Reading the Story Once More—1–2 Chronicles

Abstract

NARRATIVELY SPEAKING, 1–2 Chronicles moves back in time, long before Ezra–Nehemiah—indeed, to the beginning of biblical time, to Adam, whose name is the first word in the book. At the other end, Chronicles draws to a close with exactly the same event and even the same words with which Ezra–Nehemiah begins: Cyrus’s decree that YHWH has charged him to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chr 36:22–23; cf. Ezra 1:1–3). Accordingly, the Talmud asserts that Ezra wrote most of Chronicles, and Nehemiah finished it (Bava Batra 15a). In 1832, Leopold Zunz, the first scholar of Jewish studies as a modern academic discipline, argued that Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles are two parts of a single work. Although that view prevailed for more than a century, in the last fifty years it has been forcefully challenged. On the basis of the two books’ different linguistic usages and theological perspectives, most would now see them as separate compositions. Ezra–Nehemiah may have been among the literary sources used by the author of Chronicles, and likely both were subsequently reworked as they were synchronized into the final account of people and events running from Adam to the restoration community in Jerusalem....