries of two kingdoms' worth of rulers. Its final datable event, Jehoiachin's release from Babylonian imprisonment around 561 BCE, sets the earliest possible date for the book's completed form and situates its final composition among exiles asking how the promises to David's dynasty could be reconciled with the Temple's destruction and the dynasty's apparent end, a question the book's ambiguous, understated closing scene answers only obliquely.
Critical scholarship treats the book as drawing on genuine royal archival material, since it repeatedly cites named source documents no longer extant, and modern historians have found substantial confirmation of Kings' broad political outline, the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, several named kings, in surviving Assyrian and Babylonian royal inscriptions, even where the biblical text's theological interpretation of those events is not something archaeology can confirm or deny. Traditional Jewish authorship ascribes the book to Jeremiah, whose own prophetic book overlaps closely in its account of Judah's final kings and the Babylonian conquest, a connection the Talmudic tradition treats as more than coincidental.