Introduction

Chronicles, fixed in Jewish tradition as the conclusion of the Bible, is, at least from a modern perspective, the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. In all likelihood, it was composed sometime in the late decades of the fifth century B.C.E., after the Return to Zion and after the mission of Ezra and Nehemiah in the middle of that century to renew the Temple cult and establish the canonical authority of the Torah. Given its pervasive interest in the details of the Temple ritual and in the lines of succession of the priests and the Levites, it was probably written by a priest, or at the very least, someone close to priestly circles. The Hebrew Bible in general is much attached to genealogies because in this patriarchal and patrilineal society, following lines from father to son through a series of generations was conceived as a way of establishing origins and confirming the legitimacy of the descendants who could trace their descent from these origins. In Chronicles, however, the place of genealogies is endowed with a new order of magnitude. The book begins with Adam but races through Genesis to David chiefly by means of genealogical lists. The first nine chapters of ¹Chronicles—as with Samuel and Kings, the division into two “books” is an artifact of the editorial process—are a relentless listing of names, some familiar, many not. Although the lists have provided considerable fodder for scholarly research, it is safe to say that these nine chapters constitute the least readable extended passage in the Bible.

The main focus of the book is on the kings of Judah. 1 Chronicles 10 picks up the narrative in the Book of Samuel with the death of Saul and David’s assumption of the throne and his conquest of Jerusalem. From this point onward, there are ample borrowings from Samuel and Kings, often showing a replication of entire passages with only minor changes. Linguistically, because Chronicles hews so closely to the Deuteronomistic History, it does not exhibit a great many features of Late Biblical Hebrew, as one might expect, though not infrequently it reflects a certain loosening of syntactic and idiomatic norms that is characteristic of this late period. In any case, the obvious question is what the motive of the Chronicler was in producing a historical narrative that is to a large extent a reproduction of an existing historical narrative which had achieved a degree of canonical status after being edited in the Babylonian exile. Most prominently, this is a historical account that is intended to highlight the eternal legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty and its firm integration with the priestly hierarchy, which traces its own origins back to Aaron. Consequently, the portrait of David has been, one might say, airbrushed. There is no report of his acting as a vassal for the Philistine king Agag. The vivid scene in Samuel when David plays the madman and rolls on the ground drooling in order to save himself from the Philistines is eliminated. The representation of David as a canny political player is gone. David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband are stricken from the record. David’s demise is reported tersely, with no trace of the dense machinations before his death involving Nathan and Bathsheba that brought Solomon to the throne and no mention of his deathbed exhortation to Solomon to pay off scores against his enemies. Instead, David conveys the throne to Solomon and then proceeds to divide the priests and Levites into diverse orders, which occasions still another long list of names that runs on for some chapters.

David’s name recurs fairly often as Chronicles proceeds to later eras, often joined with Solomon’s. Repeatedly, he is said to have instituted the regimen of the temple cult and of its musical aspect, even establishing the precedent for which instruments were to be played in the temple service. He is also said to have produced written texts that authorized these sundry procedures, even though there is no hint of his doing any writing of this sort in the Book of Samuel. This is, in sum, a representation of David as an exemplary establishment figure, unswervingly virtuous, providing precedents and a model for the political and cultic tradition that he is seen as having founded.

It should also be noted that Chronicles incorporates a variety of narrative details that appear nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History. Where they come from remains a matter of conjecture. Some scholars conclude that the Chronicler had at his disposal alternative historical texts from which at some points he chose to draw. This may well be the case, but it is also possible that he composed these passages himself—at least a few of them appear to serve his ideological purposes. At the conclusion of the story of each king, he observes, in imitation of the formula used in the Book of Kings, that “the rest of the acts of King X are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.” In the Book of Kings, this formula probably refers to court annals, which may once have existed but of course have been lost to us. It is unclear what text is referred to in Chronicles, and since it is probably not the canonical Book of Kings, the “book” is not capitalized in this translation. It is also possible that the reference is to a nonexistent text, the Chronicler merely imitating the formula from Kings. At a good many other points, he says that the rest of the acts of the kings in question are written down in a particular book by a prophet or seer. The likelihood of historical reports in such visionary texts is small, so this looks like a literary gesture in part to convey a sense that the Chronicler, a writer who is insistently theological, is familiar with works of a spiritual cast that incorporate information about the figures of his own narrative.

In the end, Chronicles offers an object lesson in how as a tradition evolves it may be prone to domesticate the unruly and challenging traits of its own origins. The tales of the Patriarchs and the story of the troubled founding of the Israelite monarchy in their early formulation are full of human contradictions, moral ambiguities, psychological probings, and sometimes the intimation of dark and destructive impulses. It is this complexity of imagination that produces some of the greatest narratives that have come out of the whole ancient world. The Chronicler is impelled to rewrite these stories in order to make them yield a picture of divinely ordained political and cultic practice. He speaks of good and bad kings, as something he knows well from reading the Book of Kings, but these are now neatly divided between those who do right in the eyes of the LORD and those who do evil in the eyes of the LORD. The national history is painted in black and white, and the haunting shadows, the chiaroscuro, the sudden illuminations of classical Hebrew narrative, vanish in this work.