AUTHOR

In 538 BC, having overthrown the Babylonian Empire the previous year, Cyrus of Persia decreed that the Jews could return to their homeland after seventy years in exile. The first seventy-five years were difficult. There was no temple, and the land available to the returned Jews had included only about a 15-mile radius around Jerusalem. The walls of Jerusalem were in ruins. The people were vulnerable to the enemies who surrounded them—their neighbors hardly welcomed these “interlopers” who had come home to compete with them politically and economically. Harvests were poor or failed completely, and the people had to endure the subsequent famines. Morale was low and there was little to motivate the people’s spiritual life.

The author of the books of Chronicles, whom we shall call the Chronicler, saw a need to remind the returnees of their national identity. This identity superseded the division of the nation into northern and southern kingdoms and found its center in the law of Moses. With the spiritual life of the nation in shambles, temple worship needed to be restored by the Levites and priests as the true mediators of God’s Word and will. So the Chronicler sat down to pen a book to encourage a change in the self-image and identity of God’s chosen people.

These two books were originally one. The book’s Hebrew title is “the words of the days” or “the events of the times,” that is, the annals of the nation of Israel. When the book was translated into Greek (the Septuagint version, or LXX), it was divided into two parts. Since the Greek language used vowels and consonants, whereas the Hebrew text at the time included only consonants, this division was possibly made because of the expanded length of the translated text. The Septuagint gave the book the title “the things omitted,” referring to the fact that Chronicles includes material not found in the parallel material in the books of Samuel and Kings. Several hundred years later, the Christian scholar Jerome described the book as “a chronicle of all sacred history.” Our modern title, Chronicles, is a shortened form of that description.

Chronicles appears as the last book of the third division of the Jewish canon, the “Writings.” The Septuagint, Vulgate, and modern translations place it after Kings and before Ezra—Nehemiah, probably because its contents were historical and overlapped the period narrated by Samuel and Kings. In fact, the book is a history of the Hebrew people from Adam to the Persian king Cyrus, which parallels the writings of Genesis through Kings, with Ezra—Nehemiah as a continuation of what happened after Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to their land.

The earliest that Chronicles could have been written was 538 BC since the end of the book records Cyrus’s decree of that date. The use of Chronicles in the book of Ben Sira (published in 180 BC), and the second-century Septuagint translation of Chronicles, give us the approximate latest date when it could have been written. Thus we have about a 350-year span of time when the book could have been produced.

But we can be more specific than that. First Chronicles 3:19-24 records Zerubbabel’s descendants for two (not, as it might appear, four) generations. And since Zerubabbel can be dated to around 520 BC, this means Chronicles was compiled around 400 BC or slightly later. There is no scholarly consensus on the exact date, but the purposes for which the book was intended suggest that a fourth century BC date fits best.

While the author of Chronicles is anonymous, rabbinic authorities claimed that Ezra the scribe wrote the genealogies. Did the same author write the Chronicles as well as Ezra and Nehemiah? Since the book ends with Cyrus’s decree, the author could not have lived much earlier than Ezra’s time. The opening verses of Ezra are also the closing verses of Chronicles, and this means the author of Ezra and Nehemiah had access to Chronicles. However, these same facts are compatible with the conclusion that Chronicles is an independent work. Ezra may simply have borrowed the last verses of Chronicles to establish a context for his work.

The common linguistic features of the books are standard post-exilic Hebrew, proving they were written in the same linguistic era but not necessarily by the same person. The common theological position and viewpoint supports the notion that both authors were from the same theological community and shared the same religious values. Ultimately, whether written by one author or two, Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah stand on their own as separate works with separate purposes and aims, exhibiting internally consistent unity of composition. They should be interpreted as complete, self-contained works.

Reading Chronicles carefully reveals a number of facts about the author. He was evidently a member of the post-exilic theological community with a religious orientation to life rather than a secular one. He may have been a priest or a Levite, but he certainly believed God’s will was mediated to the people though the Levitical priesthood. He reflected the values and ideals of Ezekiel and some of the postexilic prophets about Temple worship and correct ritual observances. This theological emphasis on strict adherence to ritual and social organization was a preemptive effort to prevent a fall back into the idolatry and apostasy that had brought on God’s judgment in the first place. The Chronicler, like the post-exilic prophets, did not desire a repeat of the Lord’s judgment on Israel for disobedience to the first commandment. He emphasized a strict compliance with liturgical worship and moral purity in order to realize God’s blessing upon the newly restored nation.

First Chronicles starts with nine chapters of genealogies that trace Adam’s line down to the sons of Jacob. The rest of 1 Chronicles (chaps. 10–29) narrate the life of David. The first nine chapters of 2 Chronicles detail the reign of David’s son, Solomon. The stories of David and Solomon should be treated as one unit for the Chronicler presented both of them as models for Israel’s kings. Chapters 10–36 record the history of the southern kingdom of the divided monarchy, Judah.

