1 and 2 Chronicles for Everyone

By John Goldingay

In this popular and ambitious series, John Goldingay covers Scripture from Genesis to Malachi and addresses the texts in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply. Perfect for daily devotions, Sunday school preparation, or brief visits with the Bible, the Old Testament for Everyone series is an excellent resource for the modern reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611641585

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. An internationally respected Old Testament scholar, Goldingay is the author of many commentaries and books.

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INTRODUCTION

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of writings that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books such as Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus, that are traditionally called the Apocrypha, the books that were hidden away—a name that came to imply spurious. They are now often known as the deuterocanonical writings, which is more cumbersome but less pejorative; it simply indicates that these books have less authority than the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The precise list of them varies among different churches. For the purposes of this series that seeks to expound the Old Testament for Everyone, by the Old Testament we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community, though in the Jewish Bible they come in a different order as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

They were not old in the sense of antiquated or out-of-date; I sometimes like to refer to them as the First Testament rather than the Old Testament to make that point. For Jesus and the New Testament writers, they were a living resource for understanding God, God’s ways in the world, and God’s ways with us. They were useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person who belongs to God can be proficient, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). They were for everyone, in fact. So it’s strange that Christians don’t read them very much. My aim in these volumes is to help you do that.

My hesitation is that you may read me instead of the Scriptures. Don’t do that. I like the fact that this series includes much of the biblical text. Don’t skip over it. In the end, that’s the bit that matters.

An Outline of the Old Testament

The Jewish community often refers to these Scriptures as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. While the Christian Old Testament comprises the same books, it has them in a different order:

Genesis to Kings: A story that runs from the creation of the world to the exile of Judahites to Babylon

Chronicles to Esther: A second version of this story, continuing it into the years after the exile

Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs: Some poetic books

Isaiah to Malachi: The teaching of some prophets

Here is an outline of the history that lies at the background of the books (I give no dates for events in Genesis, which involves too much guesswork).

First and Second Chronicles

In the English Bible, then, Chronicles is an alternative and much shorter version of the story that occupies Genesis to Kings. It starts at the same place, with Adam; tells the story of humanity as a whole and then the story of Israel up to the exile; and ends at the same place, with an event that heralds the fact that God has not yet finished with Israel or finally abandoned the people. Covering this entire story in a sixth of the space when compared with Genesis to Kings obviously involves being much more selective, especially as Chronicles also includes considerable material that does not appear in Genesis to Kings. On the other hand, often the text of Chronicles closely corresponds to that of Samuel–Kings, so either Chronicles started from Samuel–Kings and reworked it or both versions used an earlier account of the history that no longer survives.

Either way, why should there be two versions? One parallel within the Bible is the existence of four versions of the Gospel story, and one factor behind their existence is that the story of Jesus needed to be told in different ways for different audiences. The implications needed working out in different ways. Something similar is true with Chronicles compared to Genesis to Kings. That earlier version stops with the people of Judah still in exile in Babylon, and Kings puts considerable emphasis on Israel’s responsibility for the double catastrophe it relates—first the fall of Ephraim, then the fall of Judah. Chronicles totally agrees about where responsibility for the exile lay, but it ends with a reference to the rise of the Persians, who put Babylon down and commissioned the Judahites to go back home and rebuild the temple the Babylonians had destroyed. Jeremiah had warned that exile would last quite some time but also promised that a moment would come when enough was enough. With the rise of Persia that moment came.

The people for whom Chronicles was written were thus not people who needed to face their responsibility for the collapse of their state. They were people who did need not to fall into similar traps to the ones that had brought down their ancestors but who also needed to see the greatness of what God had done for them and to respond by living lives of trust and obedience to God.

We have at least three ways into seeing the nature of the message that the books of the Bible were bringing to their audience. In this case, these three approaches feed into one another. One is simply to read the books and look for the things that they emphasize. A second is to compare them with other related books—in this case, with Genesis to Kings. A third is to consider them against the background of their historical or social context. These three forms of study reveal to us, for instance, that Chronicles moves with lightning speed from Adam to David; it makes no reference to the promises to Israel’s ancestors, or the exodus, or Sinai, or the journey to the promised land. David is the person who counts. Further, Chronicles focuses on a particular angle on David, his significance in making the arrangements for the building of the temple and for its worship.

All this coheres with things we learn from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah about the situation of the community in Judah in their day—Chronicles might have been written a few decades after Nehemiah’s day, but the situation stayed the same. It was a time when the Judahites were indeed free to return from exile, but most of them had taken the same view as Jews living in New York or London today; they were quite happy in their adoptive homeland and had no desire to go and live in Jerusalem. So the community in Judah was rather small and insignificant, occupying an area no bigger than a county in Britain or the United States. One of the significances of Chronicles’ focus on David and the temple is to remind the community of the amazing privilege it has in being called to worship Yahweh in this house whose building David commissioned. This God is indeed the God of heaven (even the Persian emperor calls him so, in the closing paragraph of the books), but he is worshiped here.

