Chapter 23 CHRONICLES
We start now on Chronicles. As a recap, there are four periods of five-hundred-years. The book of Kings and Samuel were written in the context of the changeover from Prophets to King. The book of Chronicles was written at the point when Kings handed the batten over to priests. In seven-twenty-two-BC, Assyria conquered the ten tribes and scattered at least half of them over its territory. But they had been given a promise that one day they would be reunited with Judah and Simeon and would return to the land. Then in five-ninety-seven-BC, Babylon finally sacked Jerusalem and took Judah captive and went on to defeat Assyria. In the meantime, they had another promise that after seventy-years they would return to Jerusalem. Then, in five-thirty-nine-BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia, (which is now Iran), conquered Babylon. That is where our ditty begins.
Cyrus was a benevolent king and firstly allowed the people to wander freely through the kingdom so the ten tribes and the two were able to reunite in accordance with that part of the prophecy. Once Cyrus signed the decree that any people group that had been captured could return to their own land, (with the condition that they should first set up a place of worship to their own gods and pray for him). The Hebrews were ready. They were now reunited as a people and could go home. This is where the book of Chronicles fits. In our bibles it follows Kings which was written about one-thousand-one-hundred-BC and it gets skipped because it looks like a repeat of the information in kings. But it has a completely different purpose and tells a different story. The first essential is, whereas the books Samuel and Kings were written at the hand over from Judges to Kings. Chronicles was written as the handover from Kings to Priests. We don’t have time here to examine the difference so here is a summary of functional difference in the hope you will do a deeper study for yourself. But here are some pointers:
The Prophet presents God to the people; the priest presents the people to God.
The Prophets sees God from the eyes of man; the priest sees man from the eyes of God.
The Prophet foretells what God will do in the future; the priest enables what God wants in the now.
The Prophet delivers the decree; the priest administers it.
The Prophet sees the sins of the people up to the point of repentance; the priest deals with the sins and expects the people to live beyond the point of repentance.
The book of Chronicles starts with the action in chapter-nine when Cyrus signs the cylinder, which is in the Iranian Museum today.
“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.”’258
That started the buzz of those Hebrew leaders who had been longing to get back home, so they started planning. They had learned their lesson and did not want to repeat the errors that had brought them into captivity. So they did their research. They wanted the right people back in the right jobs as decreed by Moses. They would need priest who had building skills. Priests with reading had writing skills. But primarily they would need people with an upright character to guard against a repeat of the corruption that had brought them down in the first place. So the first difference you will notice in this book is, it misses out the bad guys in the lineage and justifies the deeds of the good guys.
Th
e Cyrus Cylinder, a proclamation by the Persian king Cyrus the Great
Priests had to be kosher Levites. That required a genealogy. Just as the line of sceptre had to be traced back through David, Judah the patriarchs to Adam, so priests should be traced back to Aaron. The genealogy does include some of those we have already seen in Kings and Samuel, but it is more complete in following the genealogy back to Adam. We looked at the covenant in our very first study of Genesis. Those were the conditions laid down then and Ezra is looking for those conditions in the priest that return. He was looking for: Compete faith in God and his right to Judge good and Evil and Obedient faithfulness his calling. Samuel and Kings could not overlook the sins of the people because the job of prophets was to bring the people to repentance. Repentance is the activator of forgiveness and the gateway into the covenant. The absence in Chronicles of the bad things people did, is possible from a Priest’s eyes because they had repented. They had been punished for seventy-years in exile. Now they had returned to God could return to their land. Their sins are remembered no more. For two-thousand-five-hundred-years from that date the Jews could never since be accused of turning to idolatry. The English Bible ends with the words:
“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse”.
The Hebrew Bible finishes with the words from Chronicles
Whosoever there is among you of all his people, Jehovah his God be with him, and let him go up’.
