Sunday Sermonette: Blotting the copy book

Chapter 6 is largely lifted from 1 Kings 8, but it ends differently -- not notably different in sentiment, just different wording. On the whole, I find the purpose of the Chronicler ' s project puzzling. He has basically cut and pasted from versions of Samuel, Kings and some lost books, perhaps made a few alterations or added some comments of his own, although it ' s hard to tell. The first part is tethered to events in Genesis and Exodus, but consists mostly of nothing but (mostly male) genealogies. Once he gets to the history in Samuel and Kings, he skips a lot, and just picks fragments. You can see why he thought this one was important, but some of the decisions are hard to figure other than a general tendency to leave out stuff that reflects poorly on David and Solomon. My best guess is that this was kind of a school textbook, to give students a quick history of Judah without making them read the entire Torah and Deuteronomistic history. That means Joshua and Judges don ' t matter because Judah hadn ' t been founded yet. There is probably an assumption that the students have read Genesis and Exodus, so what matters is just the genealogy tying the present Judeans to the mythical past. The Chronicler isn ' t much interested in the religious laws, so we don ' t get any rehash of Leviticus through Deuteronomy -- in fact enforcement of all that nonsense was likely lax when he wrote. But he is interested in more abstract theology, which is why we get Solomon ' s speech her...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs