CHRONICLES
By the side of this comprehensive history stands another which is in
part parallel, in part supplementary, to it, Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah.
It differs from the former in being the work of one author, whose
characteristic conceptions, interests, and manner make it easy to
distinguish his writing from the sources he incorporates. His
peculiarities are the better known because there is so much of his own
in the books--not far from half the matter contained in them.
The succession of the high priests is brought down to Jaddua, who was
contemporary with Alexander the Great, and lists of heads of priestly
and levitical families are given in Neh. 12 for the reign of Darius
(Codomannus), the last Persian king. The book can, therefore, not be
put much, if any, before 300 B.C., and more probably it was written in
the following century.
The history begins with the death of Saul and the election of David as
king by all Israel at Hebron (1 Chron. 10-11). The preceding chapters
are filled with genealogies, beginning with Adam. Twenty-six verses
bring us to Abraham, and the second chapter opens with the sons of
Israel, while the third is a list of the sons of David and of his
successors on the throne to the fall of the kingdom, with the
descendants of the last king through several generations. These
genealogies, to which historical notices of different kinds are
frequently attached, are in part compiled from various places in the
Pentateuch and Historical Books, in part more freely reproduced from
such passages; but a large remainder has no parallel in the older
work. The author, here as elsewhere, evidently attaches great
importance to these lists, in particular to those which enabled the
families of his own time, clerical and lay, or the inhabitants of
towns and villages, to trace their pedigree back to remote times.
It is not without reason that the historical narrative sets in with
David, and that the first event of his reign recorded is the taking of
Jerusalem; for Jerusalem is from first to last the centre of the
author's interest. He writes the history of Judah alone, touching upon
the kingdom of Israel only in its relation to Judah. The desire to
magnify and glorify the kingdom of Judah in its great days, especially
under David and Solomon, to represent it as the most powerful,
wealthy, and magnificent among the nations, not only of its time but
of any time, frequently expresses itself in enormous exaggerations.
David could raise a native army of a million and a half, almost as
many as, according to Herodotus--who certainly does not underestimate
the numbers--Xerxes mustered from the whole Persian empire for the
invasion of Greece; he laid away, "out of his poverty," to build the
temple, a hundred thousand talents of gold and a million talents of
silver--over three times the national debt of the United Kingdom in
1912; at the dedication of the temple Solomon sacrificed 22,000
bullocks and 120,000 sheep and goats; and so on. It is evident that
the author has raised the figures out of the grasp of his own
imagination.
From the same motive, if it is possible to avoid it, he tells nothing
to discredit the kings whom he thus extols. David's sin in taking a
census is necessarily related, because the sequel of it was the choice
of a site for the future temple, but, characteristically, not God but
Satan tempted him to number the people; otherwise none of the misdeeds
and misfortunes which are set down so impartially in 2 Samuel is so
much as alluded to by the Chronicler; David is in his pages the model
king. Solomon fares as well; nothing is said of the perverting
influence of his foreign wives nor the temples he erected to their
gods. Indeed, his piety is such that he will not allow Pharaoh's
daughter, apparently the only foreign wife the Chronicler gives him,
to live in the city of David, for the neighbourhood of the ark is
holy. Solomon's press-gangs were one of the greatest grievances of the
tribes; the author of Chronicles takes pains to aver that Solomon
raised his corvée from the remnants of the Hittites and other heathen;
no Israelites were put to such work. In Kings we read that Solomon
ceded twenty towns in Galilee to Hiram, king of Tyre, in payment for
materials and services in the building of the temple; to the
Chronicler such a transaction is unimaginable, and he amends it by
making Hiram give the towns to Solomon.
All this is, however, incidental to the main purpose of the book to
exalt Jerusalem as the religious capital, its temple as the place
which God has chosen for his abode, its liturgy as the correct form of
worship, its priests and levites as the only ministry of valid orders
and unimpeachable succession. It is not solely the pride of the
churchman which prompts him to dwell on these things. The assertion is
so emphasized and reiterated that we can hardly mistake in inferring a
controversial animus, especially when we recall that at the time of
writing there was a rival temple on Mt. Gerizim near Shechem, at one
of the most venerable holy places in the land.
