Second Book of Chronicles

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The Second Book of Chronicles is the latter half of Chronicles, a historical work of the Hebrew Bible that retells the story of Israel and Judah from a priestly vantage centered on Jerusalem and its Temple. In the Hebrew canon Chronicles forms a single book, Divrei ha-Yamim — “the events of the days” — and stands at or near the close of the Writings, the Ketuvim; the division into two books, and the placement among the historical books of the Old Testament, came by way of the Greek and Latin versions. The Septuagint translators named the work Paraleipomena, “things left over” or “things passed over,” reading it as a supplement gathering up what the earlier histories had omitted, and split the long scroll across two codices for convenience of copying. The Latin tradition kept the division; the familiar English title descends from Jerome, who suggested the whole could be called a chronicon of the entire sacred history. The second book opens with Solomon and runs to the fall of the kingdom of Judah. The genealogies that fill the opening chapters of the work — the descent from Adam through the tribes to the house of David and the personnel of the sanctuary — belong to the First Book of Chronicles; the second book begins where lists give way to building.

Solomon as temple-builder

Its first nine chapters give the reign of Solomon, and they give it almost entirely as the reign of a temple-builder. Where the parallel account in the First Book of Kings sets Solomon’s wisdom, wealth, and later failings side by side — the seven hundred wives, the high places built for foreign gods, the apostasy that the older history names as the root of the kingdom’s coming division — Chronicles concentrates on the construction and dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, the furnishings, the priestly and Levitical orders, and the prayer and sacrifice at its opening. The foreign wives and the late falling-away are simply not there. The Solomon of Chronicles asks for wisdom and receives it, levies the labor, contracts with Huram of Tyre for cedar and for a master bronzeworker, raises the house over seven years, and stands before the assembled people with hands spread to dedicate it. He is given without shadow, a figure of peace whose very name is read against shalom and whose reign is the still center the whole book turns upon — the king under whom the sanctuary at last rises on the place David had prepared but was not permitted to build.

The dedication is the hinge of the account. Fire falls from heaven and consumes the offering; the glory fills the house so that the priests cannot enter; the Levitical singers, named and ordered, sound the refrain that the divine goodness endures forever. The narrative lingers on the bronze sea, the ten lampstands, the courts, the veil worked in blue and purple and crimson — the inventory of a cult rendered with the care of a writer for whom the arrangement of worship is itself the argument. This is the Chronicler’s characteristic move: to make the Temple, its officers, and its music the substance of a reign that the older sources had told as statecraft and downfall.

The kings of Judah alone

The remainder of the book follows the kings of Judah alone. After Solomon’s death his son Rehoboam loses the ten northern tribes, and from that rupture the northern kingdom of Israel drops almost wholly from view; its kings appear only where they impinge on Judah, and its separate history — the dynasties, the prophets Elijah and Elisha, the fall of Samaria that fills so much of the Second Book of Kings — is left to one side. The legitimate line, the throne of David at Jerusalem with the Temple beside it, is the only continuity the book will follow. Through some twenty reigns it traces a single measure: faithfulness to the one sanctuary and its God, against which each king is weighed.

The pattern is exact and immediate. The faithful prosper; the faithless are struck down, and struck down in their own generation rather than across the long arrears of inherited guilt that the books of Kings prefer. This is sometimes called the doctrine of immediate retribution: prosperity, victory in war, building projects, and the loyalty of the people attend the king who keeps faith, while defeat, disease, and conspiracy fall on the one who turns aside — often after a prophet has come to warn him, so that the judgment is never arbitrary but always announced. Asa reforms and flourishes, then in his disease seeks physicians and not the Lord, and dies. Jehoshaphat sends Levites through the towns with the book of the law to teach, and wins a battle by setting the singers before the army rather than the spearmen. Uzziah grows strong, then oversteps into the priests’ office to burn incense and is struck with the skin disease that drives him from the house of God to a separate dwelling until his death. Manasseh — in Kings the unrelieved villain whose sins seal the kingdom’s doom — is in Chronicles carried captive to Babylon, humbled, restored upon his repentance, a case made to fit the rule. Above them stand the two great reformers the book most admires: Hezekiah, who cleanses the Temple, restores the Passover, and keeps faith through the Assyrian siege, given here a longer and more cultic treatment than anywhere else in scripture; and Josiah, under whom the book of the law is found, the high places are thrown down, and the Passover is kept on a scale unmatched since the days of the judges. After Josiah falls at Megiddo the descent is swift — four last kings, the Babylonian armies, the burning of the house, the breaking of its bronze, the carrying away of the survivors to serve in Babylon until the rise of the Persian kingdom.

Then the book stops, abruptly, on the decree of Cyrus permitting the exiles to return and rebuild — the same lines, almost word for word, with which the Book of Ezra begins. In the Greek and Latin arrangement the two run on, history continuing into restoration. In the Hebrew order, where Chronicles stands last, the effect is the reverse and the more striking: the canon does not end in ash. It ends on a Persian king’s word to the scattered people to go up and build.

