Did the Author of Chronicles Also Write the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah?

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The Book of Ezra/Nehemiah begins where the two books of Chronicles end—at the proclamation of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowing the Jews to return to their land after the Babylonian Exile. The conventional wisdom—for the past 150 years—has it that the two sets of books—Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles—were written by the same author. And that is the position recently presented, almost assumed, by Mena-hem Haran of the Hebrew University in “Explaining the Identical Lines at the End of Chronicles and the Beginning of Ezra,” BR 02:03:

“It is generally recognized among scholars that the two books of Chronicles (originally, one, uninterrupted book) and the Book of Ezra/Nehemiah are the work of a single author, who is often referred to as the Chronicler. The four (actually two) books together are sometimes called the Chronistic Work.”

Professor Haran tells us that “the overall unity of the Chronistic Work is … demonstrated by a common ideology, the uniformity of legal, cultic and historical conceptions and specific style, all of which reflect one opus.”

Surprisingly, Professor Haran makes no mention of the fact that each of these points has been forcefully challenged in recent years.^a

The view Professor Haran presents was “established” just over 150 years ago by the German-Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz,¹ and gained a wide following soon thereafter. It always had its occasional dissenters—most notably a doughty Scottish professor named Adam C. Welch.² Credit for reopening the issue in a decisive way goes to Sara Japhet, now a professor (then a graduate student!) at the Hebrew University who published an article on the subject in 1968.³ I myself considered the matter in my doctoral dissertation⁴ and in subsequent publications,⁵ trying to round out the picture begun by Japhet. In recent years a gratifying number of scholars have either expressed agreement or added further arguments in favor of the position Japhet and I have staked out. If proof in such matters is inevitably unobtainable, at the very least we can say that this is a wide-open question at the present time.

Let us examine in a little more detail the elements of Professor Haran’s case. He refers to a “specific style,” presumably the style of Hebrew, that the two works share. Arguments from style are notoriously slippery, however, and in this case they are even worse than that. How can we distinguish the style of an individual writer from the common language of a small community living at a time from which we have very little other literature? Having examined all the evidence ever published for unity of style, I have concluded that the probability in this case lies in the opposite direction: Most of the similarities between the books are shared by other literature of the period as well. So whatever similarity in style exists actually proves nothing. On the other hand, quite a number of words and linguistic practices differ between Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah. Many of these differences, it is true, are due 057to differences in the sources the authors used, but this is not true of all of them. In any event, style certainly cannot prove that one author was responsible for both works.

Professor Haran also refers to “the uniformity of … historical conceptions” between Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah. What he means by this I cannot tell. In my view, the differences in historical conceptions are one of the strongest arguments against unity of authorship. For instance, in Chronicles, although it recounts history from the creation of the world, the major figure is unquestionably King David. He dominates 1 Chronicles. After the historical and genealogical survey of 1 Chronicles 1–10, the rest of the book is devoted to David and his career. Even in 2 Chronicles it is God’s promise to David made through the prophet Nathan (“I will make you great and the Lord shall build up your royal house. When your life ends … I will set up one of your … sons to succeed you … and I will establish his throne for all time”—l Chronicles 17:10–12) that determines the life of the people. By comparison, Moses and the Exodus recede into the background. Indeed, in some of the passages the Chronicler borrows from Samuel and Kings, he omits references to the Exodus or changes them so that they apply to David.

What a contrast we find in Ezra/Nehemiah! Here, the Exodus dominates, both as a pattern for the return of the Jews from their Exile in Babylon and in some of the more heavily ideological passages such as Nehemiah 9 (“Thou didst see the misery of our forefathers in Egypt and didst hear their cry for help at the Red Sea”—Nehemiah 9:9). In Ezra/Nehemiah, God’s covenant with David takes a distinct back seat.

This difference between Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah is not some minor change of emphasis due to different historical periods; it reflects, rather, two contrasting understandings of the whole basis of the relationship between God and Israel.

It is instructive also to note how Chronicles, on the one hand, and Ezra/Nehemiah, on the other, approaches the task of history writing. Ezra and Nehemiah are in some ways quite modern in this regard. Although reflecting an unshakable faith in their God, they nevertheless portray him as working through ordinary people as his agents rather than by direct intervention. Ezra and Nehemiah are singularly short of miracles, as miracles are commonly understood. In Chronicles, however, it is precisely the opposite; the Chronicler has no hesitation in describing God’s activity in the world in immediate ways—miracles and other supernatural happenings abound.