This temple is said by Josephus to have been erected in the time of
Alexander the Great, in avowed rivalry to the temple in Jerusalem. The
high priests of the Samaritan temple were a branch of the Jewish
high-priestly line, its ritual was the same, the Pentateuch was the
Law in Shechem as well as in Jerusalem. If the Jews maintained that
Jerusalem was the only place in the land where sacrifice might
lawfully be made to God, the Samaritans made the same exclusive claim
for their temple: Shechem, not Jerusalem, was the place (unnamed in
Deuteronomy) which God had chosen out of all the tribes to put his
name there. At Shechem was held the first great religious assembly of
Israel after the invasion of Canaan; there, on Gerizim, the first
altar of Jehovah was erected by his express command (see Deut. xi.
26-29; Jos. viii. 30-35; Jos. 24; especially Deut. xxvii. 4, where
"Ebal" in the Jewish Bible is an anti-Samaritan substitute for the
original "Gerizim"). The rivalry of Shechem was thus a serious menace,
and so the Jerusalem Jews treated it.
In their eyes the people of the old territory of Ephraim were
descendants of the assorted heathen whom the Assyrian kings had
colonized in the cities of Samaria after transplanting to the eastern
provinces of the empire the old Israelite population of the region
(see 2 Kings 17--a very late passage--noting especially vs. 34, "unto
this day"). On the other hand, Jerusalem and the region about it,
after lying waste for seventy years, had been repeopled under Cyrus by
Jews of pure race returning from the exile in Babylonia, who rebuilt
the temple and restored the worship as prescribed in the law. They
were surrounded by the "peoples of the land," who were regarded as
descendants of the ancient heathen of Canaan with whom intermarriage
was forbidden in the law. This is the Chronicler's representation: the
returned exiles are the only genuine stock, their priesthood the only
legitimate sons of Aaron, the rest of the ministry, down to the temple
slaves, was authenticated by recorded pedigrees (see Ezra ii. 59-63),
and the elaborate liturgy of his own time the same in all particulars
which had been used in the temple from its foundation.
The author has an exaggerated interest in this liturgy, and especially
in the part taken in it by the minor orders of the clergy, levites,
musicians, singers, door-keepers, and the rest. The levites are
provided for in the Pentateuch, but the orchestra and choruses,
according to the Chronicler, were organized by David (1 Chron. 23-26),
who thus provided for the proper execution of his Psalms. When a great
religious function is described, the music invariably comes in for a
prominent notice (e.g. 2 Chron. v. 12 f.).
We have seen that the historians of the seventh and following
centuries, the so-called deuteronomist school, wrote or interpreted
the history to exemplify the doctrine that defection from the national
religion is surely punished by national calamities. The Chronicler's
doctrine of retribution is at once harder and more individual. He also
turns it about: unusual suffering is proof of sin. Thus, Asa was,
according to Kings, a conspicuously good king, but in his old age he
had the gout. The Chronicler, by the mouth of a prophet, explains why:
he relied on the king of Syria to help him against Israel, instead of
relying on the Lord. The king clapped the prophet into prison for
meddling with affairs of state, and so added another affront to God.
He was impenitent, however, for though the gout was very bad, "yet
sought he not unto the Lord, but to the physicians." Uzziah, another
godly king, was in his later years afflicted with leprosy, a disease
which was regarded as peculiarly the stroke of God. The Chronicler
gives the reason: the king presumed to burn incense on the altar in
spite of the protest of the priest, and was smitten with leprosy on
the spot.
There is no reason to impugn the author's good faith in such
emendations of his sources. He thought he knew the laws of history,
and if in the particular instance the record did not correspond, it
must be defective. But whatever apology may be made for his good
intentions, it need hardly be said that the unsupported testimony of a
doctrinaire historian who deals so sovereignly with the facts is of no
weight.
