1 Chronicles: The Same History, Told Again

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown writer usually called the Chronicler, probably connected with the Temple in Jerusalem, and perhaps a Levite.

When: After the exile, probably in the 300s BC. Its family trees run several generations past the return from Babylon. In my day 1 and 2 Chronicles were one scroll, most likely the last book of the scriptures.

Where it fits: Set from Adam to King David’s death, about 970 BC; its story of David retells 1 Samuel 31 to 1 Kings 2. Written some six centuries later, for the community back from exile in Babylon.

Where I quote it: Never directly. Like Chronicles, Luke traces my family tree all the way back to Adam (Luke 3:38).

If you only read three chapters: 1 Chronicles 17, 1 Chronicles 21 and 1 Chronicles 29.

Words to Know

Chronicles — the Hebrew title means the events of the days. The Greek title means things left out.

Genealogy — a family tree. Chronicles opens with nine chapters of them.

Levites — the tribe that served in the Temple as assistants, guards and musicians.

Satan — in Hebrew, the adversary or the accuser. In Chronicles it begins to look like a name.

The Book in Brief

First Chronicles tells Israel’s story again, from the beginning to the death of King David.

Chapters 1 to 9 are family trees. They start with Adam and run through Noah and Abraham to the twelve sons of Israel, then trace the tribes. Judah, David’s tribe, comes first and gets the most room, and the Levites, who served at the Temple, get a long chapter of their own. Short stories break in here and there, such as the prayer of a man named Jabez. The lists end with the families living in Jerusalem after the exile, and with the family of Saul.

Chapter 10 tells just one story about Saul: his death in battle with the Philistines on Mount Gilboa.

Chapters 11 to 21 are about David as king. All Israel comes to Hebron to make him king, and he captures Jerusalem. The book lists his mighty warriors. David sets out to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, but a man named Uzzah touches it and dies, and the ark waits three months. Then the Levites carry it into the city with music, and David appoints Levites to sing God’s praise. When David wants to build a house for God, the prophet Nathan brings God’s answer: David’s son will build it, and God will build David a house, a line of kings. David wins wars on every side. He orders a census, and a plague strikes the people. David buys a threshing floor and builds an altar there, and the plague ends. That spot becomes the site of the Temple.

In chapters 22 to 29, David gets everything ready. He gathers stone, iron, bronze and cedar, and tells Solomon that he himself may not build because he has shed so much blood. He organizes the priests, the Levites, the singers, the gatekeepers, the treasurers and the army. He hands Solomon the plans. The leaders and people give gold and silver freely, and David blesses God before them all. Solomon is made king, and David dies at a good old age.

Chronicles retells the story you just read in Samuel and Kings. Often it copies them word for word. But it was written for a different time, and it tells the story differently.

The writers of Kings were explaining a catastrophe. Chronicles was written a century or two later, for a small community that had come back from exile to a rebuilt Temple, with no king and no army. They needed to know who they were. So the Chronicler told them.

Starting with Adam

The first word of Chronicles is Adam (1 Chronicles 1:1).

Then come nine chapters of names, from Adam to the families living in Jerusalem after the exile. Most people skip them. But the point is not the names. The point is that the little community of the Chronicler’s day was connected, unbroken, all the way back to the first human being.

When Luke gives my family tree, he does not stop at Abraham, as Matthew does. He goes all the way back: the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God (Luke 3:38). That is a Chronicles way of thinking. My family tree ends in Adam, the father of every human being.

What was left out

The Greek translators called this book Paraleipomena, “things left out,” because they thought it filled gaps in Samuel and Kings.¹ It does add some things. But what is more striking is what it leaves out.

Read the life of David in Chronicles and you will not find the story of Bathsheba and Uriah. Bathsheba appears only as Solomon’s mother, under the name Bath-shua (1 Chronicles 3:5), and Uriah only as a name in a list of David’s warriors (1 Chronicles 11:41). You will not find Nathan saying You are the man. You will not find the story of Amnon and Tamar, or Absalom’s revolt, or David weeping for his son. Those children appear only as names in a family list (1 Chronicles 3:1–9). Saul gets one chapter, the chapter where he dies.

The Chronicler gives you a David who organizes the Temple’s singers and gathers gold and cedar for his son to build with. It is a portrait for a statue.

I am not telling you this to call the Chronicler a liar. Samuel and Kings were already there, and everyone could read them. He was preaching, not hiding. He wanted the returned exiles to see the best of their history, and to center their lives on the Temple.

But it shows you something important. My people kept both versions. The confession and the portrait. Nobody threw out Samuel because Chronicles was more flattering.

Who moved David

Here is the most important change in the book.

In 2 Samuel, David takes a census, and a plague follows. The writer says, Again the LORD’s anger burned against Israel, and he moved David against them (2 Samuel 24:1).

When Chronicles tells the same story, it says, Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to take a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21:1).

In other books, the satan is a title, the adversary, an accuser in God’s court, as in Zechariah 3 and the book of Job. Here, for one of the first times, the heavenly accuser is called satan without the, almost like a name.² And it takes over an action the older book gave to God.

Over the centuries between Samuel and the Chronicler, my people had come to feel that God could not be the one who pushed David into sin. So they named another power.

By my time, people talked constantly about Satan and his demons. The gospels show me facing him in the desert and casting out demons. You can see the beginning of that change right here, in two versions of one story.