When we read beyond the story of David, we find that Chronicles virtually omits the story of Ephraim. It agrees with 1 and 2 Kings that Ephraim has virtually cut itself off from Yahweh by separating from the line of David and the worship of the Jerusalem temple, and it therefore takes the radical step of simply ignoring Ephraim, which does not belong in the story of the people of God. Ezra and Nehemiah again unveil some of the background. In their day, there is a people living in Ephraim’s area, their sister Persian province now called Samaria, who want to associate with Judah and say they worship Yahweh. Who knows whether they have a genuine religious commitment of this kind or whether it is a ploy for extending their political control of the area? Ezra and Nehemiah suspect the latter. Chronicles rejoices in the idea of people from Ephraim coming with genuine commitment to God in Jerusalem (and in Gentiles coming to acknowledge Yahweh), but it has to mean genuine commitment. Chronicles does not encourage Judahites to get taken in.

In the community’s own relationship with God, the story suggests it is challenged not to make the same mistake as its predecessors before the exile. Chronicles underscores the point by promising that a community that is faithful to God finds that God is faithful in return. First and Second Kings tell several stories that leave one wondering whether this is really so. Chronicles seeks to provide the evidence that it is indeed so.

1 CHRONICLES 1:1–2:8

In the Beginning

I have a bad conscience about the small number of people whom I name in the acknowledgments to these Old Testament for Everyone volumes, because I notice that other authors thank a whole string of people in the prefaces to their books. I must remember to include in the last volume a comprehensive list of people to whom I am indebted. I have noticed something similar about movies. When I watch an old movie, one of the trivial things that strikes me is how short the credits are; nowadays the credits are so long they are still rolling long after everyone has left the theater. On CD liners, too, artists routinely thank everyone they have known since they were in high school. In books and CD liners, at least, the lists are a rather touching phenomenon. They recognize that although one person’s name appears on the cover, this person lives and works in the context of a community. You mustn’t understand this person as an isolated individual.

Something analogous is part of the significance of the lists of names with which Chronicles begins. The books are going to tell the story of Israel from David to the exile in such a way as to bring a message to people living in Judah after the exile. Like Genesis, they begin by setting this story on the widest possible canvas. A church’s stained-glass windows set the life of a congregation in the life of the people of God over the millennia. They portray some people who are named in Chronicles’ lists and also people from later times, such as Mary, Jesus, Peter, Paul, Lydia, Ignatius, Monica, and Augustine. The list reminds the congregation of what it owes to these people. It acknowledges their inspiration.

When the congregation is a beleaguered little group in an indifferent or hostile world, the figures invite it to lift its head and be reminded of the significant body to which it belongs. The lists in Chronicles fulfill such a function for the little beleaguered Judahite community after the exile. Indeed, they put before it a vision of its own significance that beggars belief. They trace its ancestry not merely back to high school but to the very beginning of the world. The first half of chapter 1 comprises a list of the names that also appear in Genesis 1–11, so that it summarizes the story from creation to the moment when God set going the process that brought Israel into being. It covers individuals, peoples, and places; and son covers descendants as well as direct offspring.

There are several points where someone who tries to read all though the Bible may get stuck or may at least ask the question, What the heck? The nine chapters of names that open Chronicles is one of the places where this question is most pressing. Yet the lists occupy a sixth of the book; evidently they were very important to its authors, so it’s worth trying to get into their way of thinking. What might postexilic Judahites infer from this first list? They might realize, We are part of a story that has been going on for a long time. We are not so insignificant. We issue from a process going back to the very creation of humanity. They might even infer, God’s purpose for the whole world lies behind our being here. God intends to do something with us that will fulfill the original purpose of creating the world. We exist for the sake of the world, even if at the moment it thinks we are nothing. They would indeed be likely to feel overwhelmed by the power of the superpowers of the day, which in the Second Temple period were Medo-Persia, then Greece. What is the nature of God’s sovereignty in relation to the empires of the day? Before it has completed five verses, Chronicles has mentioned Media and Greece. They are part of an unfolding of history that happens within God’s purview.

Chapter 1 goes on to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, the prehistory of Judah’s own story. Their inclusion invites the community to remember the line of promise of which it is a part and whose promises it inherits. It might remember God’s intention to bless the whole world through this line. Once again the names mostly come from Genesis. The lists go on to refer to other peoples who lived around the Judahites, especially the Edomites, the descendants of Israel’s brother Esau. In the readers’ day, the Edomites had taken over much of Judah’s own territory. Chronicles reminds the readers not to be either too overwhelmed or too dismissive of these relatives of theirs. In some sense they, too, are part of God’s story. Actually, the unfolding of these lists in 1 Chronicles 1 would be more straightforward if they went directly from Abraham and Isaac to Jacob and his sons. The account is made more complicated by the material about the descendants of Hagar via Ishmael, and of Keturah, and then the material about the descendants of Esau and Seir (which is closely associated with Edom) and the Edomite kings. Yet without it, the unfolding would be oversimplified. It would encourage readers to focus exclusively on that line that leads from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Judah to David. For Chronicles’ original readers, it was important to remain aware that their story was positively interwoven with the story of the Edomites. For Chronicles’ modern readers, it is important to remain aware that their story was interwoven with the story of Ishmael, the son of Abraham to whom the Arab peoples trace their origin, as the Jewish people trace their origin to Isaac. The Arab peoples are part of God’s story.

