“The Hebrew Bible: Chronicles” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter introduces the last book of the Hebrew Bible, “Chronicles, fixed in Jewish tradition as the conclusion of the Bible, is, at least from a modern perspective, the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. In all likelihood, it was composed sometime in the late decades of the fifth century B.C.E., after the Return to Zion…. It was probably written by a priest…. The main focus of the book in on the kings of Judah…. Linguistically, because Chronicles hews so closely to the Deuteronomistic History, it does not exhibit a great many features of Late Biblical Hebrew, as one might expect, though not infrequently it reflects a certain loosening of syntactic and idiomatic norms that is characteristic of this late period…. Most prominently, this is a historical account that is intended to highlight the eternal legitimacy of the Davidic dynasty and its firm integration with the priestly hierarchy, which traces its own origins back to Aaron…. This is, in sum, a representation of David as an exemplary establishment figure, unswervingly virtuous, providing precedents and a model for the political and cultic tradition that he is seen as having founded…. It should also be noted that Chronicles incorporates a variety of narrative details that appear nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History. Where they come from remains a matter of conjecture…. In the end, Chronicles offers an object lesson in how as a tradition evolves it may be prone to domesticate the unruly and challenging traits of its own origins…. The national history is painted in black and white, and the haunting shadows, the chiaroscuro, the sudden illuminations of classical Hebrew narrative, vanish in this work.”

Chronicles is, if anything, primarily a list of names and details of the history of the Davidic dynasty. Alter notes that in 1 Chronicles 1:1, “Adam, Seth, Enosh. Chronicles begins abruptly with a patrilineal genealogical list that runs from the first man to Saul, his sons, and his grandson, at the end of chapter 9…. For the modern reader, this is scarcely an inviting way to begin a book.” In 1 Chronicles 4:9, Alter describes a bit of word choice detail and playfulness, within the original Hebrew, “I have born him in pain. Like many naming-speeches in the Bible, this one features a loose approximation between the name and its purported meaning. The Hebrew of her son’s name is ya’bets, and the word for pain is ‘otseb, the same three consonants that appear after the initial yod but in a different order.” Alter explains the main emphases of the book in 1 Chronicles 6:1, “The sons of Levi. The Chronicler appears to have had two special interests in compiling his lengthy lists—marking out the line of David, presumably in the hope of a restoration of the Davidic dynasty, and accounting for the priesthood, probably because he himself belonged to the priestly circles.”

In 1 Chronicles 12:2, Alter alerts us to a historical tidbit, “with either their right hand or their left. The Benjaminite warriors may in fact have trained themselves to be ambidextrous. In Judges 3, the Benjaminite Ehud is able to kill the Moabite King Eglon because, in a surprise attack, he suddenly pulls out his hidden short sword with his left hand.” In Chronicles 21:1 Alter notes another historical and vocabulary detail, “And Satan stood up against Israel…. In 2 Samuel 24 it is God Who incites David, but the Chronicler, not wanting to represent God as perverse, makes Satan the agent. At this late period, it looks as if “The Adversary “ (hasatan) is moving into becoming a demonic figure, and he appears here without the definite article ha, suggesting it has become a name, not just a function.”

Alter describes a bit of history revealed in 2 Chronicles 30:1, “to all Israel and Judah. Hezekiah came to the throne in 715 B.C.E., six years after the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. If the report here is grounded in historical fact, it provides evidence that, although many of the subjects of the northern kingdom were deported by the Assyrians, substantial numbers of them remained. Hezekiah’s political move, then, is to unite the whole Israelite population, north and south, around the Temple cult in Jerusalem.” In 2 Chronicles 35:1, Alter alerts us to a vocabulary choice, “And Josiah made a Passover to the Lord in Jerusalem, and they slaughtered the paschal lamb. The same Hebrew word, pesah, sometimes refers to the festival and sometimes to the sacrifice of the lamb that is the key element in the celebration of the festival. The meaning must be judged according to context.”

Finally, Alter ends his annotations with 2 Chronicles 36:23, “and let him go. This is a single word in the Hebrew, weya’al, and according to the Hebrew canonical order, which this translation follows, it is the very last word of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition has accordingly made much of the appearance of this word at the very end: it is the verb used for “going up” from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel (and retained as such in modern Zionist usage), and it concludes this story of exile and Scripture as a whole on a literally upbeat note, Cyrus’s urging the exiled people to go back up to its native land.”