Page:The Books of Chronicles (1916).djvu/43

Rh to the ecclesiastical orders at Jerusalem. Undoubtedly the feud was bitter in the Chronicler's time; and there are strong grounds for holding that Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah were written with the immediate object of confuting the ecclesiastical pretensions of the Samaritans and of showing that in Jerusalem only ought men to worship. Certainly Chronicles is well adapted for that end. A virulent polemic would have been discounted as a party document. The Chronicler instead has skilfully retold the story of the past, so as to leave two main impressions. In the first place, by ignoring the affairs of the Northern Kingdom, save where he intimates that its people were religiously degenerate from the start (see 2 Chr. xiii. 5-12), that they were grievously decimated by a great disaster (2 Chr. xiii. 13-17), and that in general their attitude on the subject of mixed marriages was scandalously lax (see Ezra and Nehemiah), he has subtly but forcibly created the impression that the Samaritans were little better than "a heterogeneous mob of heathen." Secondly and chiefly, his history was intended to show that Jerusalem, with its Temple on Mt Zion, is the one place which Jehovah has chosen, and where He has set His Name. There alone was His worship properly and legitimately established, and there alone can it still be carried on. Jerusalem too, like Samaria, had suffered for its sins, but the disaster of the exile, the break in the succession, was repaired, he argues, through the return from Babylonia of that company of Israelites of pure descent whom Ezra led back: the genealogies which are so noticeable a feature of Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah are given as irrefutable proof that the Jerusalem community of the Chronicler's day—Levites and laymen—were the true and only descendants of the nation of old. It followed that by them alone could the worship of Jehovah be lawfully conducted.

It seems very probable that the Chronicler's work was directed specifically against the Samaritans. But in any case it is undoubtedly true that the essential purpose of the book was to vindicate the religious supremacy of Jerusalem, and to