THE IMPORTANCE OF GENEALOGIES

Genealogies were very important to the Chronicler, and thus the modern reader cannot gloss over them and still expect to understand the message of the book. Some were used to show the kinship between Israel and neighboring tribes, while others established the legitimacy for persons of rank and authority. The genealogies reflect a teleological view of history, that is, a view in which humankind is moving toward a goal set by the Creator. More importantly, they provide a framework for the Chronicler’s concept of “all Israel.”

The Chronicler used this important phrase forty-five times. For the Chronicler, there was no more north and south, Israel and Judah, but just “all Israel.” His genealogies emphasized the unity of the sons of Jacob, whom the Chronicler always called “Israel.” “All Israel” accepted David as king at Hebron (1Ch 11:1). The lists of 1 Chronicles 11–12 are apparently motivated by the “all Israel” concept. “All Israel” was at the dedication of the temple (2Ch 7:8). Hezekiah invited “all Israel” to come to Jerusalem for worship (2Ch 30:1), and although most mocked the invitation, some “humbled themselves” before the Lord and came to worship at Jerusalem (2Ch 30:11). Although Israel had been divided, the damage was never irreparable, and repentance was always available to the people.

In Chronicles the northern kingdom is essentially ignored, except insofar as it interacted with Judah. This is an important clue to the Chronicler’s purpose for writing the book. He sought to prove that the newly restored nation was the true successor to the Davidic covenant. It is no surprise, then, that most of the text of Chronicles is devoted to David and Solomon, representing the ideals of kingship laid out in Deuteronomy. The author assumed his readers knew the contents of the books of Samuel and Kings, and so he gave only enough detail to establish the historical context. Also omitted were the personal failings of David and Solomon as well as the stories of Absalom, Amnon, and Adonijah. They were not relevant to temple worship and other institutions of the theocracy (God-ruled government).

Some have suggested that the Chronicler was attempting to whitewash David and Solomon’s sins and failures, but it is clear that the Chronicler expected his readers to be familiar with the books of Samuel and Kings. These negative elements in the lives of the kings were public and well-known; they were simply not pertinent to the issues pressing upon the Chronicler. He focused upon the consequences of idolatry and God’s desire for the sinner to repent and return to a life of obedience to the law of Moses. This obedience is the basic characteristic of anyone who had a covenant relationship with the Lord, since God’s moral character had to be reflected by the nation he had chosen.

In his grand survey of Israelite history, the Chronicler made liberal use of sources within the Scriptures: the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible), Joshua, Samuel, and especially Kings, which he explicitly cited (2Ch 27:7; 35:27; 36:8). For the genealogies, the Chronicler must have drawn upon other sources than just the biblical ones. The difference in arrangement and balance is great enough to suggest there were other sources that survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC.

THE RELIABILITY OF 1 AND 2 CHRONICLES

While it is certain that the Chronicler knew of and consulted with the book of Kings, a careful comparison of the parallel passages show Chronicles giving details not found in Kings, and, at the same time, omitting details that Kings includes. This suggests that the Chronicler used a source other than Kings, but that this source or sources was also used by the author of Kings. Second Chronicles 24:27 cites “Writing of the Book of the Kings.” Other extra-canonical sources used by the Chronicler were narratives of the prophets and seers (1Ch 29:29; 2Ch 9:29; 12:15; 13:22; 24:30; 26:22; 32:32; 33:19) and official genealogies preserved in government archives, although these have been lost to us.

Some of the differences in text of the books of Chronicles arose from the Chronicler using a different Hebrew text tradition from that of the author of Kings. Textual criticism has traced the history of manuscripts by comparing sets of text variations among manuscripts. They conclude that during the time of the Chronicler there were two major “families” of Hebrew manuscripts of that book: the family that eventually became known as the “Masoretic Text” (MT) and a lesser known “Palestinian” family, represented by the (Lucianic) LXX and the Samaritan Pentateuch. Chronicles used a copy of Samuel—Kings that is closer to the Palestinian family than the MT used for our printed editions of the Hebrew Bible. But most of the differences can be accounted for by comparing and contrasting the literary purposes of Kings and Chronicles.

Are the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles historically trustworthy? Yes, but because of the clearly Judean and Levitical viewpoint from which the author wrote and selected material from his sources, critics have tended to hold Chronicles to be slanted and so not a valuable historical witness. But the Chronicler did not claim to be writing a modern, objective historical narrative. The selection of material was based upon different criteria. Chronicles was written in the context of a postexilic Jewish theocracy to present a corrective understanding of Israel’s history from its origins to the ending of Israel’s exile by Cyrus’s decree. The Chronicler synthesized a historical narrative from a specific theological stance and intended it as an antidote to contemporary spiritual apathy.