Response to: Isaac Kalimi, An Ancient Israelite Historian

Ralph W. Klein, November, 2004

For more than twenty years Isaac Kalimi has issued a steady stream of publications on Chronicles, including a number of oral presentations in this vibrant section of the SBL. All of us have profited enormously from his Classified Bibliography published almost fifteen years ago. In 2004 he has topped off this record with two monographs: 1. The Books of Chronicles: Historical Writing and Literary Devices, previously published in both German and Hebrew; and 2. the book under review in this session: An Ancient Israelite Historian. Studies in the Chronicler, His Time, Place and Writing I want to congratulate Isaac for his insight and industry and thank him publicly for what we all have learned from him about this fascinating author we call the Chronicler.

The volume to which we are responding consists of nine chapters or essays, seven of which have been published previously, in fact within the last decade, in some form although Isaac assures us all of these have been expanded, corrected, and brought up to date. He adopts centrist, mainstream positions, widely held by scholars, particularly in North America. He identifies Chronicles as a work distinct from Ezra and Nehemiah, largely free of secondary passages, and dated to the first quarter of the fourth century BCE. I would only comment here that some of these conclusions need to be stated with more a bit nuance. Is it really true that common authorship with Ezra and Nehemiah is “out of the question” or “unacceptable”? I would prefer to say that such a common authorship is “improbable.” His most definitive data for dating Chronicles to the first quarter of the fourth century is the genealogy of the Davidides in 1 Chronicles. 3. I wish he had stated more explicitly that a terminus a quo is also provided by the completion of the present book of Ezra-Nehemiah, which the Chronicler seems to presuppose in his citation of Ezra 1 in 2 Chr 36:22-23 and in his citation of verses from Nehemiah 11 in 1 Chronicles 9.

Part I of this volume deals with the Chronicler’s time and place and the characteristics of his writing; Part II of this volume deals in a variety of ways with the Chronicler’s place, namely, Jerusalem. Each essay is copiously documented with bibliographical references, well-organized, and ending with a clear summary called Conclusion. A chapter on the uses of puns or paronomasia expands slightly on his previous publications in this area, but would seem to me more appropriate for his other volume this year that deals with the literary devices utilized by the Chronicler.

The first essay in the volume under review deals with the Chronicler as historian and begins with the following questions every reader faces: “Was [this literary composition] meant to be fiction or history, literary narrative or historical novel, commentary or theology?” A few lines later we are told that the characterization of the Chronicler and his work has direct implications not only for the understanding of the nature of the book and its content but also for the scholar’s assessment of the reliability of the information contained within Chronicles and hence for the book’s usefulness as a historical source for the history of the Israel in the monarchic era.

Isaac then criticizes three alternate proposals: the Chronicler as midrashist (Julius Wellhausen), the Chronicler as an exegete (Thomas Willi), and the Chronicler as theologian (Peter Ackroyd, Richard Coggins, and William Johnstone). I find myself in substantial agreement with his critique of Wellhausen and Willi, with the following provisos. His statement that Wellhausen tried to show that the Chronicler was dependent only on the earlier canonical books is a bit overdrawn. Wellhausen actually thought that the Chronicler had available a work now lost to us called the Midrash on the Book of Kings, which contained among other things the Prayer of Manasseh. Hence replace the word only with mainly. In arguing against Willi he concludes that the books of Samuel and Kings were by no means canonical for the Chronicler in that the Chronicler did not treat them as immutable, sealed books that one may strive only to explain and comprehend in their given form (p. 25). This definition of canonical strikes me as anachronistic and one-sided. The evidence from Qumran of different versions or editions of books that later were unanimously held to be canonical, Jeremiah comes to mind or even the Palestinian editions of the Pentateuch, suggests that “authoritative”/canonical works may have been treated in a variety of ways and not only as immutable, sealed books. I agree with Isaac that Chronicles is not a commentary on Samuel-Kings and even that the Chronicler presupposed that his audience would be quite familiar with the alternate version in Samuel Kings. Clearly, the Chronicler had a different interpretation of the monarchical period that he wanted to put forth, but it is by no means clear, at least to me, whether the Chronicler thought his work should be read alongside Samuel-Kings or whether he hoped his work would replace it. At some time, we know not when, what most of us call the Deuteronomistic History was identified in Judaism as the “Former Prophets” and surely therefore was not to be replaced.

