First Book of Chronicles

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The book opens not with an event but with a single name, and then another: Adam, Seth, Enosh — a chain laid down without verb or comment, generation hooked to generation, running for nine chapters before anything happens at all. A reader who comes to it expecting the storytelling of the older histories finds instead a register, a ledger of descent, the longest unbroken column of names in scripture. The list is the argument. By the time the narrative proper begins, the writer has already established, in nothing but lineage, who Israel is and where it stands in the order of the world.

The First Book of Chronicles is the opening half of Chronicles, a work of the Hebrew Bible that retells Israel’s history from the first man to the reign of David. It carries three names, and each preserves a different reading of what kind of book it is. In the Jewish canon it stands among the Writings — the Ketuvim, the third and final division of the Tanakh after the Law and the Prophets — where the two books of Chronicles are counted as one, under the Hebrew title Divrei ha-Yamim, “the events of the days.” The phrase is old and plain: it is the idiom for annals, the kind of court record a kingdom keeps of its reigns and its accountings, and the same words are used inside the books of Kings to point at the official registers of the monarchy. The Greek translators of the Septuagint gave it another name entirely — Paraleipomena, “the things left out” — reading the book as a supplement, a gathering of what the earlier histories had passed over. The English name descends from neither. It comes by way of Jerome, who, in the prologue he wrote to set the canon in order, judged that the Hebrew title might more fittingly be rendered as a chronicon — a chronicle — of the whole of sacred history; the Latin word, narrowed and carried into English, became “Chronicles.” Three names, three theories of the book held in suspension: an annal, a supplement, a chronicle of everything. The supplement-reading has a long afterlife in the Christian tradition, where the Greek name fixed the expectation that Chronicles exists to fill gaps in the older histories — a verdict that did the book lasting harm, since a book read as a collection of leftovers is a book read for what others omitted rather than for what it set out to say.

The genealogies

The first nine chapters are almost wholly lineage. A chain of names runs from Adam through Noah and the dispersal of the nations, down through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob into the twelve tribes of Israel — but the chain is not laid out evenly. Its weight is deliberate. The line of Judah, the tribe of David, is given pride of place and far more space than any other; the descent of David is traced not only back to its origin but forward, in the third chapter, through the kings of Judah and past the fall of Jerusalem into the generations of the exile and the return, so that the royal line is shown unbroken from David’s birth into the writer’s own present. Benjamin, the tribe of the first king, is treated at length. And at the center of the whole architecture stand the Levites, the priestly families and the clans set apart for the service of the sanctuary, given their own detailed reckoning — the king-producing tribes bracketing the lists, the priestly tribe anchoring the middle. The ninth chapter closes the genealogical movement with a roll of those who returned and resettled in Jerusalem after the exile: householders, priests, Levites, gatekeepers, and the singers stationed in the chambers of the temple. The list of the living present is bound, name by name, to the list that began with the first man.

These chapters are easy to read past, and for centuries they were read past — material for skipping, the part of the Bible no one quotes. The scholarship of the last century has reversed that judgment. The genealogies are not antiquarian ballast inherited and copied without purpose; they are composed, arranged with a shaping hand, and they do work the narrative could not. They place Israel inside the family of all the nations descended from Noah’s sons, and then, within that family, single out the people of the covenant, and within that people the tribe of kingship and the families of the altar. A descent from the first man is the strongest title a community can hold. The list says: this people did not arrive; it was always here, threaded continuously from the beginning of the human race to the door of the temple now standing.

David

The narrative proper begins only at the tenth chapter, and it begins with a death — Saul falling on his own sword on Mount Gilboa, his sons killed around him, the kingship passing because the first king had been unfaithful. Everything after that belongs to David. The book gives his anointing as king over all Israel, the capture of Jerusalem and its making into the city of the kingdom, the roll of his warriors. It gives the bringing of the Ark to Jerusalem — the first attempt that ended in death and was abandoned, the second that succeeded, the Ark installed in its tent with the Levites appointed to carry it and to sing before it. It gives the census that brought a plague, and the threshing floor where the plague stopped, the place David bought and marked as the site where the sanctuary would one day stand. And it gives, at great length and as the heart of the book, David’s preparation for that sanctuary: the amassing of materials, the plans handed to his son, and above all the ordering of the temple personnel — the courses of the priests, the divisions of the Levites, the companies of singers under Asaph and Heman and Jeduthun, the gatekeepers, the officers and the treasurers, each assigned a place in a service not yet begun. The book ends with David’s charge to Solomon, his death in old age, and his son’s secure succession. The reign of Solomon itself, the actual building of the temple, and the long line of the kings of Judah down to the Babylonian exile fall to the Second Book of Chronicles, the latter half of the single Hebrew work; the first book takes the story only to the threshold of the sanctuary it spends its whole second half preparing to raise.

