§ 8. The Religious Value of Chronicles
Chronicles has suffered by comparison with the fresher, more human, history in Samuel and Kings. It has seemed to modern taste somewhat dry and uninspiring. To the superficial reader any religious feeling in the book is devoted to the concerns of a ritual that has long since passed away, and with which we might in any case have little sympathy. And, of course, the contrast is still more unfavourable if it be made with the books which contain the noblest utterances of Jewish faith. Job in his anguish crying “though He slay me yet will I trust Him”; the Psalmist fearless of all ill since God is with him; Hosea who wrote of God “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings”—these stand on a higher spiritual level than the Chronicler. None the less, there is virtue, and even great virtue, in Chronicles, and failure to perceive it only argues lack of insight on our part.
In the first place, if Temple ritual and observance of the precepts of the Law bulk too largely in the Chronicler’s conception of the religious life, he had much excuse for his attitude. In his day and generation, faithfulness to Jehovah and to that moral and spiritual interpretation of life for which the worship of Jehovah stood, inevitably involved participation in the organised services which centred in the Temple. Whatever its imperfections, the Temple at Jerusalem in his time was performing a great religious work in keeping alive zeal for Jehovah and His Law in the face of much degenerate heathenism. Moreover it is an unfair and a false assumption to suppose that his manifest devotion to the ritual necessarily or probably meant that his religion was mere formalism or his creed poorly conceived. Behind the parade of the formalities of worship burns a living faith. The freedom with which the Chronicler has retold the history to conform with his religious views is indeed the measure of the force of his beliefs. We have already noted (p. xlix) as regards one midrashic passage that it is essentially a sermon on the need for trust in God. The Chronicler was passionately convinced that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. He believed in a God supremely just yet merciful, One who rules directly and personally in human life, destroying evil, guiding and fostering all that is true and good. “The might of nations counted as nothing before Him. Obedience and faith in Jehovah were more effective instruments in the hands of Israel’s kings than powerful armies and strong alliances.” It is easy to smile at the Chronicler’s belief that piety is necessarily rewarded by worldly prosperity, and sin by worldly misfortune. But, if the life and teaching of Jesus Christ have led us to a deeper interpretation of life, that does not lessen the virtue of the Chronicler in maintaining his faith in God’s justice and vigilance, despite all the cruel evidences of the prosperity of the wicked. His doctrine of reward and punishment was crude, but after all he was striving, as best he knew how, to maintain the great central conviction of religion that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” Everywhere his work is dominated by the sense of right and wrong, and a clear-eyed perception of the absolute distinction between them. He brings all men and all things to a moral and religious test. The imperishable worth of Chronicles will ever be that it is the record of a man’s endeavour to present, in terms of national experience, the eternal laws of the spiritual realm.
Finally, since the Chronicler was retelling the past in terms of the present, we know that these beliefs of his were not rules applied in theory to history and ignored in present practice. They were the convictions by which his own soul lived. No one can afford to despise a man who was prepared to walk by the light of such a faith amid the difficulties and the perils which surrounded the enfeebled Jerusalem of that age. As Curtis says, “it was under the tutelage of men like the Chronicler that the Maccabees were nourished and the heroic age of Judaism began.” We must not allow any distaste for legalism in religion to blind us to the virtues of the post-exilic Jews. The very rigidity of the ritual and the doctrine was essential to the preservation of the nobler elements in the faith. In the memorable words of Wellhausen (Prolegomena, pp. 497 f.), “At a time when all nationalities, and at the same time all bonds of religion and national customs were beginning to be broken up in the seeming cosmos and real chaos of the Graeco-Roman Empire, the Jews stood out like a rock in the midst of the ocean. When the natural conditions of independent nationality all failed them, they nevertheless artificially maintained it with an energy truly marvellous, and thereby preserved for themselves, and at the same time for the whole world, an eternal good.” Chronicles may justly claim to have played a part in that extraordinary triumph.