Christine Hayes continues Yale's Introduction to the Old Testament with a lecture on the Deuteronomistic History. She traces the tension between covenant theology, rooted in the conditional Mosaic covenant at Sinai, and royal theology, rooted in the unconditional Davidic covenant on Mt. Zion, and shows how the narrative treats David's failures with surprising candor. The lecture follows the kingdom's split after Solomon's death into Israel and Judah, and the eventual fall of the north to Assyria in 722 BCE and the south to Babylon in 586 BCE. Using redaction criticism, Hayes reconstructs how the Deuteronomistic School interpreted these catastrophes and the Babylonian exile as consequences of covenant violation rather than as proof of divine defeat. Chapter markers move from the honesty of the David story through the tensions in Kings to the separation of the kingdom and the school's historiosophy. This is lecture fourteen of the Open Yale Courses series on the Hebrew Bible.