In chapter 2, Chronicles again narrows its focus, like Genesis. Having first listed the names of Israel’s sons, it focuses on the descendants of the fourth son, Judah. Genesis 34 and 35 give some hints as to why Israel’s first three sons lose their senior position, though Genesis 38 also tells a story that could provide good reason for Judah to lose his place. Chronicles is discrete in the allusions it makes to that story, but it reminds its readers (who would be mostly Judahites) that there are skeletons in Judah’s closet, too. The chapter thus shows that as usual you can’t explain what God does simply on the basis of merit, and the Judahites had better not think so. The story of Trouble comes in Joshua 7, and the sentence about him introduces one of Chronicles’ key terms to characterize the significance of Israel’s wrongdoing. It’s like trespassing on someone’s property or their rights or their personal space or the contents of their refrigerator in a way that goes beyond what you have been invited into. There was stuff that Israel was supposed to devote to God, and Trouble thought he could get away with appropriating a little on the side.

1 CHRONICLES 2:9–4:43

The Prayer of Jabez

I was talking the other day to a woman who runs an adoption agency about the rights of adoptive children to trace their birth parents (and for that matter, the rights of birth parents to trace the children they surrendered). Most states recognize no such rights, though some have procedures whereby parents and their offspring can make contact if both parties want to do so. Just after this conversation, I opened up this question with a friend who had been adopted, and she exploded over the difficulty of discovering who her birth parents had been. Not every adopted person wants this knowledge, though many sense that knowing their birth parents’ identity is a significant aspect of knowing who they themselves are.

Most of the people and places listed in 1 Chronicles 2 and connected with Judah are unmentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament; the people who are mentioned elsewhere are not Israelite by birth. In effect, they are people who are adopted into Judah. One can sometimes get the impression that Israel is by its essential nature an ethnically based people, but from time to time the Old Testament makes clear that this is an oversimplification. On one hand, you can forfeit your membership in the family of Israel by failing to be faithful to Yahweh. You can be cut off, as the Torah often puts it. On the other hand, if you belong to another people but come to identify with Israel and with its God, you can be adopted into the family of Israel. Like adopted children in any context, you and the rest of the original family may be aware for quite a time that you were not born into the family, but this does not alter the fact that you now belong to it as truly as people who were born into it. Israel had to balance the importance of staying uncontaminated by people who did not fully acknowledge Yahweh or acknowledge who Israel was, with the importance of staying open to outsiders who did so acknowledge Yahweh and Israel. The context in which Chronicles’ readers lived made that an especially pressing necessity. It would be easy for Judah to be swallowed up by the peoples around. On the other hand, Chronicles reminds it not to be closed to groups that will make their acknowledgment of Israel and of Yahweh.

First Chronicles 4 lists key members of several of the clans over the centuries. It again begins with Judah, the clan to which the vast bulk of the community for which Chronicles was written belonged. Our word Jew comes from the word for Judahite; Jew does not apply to Israelites in the First Temple period. It is when Israel is virtually coterminous with Judah that Jew becomes an appropriate term for Israelites, because most of the Israelites who were left were Judahites. Simeon here follows on Judah because it lived in Judah’s shadow. Its separate existence was really rather nominal. Joshua 19 (where the information on Simeon comes from) notes how in effect Simeon was absorbed by Judah.

The prominence of Judahites among the readers of Chronicles is not the only reason for Judah’s prominence in these chapters. Judah matters because David was born from Judah; hence the transition here from chapter 2 to chapter 3. When 1 Chronicles tells Israel’s actual story, beginning in chapter 10, David is where it will begin. That reflects David’s continuing importance even in the Persian or Second Temple or postexilic period when Chronicles was written. After listing David’s sons, Chronicles goes on to list the kings who ruled until the fall of Jerusalem, after which no kings reigned in Judah for four centuries. Yet the list of David’s descendants does not stop there but continues with the names of descendants of David who lived in the midst of the Second Temple community, people such as Zerubbabel. As a descendant of David he might be king if Judah had a king. The list reminds the readers that David’s line has not died out and affirms the continuing importance of that line.

Why might it be important? God had promised in due course to put on the throne in Jerusalem a descendant of David who would fulfill all that a king ought to be and would reign in faithfulness over the people. Another