Not that I see any great problem in finding different ideologies relating to miracles side by side in the Bible. I have many friends even today who speak without hesitation about the Lord doing or saying this, while other friends prefer to speak of him helping or guiding—and both can be correct! These differing perceptions simply reflect different temperaments arriving at different modes of theological expression. My point, however, is that they are different, and it is difficult to see how the Chronicler could suddenly switch from one to the other when he allegedly came to edit Ezra and Nehemiah.

There is much more that could be said along these lines—for example, the quite different attitudes towards prophets in the two works. In Chronicles, for instance, the text is punctured by prophetic “sermons” which draw out the lessons of the historical narrative for the reader. In Ezra/Nehemiah, by contrast, this characteristic feature of Chronicles is completely lacking, and indeed prophets play very little part whatever in the account.

As a final example, we should note that Ezra and Nehemiah take a very harsh, negative view of the inhabitants of the former northern kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by Assyria in 721 B.C. Part of the reason for this is that Ezra did not consider these northerners any longer to be true Israelites. Those who were then living in what had been the northern kingdom of Israel were considered to be descendants of “foreigners” imported long ago by an earlier Assyrian king.

In 2 Kings 17, we are told at length of the apostasy of the northerners that led to their defeat and deportation, and how the king of Assyria settled foreigners in their stead. Surely, if the author of Chronicles shared the negative view of Ezra and Nehemiah toward the inhabitants of the former northern kingdom of Israel, he would have 058included in Chronicles the material from 2 Kings 17 in his recounting of Israelite history, Since this was obviously available to him, as we know from the many instances in which he copied the account in Kings almost verbatim. How remarkable it is, then, to find that Chronicles completely omits any reference to 2 Kings 17, the very chapter that would have given the historical background to the ideological stance so strongly represented in Ezra/Nehemiah. Indeed, in Chronicles, we find instead that the good kings of Judah (the southern kingdom) who ruled after the fall of Israel to the Assyrians (kings of Judah such as Hezekiah and Josiah) go out of their way to woo back all those northerners who had not been deported by the Assyrian king (2 Chronicles 30 and 34:9), while no mention whatever is made of foreigners having been brought into the former kingdom of Israel.

Along this same line: In 1 Kings 11 we are told of Solomon’s foreign wives who “turned his heart to follow other gods” (1 Kings 11:4). This is specifically referred to in Nehemiah 13:26, when we are told that even King Solomon, with all his wisdom “was led by foreign women into sin.” Much of the account of Solomon’s reign in 2 Chronicles 9 is taken verbatim from the account in 1 Kings 10. If the author of Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles were the same, we would surely expect the Chronicler to continue by including the part of 1 Kings 11 describing Solomon’s foreign wives and how they led him into sin, but the Chronicler deliberately omitted it. How then can it be argued the authors of Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah are the same?

Finally, Professor Haran refers to the uniformity of legal and cultic conceptions in the two works. This is true as it relates to such matters as the importance of the Temple and the correct ordering of its personnel. But this is in no way surprising in view of the fact that both works come from similar social and religious backgrounds. Any writer in Jerusalem at that time would have done the same. The Book of Malachi, for instance, also shares these concerns, but that has not led any, modern scholar to identify the prophet Malachi with the Chronicler.

Naturally, a great deal more could be said about these and related matters. Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, many other technical considerations about the literary history of Ezra and Nehemiah fully support the conclusion suggested above—that the authors of Chronicles, on the one hand, and Ezra/Nehemiah, on the other, are not the same.

Professor Haran’s principal argument his BR article, however, relates to the “catchlines” at the end of Chronicles and the beginning of Ezra/Nehemiah: The last two verses of Chronicles are repeated verbatim at the beginning of Ezra/Nehemiah. This, he argues, shows that they were originally part of one work. Indeed, “the catch-lines that connect Chronicles with Ezra are decisive evidence [my emphasis] of the compositional connection between the two works.”

According to Professor Haran, the combined composition was too long to fit on a single scroll. Like other lengthy compositions in the Bible, such as the Pentateuch it had to be divided up on more than one scroll.

Normally, Professor Haran argues, this division was done on the basis of thematic significance, as in the case of the Pentateuch; hence, the five “Books of Moses.” Each new book (or scroll) dealt with a single historical period, so that it could reasonably be regarded as a new self-contained entity.

