ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |41 pages
Introductory Essays
part |115 pages
Chronicles and the Rereading and Writing of a Didactic, Socializing History
part |110 pages
Chronicles and Theology as Communicated and Recreated Through the Rereading of a Historiographical, Literary Writing
part |20 pages
Chronicles and Literature: Literary Characterizations that Convey Theological Worldviews and Shape Stories about the Past