This is a David recognizable from the older books and at the same time transformed. In the books of Samuel he is a man of blood and appetite and grief — the adultery with Bathsheba and the killing of her husband, the revolt of his son Absalom, the long disorder of his house, the intrigue around his deathbed. In Chronicles almost none of this appears. The failings are not defended or explained away; they are simply absent, lifted out of the record, so that what remains is David the founder of worship, the man who fought the wars so that his son could build in peace, the king whose true achievement was not conquest but the establishment of the order of praise. The threshing floor he buys is the floor of the future temple; the wars he wins clear the ground for it; the singers he appoints are still singing, in their courses, in the writer’s own day. David is made into the architect of the cult.

A reworking of the older history

Much of the material from the tenth chapter onward runs parallel to the books of Samuel and Kings — First and Second Kings — and Chronicles often reproduces their very wording, sentence for sentence. The differences are therefore not accidents of an independent tradition; they are choices made against a text the writer had in front of him. Scholarship reads Chronicles as a deliberate reworking of that earlier history, composed long after the events it narrates. The consensus places it in the Persian period, most often in the fourth century before the Common Era, the work of an anonymous author or circle conventionally called the Chronicler — writing in a small temple province under imperial rule, generations after the monarchy had ended and the exiles had returned.

The reworking is selective in a consistent direction, and the direction reveals a theology. David’s failings drop away, as do the northern kingdom’s story told for its own sake and most of what does not bear on Jerusalem and its sanctuary; the temple, its furnishings, its clergy, and above all its music move from the margins of the older account to the center. Where the books of Kings explain the catastrophe of the exile as the slow accumulation of sin across many reigns — the long delayed consequence of generations gone wrong — Chronicles tends toward a tighter and more immediate accounting, in which each generation meets the return of its own conduct within its own lifetime: faithfulness rewarded, infidelity punished, often at once, and the way back never closed to those who turn. Running through the whole is the insistence on “all Israel,” the twelve tribes as a single people, the genealogies from Adam binding even the lost and scattered into one body. The writer is reordering memory for a community that has lost its king and its independence and kept its altar — telling it that the altar was the point all along.

Authorship and the canon

Jewish tradition gave the book an author. The Babylonian Talmud, in a famous passage in the tractate Bava Batra that assigns each book of scripture to a hand, holds that the priest-scribe Ezra wrote his own book and the genealogy of Chronicles down to his own time, and that the work was completed after him. The ascription is intelligible: Ezra is remembered as the restorer of the Law in the restored community, exactly the figure the book’s preoccupations fit. Modern scholarship sets the named author aside and keeps the profile — an anonymous writer of the Persian period, immersed in the temple and its service, working from the older scriptures and from sources of his own. The relation between Chronicles and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, once thought to be the product of a single Chronicler, is now debated rather than assumed; the books share language and outlook but may be distinct works.

The book’s place in the canon was itself unsettled in a telling way. In the order of the Babylonian Talmud, Chronicles comes last of all the Writings, and so closes the Hebrew Bible entire — the scripture ending where it ought, on the edict of the Persian king Cyrus permitting the return and the rebuilding, a final word that points forward to restoration. In the great Tiberian manuscripts, the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, Chronicles stands instead at the head of the Writings, before the Psalms — first rather than last. The two placements frame the same book differently: as the summation of everything, or as the long preface to the poetry and wisdom that follow. In the Greek and Latin Bibles it was moved among the historical books, set after Kings as the supplement its Greek name had called it, and there split into the two volumes that the printed Bible still keeps; in the Hebrew reckoning it remains one book.

Scholarship and the text

The serious study of Chronicles is recent. For a long time the book was treated as a derivative and tendentious abridgment of Samuel-Kings, valuable mainly where it preserved older readings and otherwise a witness to a late and narrowed piety. That estimate has been overturned. Sara Japhet’s monograph on the ideology of the book, first published in Hebrew in 1977 and in English in 1989, argued that Chronicles is a coherent theological composition with a worked-out view of God, retribution, the people, and the kingship, not a careless reshaping but a deliberate one; her full commentary, I & II Chronicles, appeared in the Old Testament Library in 1993 and remains a standard treatment (publisher page). Gary N. Knoppers’ two-volume commentary on the first book, I Chronicles 1–9 and I Chronicles 10–29, published in the Anchor Bible in 2003 and 2004, gave the genealogies in particular their first exhaustive modern treatment and was the first commentary to use the biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea systematically to reconstruct the text the Chronicler worked from (Yale University Press edition). The Hebrew text itself can be read in the primary edition at Sefaria, whose first verse is the bare opening of the chain — Adam, Seth, Enosh — with which the book and this account both begin.

The book carries, in its compilers’ understanding, a particular claim about continuity: that the community rebuilding itself around the Second Temple stood in unbroken descent from Adam, through David, to the present — that the genealogies and the cultic detail were not antiquarian filler but title to a covenant still in force. The community of Second Temple Judaism, gathered again around the courts on the Temple Mount, is being told that it holds the deed. Read this way, the long lists of names that open the book are doing the same work as the narrative that follows. Both are arguing that the worshipping community of the writer’s own day was the rightful heir of everything that came before.

→ Related: Second Book Of Chronicles · Mishnah · Books Of Samuel · First Book Of Kings · Second Book Of Kings · Ketuvim · Tanakh · Ezra · David · Jerome · Second Temple Judaism · Temple Mount · Adam · Abraham