This was not the case, says Professor Haran, with the Chronicler’s work because of the absence of a natural break. So, in order to indicate the integral connection between one part of the work and its sequel, the scroll containing our 1 and 2 Chronicles was provided with a catchline. In this way, readers would be made aware of the need to continue reading on another scroll and they would be helped by the overlap to identify the next scroll correctly. Thus says Professor Haran.

Much of this argument depends, however, on Professor Haran’s assumption that the authors of the two works were the same. As we have shown, this assumption is highly questionable, to say the least.

He also assumes without proof that “the length of Chronicles was the maximum possible size of a book scroll of the time.” It is true that Chronicles is the longest single book in the Old Testament. But that, of course, does not in any way prove that the scroll could not have been even longer if necessary. Professor Haran simply assumes this to 059be the case. His argument thus comes dangerously close to being circular: The maximum size of a scroll and the common authorship of Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah are both assumed, and then the one is used to establish the other, and vice versa.

Moreover, Professor Haran’s explanation of the need for catchlines in Chronicles plus Ezra/Nehemiah by comparing it with other long books in the Bible is not convincing. No other long work of the Bible that is divided over more than one scroll—the Pentateuch or the “Deuteronomic History,” comprising Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings—contains catchlines. Professor Haran tries to avoid this difficulty by maintaining that the other works were divided into self-contained units on thematic and historical grounds, whereas the Chronicler’s work could not be so divided; the division was determined merely by a technical necessity relating to the (supposed) maximum possible length of a scroll at the time.

A moment’s thought will reveal, however, that this is simply not the case. The break between 2 Samuel and 1 Kings is not at all happy, for instance, interrupting as it does the account of the end of David’s reign. By contrast, the break at the end of 2 Chronicles 36:21 (i.e., just before the so-called catchline) is fully satisfying, both thematically and historically. The end of the monarchy, the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the land left desolate for “seventy years” as the people were taken into Exile in Babylon—this seems like a logical enough place to close a chapter, if not a book! Similarly, the Book of Ezra would then make a completely fresh start with a new empire (Persia), a new king (Cyrus) and a new community (post-Exilic Judaism, by contrast with the former monarchy and nation). Thus, even on the basis of Haran’s explanation, we should no more expect the use of catchlines here than elsewhere in the Old Testament.

How, then can these catchlines be explained? Naturally, no single suggested answer can claim to be certainly right, but at least three possibilities might be considered.

The most likely possibility relates to liturgical considerations. We know that for a period before and after the close of the Old Testament canon the Books of Chronicles enjoyed a very much greater popularity than, sadly, they do today. We also know, however, that in liturgical use of the Bible there was a desire not to end a reading on too negative a note; that is why, for instance, after the reading of Isaiah 66 it became the common practice to reread one of the more attractive-sounding verses from a little earlier in the chapter. Perhaps the same thing happened with Chronicles: Instead of finishing with the Chronicler’s original ending at 2 Chronicles 36:21, it became normal to read a short passage from the beginning of Ezra, which of course in one sense continues the story where the Chronicler left off. And so in time this habit came to be reflected in the written form of the text.

While this seems to me the most likely explanation of the catchlines, there are at least two other less likely possibilities:

1. If the author of Chronicles wrote his work after Ezra and Nehemiah had been completed, he might have borrowed the opening of Ezra in order to conclude his work on a note of hope and to point his readers toward the fuller account of the post-Exilic restoration. (I do not personally favor this suggestion because I believe that Ezra 1–6 was written only after the Books of Chronicles had been completed.)

2. Another possibility is that a later editor added the conclusion to Chronicles for the same reasons suggested above—to conclude on a note of hope and to point his readers toward the fuller account of the post-Exilic restoration in Ezra/Nehemiah.⁶

The Book of Ezra/Nehemiah begins where the two books of Chronicles end—at the proclamation of Cyrus, king of Persia, allowing the Jews to return to their land after the Babylonian Exile. The conventional wisdom—for the past 150 years—has it that the two sets of books—Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles—were written by the same author. And that is the position recently presented, almost assumed, by Mena-hem Haran of the Hebrew University in “Explaining the Identical Lines at the End of Chronicles and the Beginning of Ezra,” BR 02:03: “It is generally recognized among scholars that the two books of Chronicles (originally, one, […]