Go deeperHow the accuser became the devil

The Hebrew word satan means an adversary, anyone who stands in your way. In the story of Balaam, it is God’s own angel who stands in the road as an adversary against him (Numbers 22:22). In Job and Zechariah, the satan is an officer of God’s court. In Chronicles, he acts on his own.²

When Jewish translators, most of them probably in Egypt, put the scriptures into Greek in the last centuries before me, they rendered satan in Job, in Zechariah and here in Chronicles with the Greek word diabolos, the slanderer. That is where your word devil comes from.³

Other writers did to other stories what the Chronicler did to David’s census. The Book of Jubilees, written about a century and a half before I was born, retells Genesis and Exodus. Copies of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Genesis, God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac. In Jubilees, an evil spirit called Prince Mastema suggests the test to God. In Exodus, the LORD met Moses and wanted to kill him (Exodus 4:24). In Jubilees, it is Mastema who tries to kill him. Each time, a dark act once laid at God’s door is moved to an adversary.⁴

Where did the change come from? Some scholars point to the Persians, who ruled my people for two centuries after the exile, and whose religion set a great evil spirit against the good god. Others think it grew from inside Israel’s own scriptures, as people wrestled with how a good God could send evil. The question is still argued.⁵

By my time the adversary had become a ruler with demons under him. When people said I cast out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of the demons, I asked them, If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? (Matthew 12:26).

Why David could not build

In 2 Samuel, when David wants to build the Temple, God simply says no and promises him a dynasty instead (2 Samuel 7). In 1 Kings, Solomon explains that his father was too busy with wars (1 Kings 5:3).

Chronicles gives a sharper reason. David says that God told him, You have shed blood abundantly, and have made great wars. You shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight (1 Chronicles 22:8; see 28:3).

Even the most flattering account of David could not let a man of war build the house of God.

Go deeperThe priests’ rota, from David to my day

Since David may not build, the Chronicler has him do the next best thing. In chapters 23 to 26 he organizes everyone who will serve in the house his son will build. The priests, the descendants of Aaron, are divided by lot into twenty-four families, called courses or divisions, and each takes its turn at the altar (1 Chronicles 24:1–19).

The system was still running in my day. Luke begins my story with a priest named Zacharias, of the priestly division of Abijah (Luke 1:5). Abijah is the eighth name on the Chronicler’s list (1 Chronicles 24:10). Luke says that while Zacharias was serving in his division’s turn, the lot fell to him to burn incense in the Temple, and that is when he was told that his wife Elizabeth would bear a son, John (Luke 1:8–13). The historian Josephus, born a few years after my death, was proud that his family came from the first of the twenty-four courses, and he wrote that David’s arrangement had lasted to his own day.⁶

The courses outlived the Temple. In the generations after the Romans destroyed it, the priestly families settled in the towns and villages of Galilee, and lists were kept of where each course lived. In 1962 archaeologists digging at Caesarea, on the coast, found pieces of a stone plaque that once listed all twenty-four courses with their home towns. One fragment reads, in Hebrew, “the eighteenth course, Happizzez, Nazareth.” Happizzez is the eighteenth name in Chronicles too. It is the oldest known mention of my hometown in any inscription.⁷

We have given you of your own

At the end of the book, David gathers gifts for the Temple, and the people give freely. Then David prays.

But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly as this? For all things come from you, and we have given you of your own. For we are strangers before you, and foreigners, as all our fathers were (1 Chronicles 29:14–15).

Many churches still sing the middle of that verse, in an older translation’s wording, when they take up the offering. It is worth hearing the whole thing. Everything you own came from God. You are only giving it back. And even the king is a foreigner and a passing guest on God’s earth.

Go deeperThe line people added to my prayer

A little earlier in the same prayer, David says this: Yours, LORD, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty! … Yours is the kingdom, LORD, and you are exalted as head above all (1 Chronicles 29:11).

You may know those words from somewhere else. Many Christians end the prayer I taught my friends with For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen (Matthew 6:13). The World English Bible prints that line in Matthew. Most modern Bibles move it to a footnote.

The reason is in the manuscripts. The oldest copies of Matthew, including the two great Greek codices of the 300s, end the prayer with deliver us from the evil one. The oldest copies of Luke’s version stop even sooner, at Bring us not into temptation; the rest was added from Matthew in later copies (Luke 11:4). The early teachers who wrote about the prayer line by line, Tertullian, Origen and Cyprian, knew no closing words of praise. The line first appears in a short church manual called the Didache, probably from around the year 100, in a shorter form: “for thine is the power and the glory for ever.” Later copies of Matthew give it in several different wordings before it settled into the one you know.⁸

Jewish prayers often closed with a blessing of God, and churches praying my words aloud together wanted an ending like that. Where did they find the words? Many scholars think they borrowed them from David’s prayer, here at the end of Chronicles.⁸

So when you say that line, you are praying David’s words after mine.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Samuel 24:1, then 1 Chronicles 21:1.

You will find: the same story, with God moving David in the older book and Satan moving him in the later one.

Then read 2 Samuel 11, and then 1 Chronicles 20:1–3. Chronicles copies the first verse, then skips straight to the capture of Rabbah.

The Short Version

• Chronicles retells Samuel and Kings for the small community that returned from exile.
• It begins with Adam, and Luke traces my family tree back to Adam too.
• It leaves out David’s crimes, but my people kept both versions of his story.
• Where the older book says God moved David, Chronicles says Satan did, an early sign of how ideas about evil changed.
• David was not allowed to build the Temple because he had shed much blood.