After many years of mulling over the reasoning for the B2 text, Clements has become confident that it was composed during the Exile when many deportees saw Jerusalem, reduced to rubble, as “discredited and no longer suitable as a focus of hope and protection.” The idea behind the B2 account was to show that “when the right precondition of faith and obedience on the part of the king was present, God may give a miraculous victory.”
