Introduction to 2 Chronicles

Title and authorship

This is the second half of one work, and the division between the two volumes is a later convenience rather than a seam in the writing. The first ends with Solomon enthroned and David dead 1 Chronicles 29:23–28; this one opens with Solomon firmly established in his kingdom 2 Chronicles 1:1. Nothing is restarted and nothing is recapitulated.

The method is the same, and it is unusually visible. Nearly every reign closes by naming where the fuller record may be found, and the citations are specific: for Solomon, the history of Nathan the prophet, the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and the visions of Iddo the seer 2 Chronicles 9:29; for Rehoboam, works of Shemaiah and Iddo in the genealogies 2 Chronicles 12:15; for Jehoshaphat, the history of Jehu the son of Hanani, itself said to be included in a larger book 2 Chronicles 20:34; for Uzziah and for Hezekiah, writings of Isaiah 2 Chronicles 26:22 2 Chronicles 32:32; for Josiah, a collection of laments 2 Chronicles 35:25.

That list is worth pausing over. The writer is not claiming to have witnessed any of this. He is telling a reader that a documentary trail exists, that most of it was kept by prophets, and where to look. A book that repeatedly points past itself is making a claim about evidence rather than about inspiration of the sort that would need no evidence.

What is his own is the selection, and it is severe. The northern kingdom, which occupies half of the parallel history, appears here only where it touches Judah — a marriage alliance, a war, an invasion. Elijah is mentioned once, in a letter 2 Chronicles 21:12. Elisha not at all. The reader who wants the story of Israel is not being given a shortened version of it; he is being given a different book, whose subject is the house at Jerusalem and the kings responsible for it.

Against that, whole passages found nowhere else are given at length: Abijah's speech from a hilltop, Jehoshaphat's judicial reform, Uzziah's leprosy, Hezekiah's Passover, Manasseh's imprisonment and repentance. The additions are not miscellaneous. Every one of them concerns worship, or a king's relation to the sanctuary.

Date

The book was written after the exile, and its last two verses fix the earliest date precisely.

It ends with a proclamation: in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia... Yahweh stirred up the spirit of Cyrus 2 Chronicles 36:22. That decree belongs to 538, so the work is later than the fall of Babylon and later than the first permission to return.

How much later cannot be settled from the book itself. The genealogy in the companion volume runs several generations past Zerubbabel 1 Chronicles 3:19–24, which pushes the whole work well into the Persian period, but no event after Cyrus is narrated.

One feature of the ending is easy to miss and hard to explain away. The decree is quoted only as far as let him go up, and the sentence stops there — where the same decree, given more fully elsewhere, continues Ezra 1:2–4. The book breaks off on a permission and a first step, with the rebuilding unreported.

Whatever the reason, the effect is a work that closes on an open road rather than on an arrival. The last word given to a reader is not that the temple was restored. It is that the way back to it was opened, and that whoever wished could go.

The internal chronology is given in regnal years throughout and is dense with them. Josiah's reform is dated to his eighteenth year 2 Chronicles 34:8, Hezekiah's cleansing to the first month of his first 2 Chronicles 29:3, the foundation of the temple to the second month of Solomon's fourth 2 Chronicles 3:2. The writer counts from accessions, not from an era, so his dates are exact relative to each other and floating relative to everything else.

Backgrounds

The readers of this book had a temple. It was small, it had been rebuilt on the old site, and it stood in a province that paid tribute to a foreign king. The book they were given describes the same building at its founding, in gold, at the center of an empire.

That gap governs how the material is chosen. The construction is described in detail no other account supplies — the site named as the threshing floor David bought 2 Chronicles 3:1, the dimensions, the veil, the two pillars, the bronze altar, the sea on twelve oxen. A congregation worshiping in a modest replacement is shown, at length, what the pattern was.

The political frame is decline. Solomon's kingdom reaches from the Euphrates to Egypt; within one chapter of his death ten tribes are gone. Thereafter the story is of a small state between larger ones, buying off invaders with temple gold, hiring allies, and losing them. Egypt strips the treasury under Rehoboam, Assyria besieges under Hezekiah, Babylon carries the vessels away under the last kings. The same objects keep being taken, replaced and taken again, and the writer keeps count.

The Levites are the other constant background. They appear at every reform, and their duties are itemized each time — the singers at Jehoshaphat's battle, the doorkeepers collecting for Joash's repairs, the courses restored under Hezekiah, the Passover lambs prepared under Josiah. For a post-exilic community whose leadership was priestly rather than royal, this is the part of the past that was still theirs to reproduce.

And the prophets appear constantly, but not the famous ones. Shemaiah, Azariah son of Oded, Hanani, Jehu son of Hanani, Eliezer, Zechariah son of Jehoiada, Oded of Samaria, and unnamed messengers. Most speak once, to one king, and are not heard from again. Prophecy in this book is chiefly an interruption addressed to whoever is on the throne.

Theology and purpose

The book's argument is that God's response is not fixed by the past, and that a nation's condition at any moment answers to what it is doing now.