The Chronicler names a considerable number of books as authorities for
different periods of the history; the Book of the Kings of Judah and
Israel (or Israel and Judah) and the Book of the Kings of Israel are
repeatedly cited for things not related in our Book of Kings. For more
information about Joash the reader is referred to the "Midrash of the
Book of Kings," and for Abijah to the "Midrash of the Prophet Iddo,"
titles that in later times, at least, would designate an edifying
exposition in which full licence was given to the imagination to
embroider the theme with picturesque inventions. The favourite
references, however, are to writings bearing the names of
prophets--Samuel, Nathan, Gad, Ahijah, Iddo, Shemaiah, Jehu son of
Hanani. The title History of Samuel the Seer, of Nathan the Prophet,
and so on, may mean either _about_ Samuel or _by_ Samuel. Very likely
the author entertained the theory which subsequently prevailed among
the Jews that in each age the prophets wrote down the events of their
own time in which many of them had a conspicuous part.
The question is of no other interest; for an examination of the
extracts from his sources which the Chronicler has incorporated or
condensed shows that (with small possible exceptions to be considered
hereafter) his material was all taken from our Book of Kings. This
enables us to confront his history of Judah with his sources and
acquaint ourselves with his habitual way of dealing with them, an
investigation not only instructive for his method, but of the greatest
importance when we come to the Chronicler's history of the Persian
period, where, for the most part, his sources are not independently
preserved.
In the first place it will be noticed that he has selected from the
history in Samuel and Kings the parts which particularly interested
him for their own sake, such as the description of religious
ceremonies, or could be used as a text for the doctrines he had most
at heart, and has therefore passed over a very large part of the
contents of his source. Precisely so, the author of Kings, two
centuries earlier, had dealt with his sources, though with a different
interest. What the Chronicler chose to include he generally copied out
without much change; the present variations in the text are chiefly
due to divergent transmission. (Compare, for illustration, 1 Chron. x.
1-xi. 47 with 1 Sam. 31 and 2 Sam. xxiii. 8-39, or 1 Chron. xvii.
1-xx. 8 with 2 Sam. 7, 8, 10 and 12.). Often he introduces in these
extracts, or appends to them, notes of his own which would in almost
all cases be certainly recognizable on internal evidence even if we
had not the text of Kings before us. In a few places he condenses or
abridges the narrative of Kings, as in 2 Chron. xxxii. 1-23 compared
with 2 Kings xviii. 13-xix. 37.
Of alterations, or, from the author's own point of view, corrections,
of the older history several examples have been given above. One more,
of a striking character, may be cited, viz. 2 Chron. xxii. 10-xxiii.
21 compared with 2 Kings 11. The Carian mercenaries of the guard in
the sacred precincts of the temple (2 Kings xi. 4) were a plain
profanation, of which the pious chief priest could not have been
guilty. The Chronicler accordingly rewrites the story, substituting
the levites (note 2 Chron. xxiii. 6) for the obnoxious heathen.
Finally, he sometimes freely expands on his text, as in the building
of Solomon's temple (2 Chron. 2-3).
In view of the Chronicler's multiplied references to authorities, it
has frequently been assumed that his immediate source was not the
Books of Samuel and Kings, but a work of a "midrashic" character--that
is, euphemistically, a work with more concern for edification than for
historical verity--written not long before his time from the same
point of view and with the same salient interests, which the
Chronicler in all simplicity took for authentic history. This ghost
source eludes, however, all attempts to catch it actually walking. It
may perfectly well be that the Chronicler did not invent everything in
the book which is plainly invention, but if not, we can only apply the
famous contribution of an undergraduate to Homeric criticism, "the
Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name."
There remain a few short notices, not derived from the Pentateuch or
Historical Books, whose contents and form suggest that they are scraps
which the Chronicler picked up from some other source, e.g. the
migration of the Simeonites, 1 Chron. iv. 24-43 (in the main). But
these passages are so few, and generally of so little historical
importance, that the question need here not be pursued farther.