History, Literature And Theology in the Book of Chronicles

History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles presents a new way of approaching this key biblical text, arguing that the Book employs both multiple viewpoints and the knowledge of the past held by its intended readership to reshape social memory and reinforce the authority of God. The Book of Chronicles communicates to its intended readership a theological worldview built around multiple, partial perspectives which inform and balance each other. This is a worldview which emphasizes the limitations of all human knowledge, even of theologically "proper" knowledge. When Chronicles presents the past as explainable it also affirms that those who inhabited it could not predict the future. And, despite expanding an "explainable" past, the Book deliberately frames some of YHWH's actions - crucial events in Israel's social memory - as unexplainable in human terms. The Book serves to rationalise divinely ordained, prescriptive behaviour through its emphasis on the impossibility of adequate human understanding of a past, present and future governed by YHWH.

Ehud Ben Zvi is a professor (History & Classics, and Religious Studies) at the University of Alberta. A former president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, his publications include, Hosea (forthcoming, 2005); Signs of Jonah: Reading and Rereading in Ancient Yehud (2003); Micah (2000) and A Historical-Critical Study of The Book of Obadiah (1996) as well as many articles on the historical books of the Hebrew Bible in which he explores the ways in which ancient Israelites construed their past and the significance of these images of the past for them. He is also a co-author of Readings in Biblical Hebrew. An Intermediate Textbook (1993).