A late history, written backward

Scholarship generally treats Chronicles as a late composition, most often dated to the Persian or early Hellenistic period, well after the events it narrates and after the Books of Samuel and Kings on which it draws. The broad agreement falls in the fourth century before the Common Era. In its finished form the work must postdate Ezra, who is placed in Judah around the year 400; its upper limit is read from what it does not say — its silence about the Hellenizing of Jewish life that followed Alexander, which suggests a hand that wrote before that pressure made itself felt, in the late Persian years or just over the threshold into the Hellenistic age. A further clue lies inside the text: the closing genealogies of the Davidic house carry the line several generations past the exile, and how far they run has been used to set the floor for the book’s composition. The Aramaic loanwords, the late Hebrew syntax, and the interest in the Levites and the Temple guilds — the singers and gatekeepers organized in the same way the restored community of the Book of Nehemiah describes — all point the same direction, toward a writer of the post-exilic sanctuary rather than the monarchy he portrays. The author, or the circle, is known by convention as the Chronicler. Jewish tradition named him: in the tractate Bava Batra the sages hold that Ezra wrote his own book and the genealogies of Chronicles down to himself, and that Nehemiah finished the rest — a memory that binds the two works as a single restoration project even where modern philology pulls them apart. Sara Japhet’s study of their language, weighing the vocabulary and grammar of Chronicles against Ezra–Nehemiah, argued that the two are not after all the product of one writer, and reopened a question the older consensus had treated as closed.

The book is read, then, less as a fresh chronicle than as a re-narration: a selective retelling that foregrounds the Temple cult, the legitimate Davidic line, and the pattern in which faithful kings prosper and faithless ones are struck down. Its sources lie open beside it. For long stretches it reproduces the wording of Samuel and Kings, and the places where it diverges are not slips but choices — what is added (the Levites, the singers, the doorkeepers, the immediate sanction of conduct) and what is dropped (David’s adultery, Solomon’s idolatry, the whole tangled saga of the north) compose a single consistent emphasis. The Chronicler also cites sources no longer extant — the records of Samuel the seer, the words of Nathan the prophet, the visions of Iddo — and whether these are real archives, alternate names for the canonical histories, or a literary gesture toward authority remains debated. The Chronicler’s history is thus a theology written as history. Its divergences from Kings are read by historians as evidence of that purpose rather than of independent record: this is the past arranged to teach the writer’s own community what its worship and its loyalty must be, the chronicle of an earlier age narrated backward from the standpoint of the restored sanctuary in which the writer stood.

Scholarship and the text

Critical study of Chronicles long suffered from the verdict of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, whose early-nineteenth-century work treated the book as an unreliable priestly recasting of Samuel–Kings, valuable mainly as a window onto its own late age rather than the times it described. The twentieth century recovered it as a coherent theological author in its own right. Martin Noth set Chronicles within his account of the great works of Israelite historiography; Gerhard von Rad examined the distinctively Levitical theology running through it. The standard modern treatments are Sara Japhet’s large commentary, I & II Chronicles (Old Testament Library, 1993), and her thematic study The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought; alongside them stand the commentaries of Hugh G. M. Williamson and Ralph W. Klein, and, on the Greek tradition, the work on Paraleipomena in Septuagint scholarship. The question of the relation between Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah, set in motion by Leopold Zunz and Japhet, remains one of the field’s open seams; the question of the Chronicler’s named-but-lost sources is another.

The early reception is preserved in the rabbinic order of the canon, set down in Bava Batra 14b–15a, which both places Chronicles last among the Writings and assigns its authorship to Ezra and Nehemiah. On the modern dating and the Chronicler’s selective method, the overview of Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah in Encyclopædia Britannica sets out the fourth-century consensus and the argument-from-silence about Hellenization. The Chronicler’s portrait of Solomon as a king of peace, read against the political language of the Persian age, is the subject of Louis Jonker’s study in Old Testament Essays (2008). On the two bronze pillars and the craftsman from Tyre, the Jewish Virtual Library entry on Jachin and Boaz gathers the biblical and later traditions. No critical Hebrew or Greek text of the book is hosted in this collection’s library; the standard editions are the Masoretic text of the Biblia Hebraica tradition and the Göttingen Septuagint.

The Temple as figure

For the traditions that received it, the book carried weight beyond its narrative. In Jewish reckoning Chronicles closes the Bible, so that the canon ends not in exile but on Cyrus’s word to go up and build — a placement felt every Sabbath in the arrangement of the Writings and dwelt on in the Mishnah and later commentary, which mined the book’s genealogies and its detailed account of Temple service. The world of Second Temple Judaism, rebuilding its worship under the Achaemenid crown and after, found in the Chronicler a charter for the sanctuary at its center. Christian readers folded the book into the longer arc from creation to Christ, reading the Davidic throne it guards as a line running toward a king it did not name.

Within Western esoteric writing the long description of Solomon’s Temple became a quarry. Its measurements, its courts, its bronze sea and lampstands, and above all its two pillars — Jachin set at the right hand and Boaz at the left, cast in bronze and crowned with capitals worked in lilies and chainwork and rows of pomegranates — passed into the symbolic furniture of Freemasonry, where the porch of the Temple became the threshold of the lodge and the two columns its standing emblems. The craftsman Huram-abi, sent from Tyre, a worker in bronze and gold and stone and fine cloth whom Chronicles names where Kings calls him simply Hiram, supplied the seed of the legend of the Temple’s architect that the Masonic ritual would elaborate far beyond anything in scripture. Esoteric writers from the Renaissance forward read the dimensions of a vanished sanctuary as the figure of an inner temple to be raised again, treating the proportions of Solomon’s house as a key to a building made without hands. The text itself makes no such claim; it records a building, and then records its burning.

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