Page:The Books of Chronicles (1916).djvu/39

Rh Judean affairs. It is therefore significant that the South Judean "strain" is a marked feature in the Chronicler's history. Again, it is practically certain that Levitical predecessors of the Chronicler felt somewhat the same interest as he displays in the origins of their order and institutions. Are we to suppose that they made no attempts to gratify their curiosity, or to find historical grounds for their claims? Surely they would seize with interest on any and all current traditions, and would be constantly collating them with the well-known version in Kings, adding whatever they could to the total, and no doubt tending to retell the whole—at least the popular and edifying portions of the narrative—in terms more agreeable to the ideas and practices of their own time. We cannot suppose that the Chronicler was the first and only Levite who attempted to satisfy the obvious need (§ 6) for an orthodox ecclesiastical version of Judean history. Features of the genealogies, and in particular the Levitical data, suggest the existence of statistical records, if of nothing more. One further small but interesting point deserves mention. In 1 Chr. iv. 9, vii. 23, xii. 18 there are sayings which cannot possibly originate with the Chronicler, for they are written in an archaic style utterly foreign to his manner of speech. Of these xii. 18 is poetical in form, while the other two are sentences of a type made familiar to us by early passages in Genesis. These verses, then, are certainly not the invention of the Chronicler, and, even if they are only isolated fragments, their existence is at least significant. In fine, the natural supposition is that in post-exilic Jerusalem there were various traditions which were drawn partly, but not exclusively, from the particular recension of history preserved in Kings, and which continued to develop in form and perhaps in content after the "Kings" recension was relatively fixed. Whether these developments of traditions, canonical and otherwise, preserve any genuine history or not (§ 7), their existence in popular and priestly circles of the Chronicler's time is, we think, almost certain; and it is quite certain that, if they were in existence, the Chronicler would