Toward the end of his critique of the Chronicler as theologian he observes “In other words, as a historian the Chronicler’s ideological [or theological] presuppositions guided his historiography. Nevertheless, Kalimi concludes, the main feature of the Chronicler’s work is history—not theology—though it is indeed a “sacred history” and not a “secular history.” And—again I quote--“Therefore, the Chronicler is primarily a historian rather than a theologian.” P. 30 This conclusion is built in large part on assertion rather than argument, and this leads to the following reflections on Kalimi’s own thesis of the Chronicler being a historian.

Kalimi calls attention to certain historiographic features of Chronicles: the author deals the past, collected material from earlier books and possibly additional sources, selects, evaluates, and interprets these sources and makes connections between them, and his work as a whole is imprinted with a unique historiography. Kalimi goes on to state that the Chronicler understood himself as a narrator or storyteller of past events, that is, in western terminology a “historian.” P. 32. Kalimi considers the author a historian and his work as late biblical historiography. He admits that the features discussed do not automatically make the book of Chronicles a reliable historical composition, or its author a scientific historian such as Thucydides. After dismissing the views of Pfeiffer who considered Chronicles historical fiction, John Jarick who dubs it fantasy literature and John Van Seters who labeled it plagiarism, Kalimi concludes that the Chronicler is a skilled professional historian and Chronicles is an impressive attempt to organize material into a single comprehensive and systematic work. His statement that according to our knowledge of the sources, it is the first of its kind would come as a considerable surprise to the Deuteronomistic Historian. In a personal communication, Isaac states that it is the first of its kind in the Second Temple Period, but of course the final editing of the Deuteronomistic History may have extended into that period and in any case it would be widely known. Kalimi concludes that Chronicles is neither Midrash nor commentary nor theology and that the Chronicler cannot be considered as a midrashist, commentator, or theologian.

It is this either/or conclusion, however, that worries me. Kalimi himself admits that there are midrashic elements in Chronicles and if the Chronicler is not a commentator on Samuel and Kings, he is surely a commentator on the history therein recounted. And why should we make his role as theologian/historian an either/or choice?

The Chronicler does not fit easily into any of our literary categories. Here is my own summary of Chronicles (that is too long to fit on a bumper sticker). Chronicles is largely a literary narrative about Israel’s past, focused primarily on the story of the Davidic line of kings who ruled in Jerusalem and prefaced by a collection of genealogies that links Israel back to the first human and to the ancestral figure of Abraham while sketching out the totality of what might be meant by Israel by recording the genealogies of each of the tribes. The first chapter, excerpted exclusively from Genesis, gives the genealogy from Adam to Abraham, or Adam to Israel if you wish, and portrays Israel against the backdrop of, or the context of, all the nations of the world. The narrative itself is largely a rewriting of Samuel and Kings, interspersed with major paragraphs of the Chronicler’s own composition. The theological agenda of this composition stresses especially the importance and legitimacy of the temple in Jerusalem, its clergy, and its sacrificial rites, also and especially, at least by implication, for the author’s own time and audience. Here ends my summary of Chronicles. I’m comfortable with calling that theology or theological history, but I am not comfortable with saying that the Chronicler is a historian and not a theologian. There is a defensiveness about the Chronicler who has to write one of the longest books in the Old Testament in order to uphold the authority of the Jerusalem temple, its clergy, and its sacrificial rites. Hence it is also an apologetic work that implies an awareness that some of his contemporaries were not willing to concede his points about the temple, its clergy, and its rites.

Let’s consider briefly in this regard two major units in Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 1-9 tells the story of Solomon and his building of the temple, a section in which the Chronicler had very little, if any, additional data, but where he wanted to tell the history differently, for theological reasons. Hence he leaves out the Deuteronomistic Historians’s indictment of Solomon from 1 Kings 11, and has Huram cede cities to Solomon rather than the other way around. In both cases I would classify the Chronicler more as a theologian than a historian. Or what about the lavish preparations of David for the building of the temple in 1 Chronicles 22 and 28-29 or the seamless transition in power from David to Solomon with no opposing Adonijah or conniving Bathsheba and Nathan in sight? I do not begrudge calling that “history, properly understood,” although I think I would call it primarily theological in intent, designed to enhance the roles of David and Solomon as temple founders.

