The Saga of Judah's Kings Continues: The Reception of Chronicles in the Late Second Temple Period

This article studies the early reception of Chronicles and its status in relation to its source texts in Samuel–Kings in the late Second Temple period. It has usually been supposed that Chronicles was less authoritative than its sources in Samuel– Kings. This dominant view is challenged in this study, especially regarding the status of these compositions in the second century BCE. I first present the evidence for the direct influence of Chronicles in later traditions by exploring the reception of the actual composition and then the influence of some of the central theological concepts and paradigms advocated in Chronicles. In the main part of the study, I analyze the impact of Chronicles on the interpretive traditions dealing with the kings of Judah. In these instances the differences between Chronicles and its sources are more marked than elsewhere, and most scholars would now agree that the majority of these differences come from the pen of the Chronicler. This means that the use of these features in later writings can fairly certainly be attributed to the direct influence of the traditions in Chronicles and can thus shed light on how later authors valued Samuel–Kings and Chronicles in relation to one another.