The Creation of Historical Narrative in the Biblical Book of Chronicles: the War of Jehoshaphat

• In Event: The Bible in its Ancient Near Eastern Context

Abstract

The historical narratives of Chronicles are often viewed as midrashic expansions of those of Kings. In this model, Kings serves as the historical canon and Chronicles as the expansion of the canon. Nevertheless, in 1997, Anson Rainey cited several pieces of evidence demonstrating that the Chronicler used ancient textual sources describing the building works and wars of the kings of Judah, sources not cited in the book of Kings. This suggests that the Chronicler was more acutely concerned with historical accuracy than scholars previously suspected.
This raises the question of the Chronicler’s method in integrating sensitivity to historical accuracy with the need to create a theologically-edifying narrative.
The case of Jehoshaphat’s war with Moab and Ammon (II Chronicles 20) provides an excellent case-study for examining the Chronicler’s method. We can accurately reconstruct the event behind this narrative, since the Judah-Moab war is narrated both in II Kings 3 and in lines 30-32 of the 9th century Mesha Stele (published by Andre Lemaire in 1994). By examining the similar occurrences contained in both these narratives, we can reconstruct a war between Moab on the one hand, and Judah (acting as a second tier ally of Ahabite Israel) on the other hand. This war took place in the desert south of the Dead Sea and ended in a Moabite victory (Mesha 30-32 and II Kings 3:27-28). Edom’s participation in the war, narrated in Kings, reflects political developments in southern Transjordan in the 10th-9th centuries BCE.
II Chronicles 20 uses the narrative of II Kings 3, while preserving historical features found in II Kings 3: the desert setting of the war, its theological import, and the role of the Edomites. It moves the geographic location of the war to the Hebron hills, where the Judah-Edom border ran in the time of the Chronicler. Chronicles seizes on the theological import of the war, and creates a narrative which preserves points of historical detail while adding the element of thanksgiving, central to Chronicles’ theology

author

• Shawn Zelig Aster, Bar-Ilan University