Finally, on this point, I am uneasy about Isaac’s assertion that the characterization of the Chronicler as historian has direct implications for the scholar’s assessment of the reliability of the information contained within Chronicles and hence for the book’s usefulness as a historical source for the history of Israel in the monarchic period (p. 20). Was this literary composition meant to be fiction or history, Kalimi asks. History, probably, but some of the Chronicler’s information such as the tonnage of David’s donation in silver and gold and the numbers used throughout the corpus are fiction. Was Chronicles a literary narrative or historical novel? Probably a literary narrative, but this narrative has some qualities with the much later genre we call historical novel. Was it commentary or theology? Yes, on theology, and yes on commentary if we mean by that that the Chronicler was commenting on the history presented in Samuel and especially Kings.

On the second half of Isaac’s book, dealing with Jerusalem, I can be much more brief because I am in substantial agreement with most parts of it. Here are a few issues on which I would welcome further research from Isaac or collegial conversation with him:

· Why does the Chronicler portray Joab more positively in contrast with Samuel and Kings? Does it have anything to do with the descendants of Joab mentioned in Ezra 2:6//Neh 7:11 and Ezra 8:9. While we might think that these are two different Joabs, the Chronicler may have equated them and therefore felt he needed to enhance the status of Joab.

· I am fascinated by Isaac’s proposal that the positioning of Chronicles as the last book in the Tenak has to do with the open-ending invitation by Cyrus for Jews to make aliyah to Jerusalem, even perhaps after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. At the same time I am somewhat skeptical of his view of the final chapter in Kings reporting the “end” of history. Isaac himself argues for the originality of 2 Chr 36:22-23 against a whole host of modern commentators, but he accepts, much too easily in my judgment, that the account of the release and rehabilitation of Jehoiachin is only a secondary afterthought in Kings. Those who argue that the promise to David is a leading leit motif in Samuel and Kings see these four verses as reassurance to the reader that the promise to David is still alive. If readers were to follow DTR’s repeated admonition to return or repent (Shub), might God not once more send some kind of deliverer since he still stands behind the promise to David?

· One new essay in this volume, comprising chapter six, The Eternal City Jerusalem versus “City of David” is only three and a half pages long. Isaac writes that in spite of the Chronicler’s admiration for King David, he does not make systematic use of the new name City of David and tried to minimize its appearance (p. 107). The fact remains however that the Chronicler uses “city of David” nineteen times (Kalimi says eighteen but he evidently overlooked two passages where the expression is preceded by the preposition in (2 Chr 8:11//1 Kgs 9:24). Kalimi cites one case where the “city of David” becomes “the city of Judah” (2 Chr 25:28//2 Kgs 14:20) although I think textual corruption is still a possibility here. On another case he notes that “the city of David” is replaced by “Jerusalem” (2 Chr 28:27//2 Kgs 16:20), but this is the burial notice of Ahaz, and the Chronicler also adds that they did not bring Ahaz to the graves of the kings of Israel, and this addition renders the replacement of “city of David” by “Jerusalem” of little consequence. On two occasions Kalimi claims that the Chronicler drops the name “city of David.” But in one case the Chronicler not only drops the word city of David, but he incorporates nothing at all from the verse in question 1 Kgs 2:10 David’s burial notice—David is not buried in Chronicles. The other omission (1 Chr 15:25//2 Sam 6:12) might reflect only the Chronicler’s attempt to straighten out the awkward syntax of his Vorlage. A literal translation of 2 Sam 6:12 would be: So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom the city of David with joy. Most translators, Kalimi included, add the preposition “to” before “the city of David.” Rather than make this addition, the Chronicler omitted the awkward phrase which may have struck the Chronicler as a solecism. In short the Chronicler’s nineteen uses of city of David in comparison to eighteen in his Vorlage hardly seems like an unsystematic use of the expression or minimizing its appearance.

Let me end my response on a different note. The leaders of our section invited this panel to honor Isaac for his great accomplishments and to continue the dialogue that Isaac always initiates and invites. I am pleased with this opportunity to enter that dialogue and to give due honor to our author.