Its charter is given at the dedication, in the night answer to Solomon. If the sky is shut, or locusts sent, or pestilence — if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin, and will heal their land 2 Chronicles 7:14.

Four verbs, and none of them is a sacrifice. The rest of the book is a series of test cases for that sentence, and the ones that matter most are the ones where it holds for people who had no right to expect it.

The same principle is stated to Asa as a two-way rule: Yahweh is with you while you are with him; and if you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will forsake you 2 Chronicles 15:2 — which is word for word what David told Solomon 1 Chronicles 28:9. It is the hinge of both volumes, and the verb that carries it is seek.

So retribution in this book is immediate and personal. A king's fortunes turn within his own reign, sometimes within a chapter: Asa is delivered from an overwhelming army and later dies of a disease he would not bring to God 2 Chronicles 16:12; Uzziah is helped until he was strong, and then his heart was lifted up 2 Chronicles 26:15–16; Josiah reforms the nation and is killed refusing a warning 2 Chronicles 35:21–23.

That pattern must be read for what it claims. It is not an assurance that prosperity marks approval — Job and the Psalms deny that outright, and this book's own last chapters have the most thorough reformer in the line dying young while the nation falls anyway. What it claims is narrower and harder: that these particular events were morally legible, and that the kings were told so at the time by prophets sent for the purpose.

The warnings are the fourth theme, and the book's own summary makes them the ground of the judgment. God sent to them by his messengers, rising up early and sending, because he had compassion; and they mocked the messengers of God, despised his words, and scoffed at his prophets, until Yahweh's wrath arose against his people, until there was no remedy 2 Chronicles 36:15–16. The exile is presented not as a sentence passed suddenly but as the end of a long refusal to hear.

And the last note is not judgment. The land kept Sabbath through the seventy years 2 Chronicles 36:21, and then a foreign king was moved to send the exiles home. The book ends on the same word it began with, a house to be built at Jerusalem.

Additional notes

Note — Manasseh's repentance, and why it is here. The worst king in the line is given a conversion in this book and in no other account. Taken to Babylon with hooks and fetters, he begged Yahweh his God, and humbled himself greatly; God was entreated by him, and restored him; then Manasseh knew that Yahweh was God 2 Chronicles 33:12–13.

The placement is deliberate rather than sentimental. Manasseh is the exact case the dedication formula was built for: humbling, prayer, seeking, turning 2 Chronicles 7:14. If the formula holds for him it holds for anyone, and the readers of this book were a people who had themselves been carried to Babylon and brought back.

The account also refuses to make the repentance cost-free. His son restores the images Manasseh had made, within two verses of his death 2 Chronicles 33:22, and the reform did not save the nation. A man may be forgiven and still have to watch what he built go on standing.

Note — the land's Sabbaths. The exile is explained by a rule about land rather than only by a verdict on people. The captivity lasted until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. As long as it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years 2 Chronicles 36:21.

The law had required the ground to be left uncultivated every seventh year Leviticus 25:3–5, and had stated this precise consequence for neglecting it: the land would enjoy its Sabbaths while it lay desolate and its people were in enemy country Leviticus 26:34–35. The seventy years are also a figure given in advance Jeremiah 25:11.

What this does is remove the arbitrariness from the length of the exile. It was not a period chosen to be severe. It was arrears, and the writer names it as such.

Note — where the northern kingdom is, and is not. Readers who know the parallel history will notice how much is missing. Ahab appears, but as Jehoshaphat's ally rather than in his own right. Elijah appears once and only in writing, in a letter delivered to a king of Judah 2 Chronicles 21:12. Elisha, Jehu's revolution, the fall of Samaria, and the whole northern dynastic sequence are absent.

This is not a judgment that the north did not matter; the writer's own genealogies count its tribes, and his Passovers invite its survivors 2 Chronicles 30:6–9. It is a consequence of the subject. The book follows the house at Jerusalem, the priesthood attached to it, and the line to which the throne was promised. Where the north touches those, it is in the book. Where it does not, it is elsewhere.

Outline

How the book is built

A house to be built at Jerusalem inclusio 1:1-36:23

• A 2:1-6 Solomon decides to build a house for the name of Yahweh, and asks what kind of house can be built for a God the heavens cannot contain.
• A′ 36:22-23 Cyrus proclaims that Yahweh has charged him to build him a house in Jerusalem, and sends up whoever among the people will go.

The book opens and closes on the same commission, and the second time it is given to a foreigner. Solomon decides to build a house for the name of Yahweh, and raises it at Jerusalem; six centuries and thirty-five chapters later a Persian king announces that Yahweh has commanded him to build him a house in Jerusalem, and releases whoever will go. The frame is exact — the same undertaking, the same city, and in both cases a king who says the commission is not his own idea — and everything between the two is the history of that house being built, plundered, repaired, polluted and burned. The frame is what keeps the ending from being an epilogue: the last verse is not a note about Persian policy but the first commission repeated, which means the book closes at the point it opened rather than at the disaster four verses earlier.

---

Read 2 Chronicles · About this commentary