Double folly
The end of 1 Kings might remind you of a home carpentry project. Imagine having finished. You are collecting your tools and replacing them in their assigned resting places.
You stash left-over materials away for potential future use. Finally, you sweep up the sawdust and shavings and bent nails into the dustpan to flip into the trash. This last passage of 1 Kings may strike you as very much like those sweepings from a workshop floor. Here is no fascinating narrative, no connected story, but only bits and pieces about two kings. A dull way to end a book.
But that's just it. It's not the end of a book. The whole book or document consists of 1 and 2 Kings together and doesn't reach its proper end until 2 Kings 25. However, there's only so much text one can get on one scroll, and so the document has to be divided and that division comes after this somewhat bare-bones passage. And yet, though 22.41-53 is not an intended conclusion, it may be an apt one.