Now you might have picked up from the preamble that Chronicles was written after the return. Not so! It was a sort of select committee report, written before but published after the return from exile. It was written as preparation for the return. The very last verse stops halfway through a sentence “Let him go up…”. This was not just a case of ‘let’s just up and go then’. The leading priests were preparing for this moment because they had read the prophets and found seventy-years exile was almost up. So even before hearing the decree, the leaders began to plan the return of Israel to its homeland. The punishment was over. For Israel, this seventy-year exile meant many things. First, Israel and Judah were once again united. But on the other hand there were few people around after seventy-years that could remember who their ancestors were or even what home was like.
To God’s people, genealogy determines where you live and what your role is. When they got home, the right people needed to be in the right roles for their society to function. The decree of return was conditional on each nation setting up a temple to their own God and praying for king Darius. That was no problem for the Hebrew people because setting up an altar was the first thing they always did when they moved. But it was essential to them also that the right people did the right jobs. Gatekeepers, priests, musicians, builders, and the military, were chosen on the basis of ancestry and Clan. But more than that, the leaders were determined to do their very best to be sure “Lessons had been learned”. Exile must “Never Happen Again”. So a committee took a critical review of the whole of Israel’s history to learn the lessons and make recommendation for the future. The ancestral list was needed to check everyone taking office was of the right stock and was faithful in character. Above all, the heart must be right to prevent corruption. Ancestry, class or skill alone could not determine that.
Chronicles is the research and work of the scribes in preparation for the return of the people. As far as the people were concerned, the spirit was keen to go, they did not see the preparations going on behind the scenes.
Besides the different viewpoint of Samuel and kings, those books only cover the five-hundred-years while judges were prominent in Israel. Prophets concentrated on the bad things people were doing at the time in order to bring the people into line. There is a constant battle between prophets and the people over idolatry, immorality, lying, and injustice. Every mention of their failings is there. Those books were written from the point of view that you will be punished for these things. Chronicles, written at the end of the punishment concentrates on the royal line from Adam to Messiah, ignoring all the bad and emphasizing spiritual and moral qualities.
Rebuilding the temple caused some problems for the people. The older folk started to compare it with Solomon’s construction of temple. Solomon concentrated on the prestige. The kingdom had an empire and the building was to be magnificent to demonstrate pomp and power. This new temple was to have a different emphasis. The new significance of the temple was to rebuild the people. The first temple concentrated on the purpose of temple as Solomon had set out in his letter to the King of Tyre because it was the original concept of David and Solomon.
The house that I am to build will be great, for our God is greater than all gods. But who is able to build him a house, since heaven, even highest heaven, cannot contain him? Who am I to build a house for him, except as a place to make offerings before him?259
The Kings account of the consecration concentrates on Moses, the ark and law, (which at that time only had the tablets of Moses inside). But Chronicles does not mention the law. It empasizes the praise and music to be led by prophetic choir masters. The exile has given them ample time to reflect and one thing stood out, you cannot legislate to rid the nation of sin the people must contribute from the heart. Moses tried laws and procedures but they had not worked. The purpose of the law was to show the standard required but it could not change the heart. The Priests, under the law of Moses, had become corrupt. The “Chronicle Committee” were emphasising the importance of character both in the leaders and in the people.
There is some extra information in Chronicles when we get to the record of Jehoshaphat. In the Kings version Jehoshaphat enquires of the prophets. The prophets discussed it among themselves and agreed to give the best political answer. Jehoshaphat saw through that and called Micah from the North because he had both a reputation and a record of speaking the word of God. In Chronicles, we are told of the action that Jeroboam took after that incident to halt the corrupt political outlook of prophets and priests.
In the third year of his reign he sent his officials, Ben-hail, Obadiah, Zechariah, Nethanel, and Micaiah, to re-educate from the law; Shemaiah, Nethaniah, Zebadiah, Asahel, Shemiramoth, Jehonathan, Adonijah, Tobijah, Tobadonijah; and with these prophets also Levites, and priests then he sent them throughout Judah with the book of the law to teach the people.260
Jehoshaphat did not just accept the status-quo, he pro-actively set about with a plan. He would re-educate all the people in the scriptures so false prophets could not pull the wool over their eyes. As a result of that all the neighbouring nations respected and feared Judah.
258 2 Chronicles 36: 23
259 2 Chronicles 2: 5
260 Chronicles 17: 7-9