Also telling is the book’s place in the canon. In two important
manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible—the Aleppo codex (tenth century CE) and the
Leningrad codex (1009)—Chronicles comes at the beginning of the Writings,
immediately preceding the Psalms. This arrangement may reflect a desire to
closely link Chronicles’ David, with his intense interest in sacred music, to
the Psalter, which, according to tradition, he authored (b. B. Bat. 14b). These
codices conclude with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
In the Talmud, in the majority of medieval biblical manuscripts, and
in the finalized form of the Hebrew Bible, however, Chronicles comes last
within the Writings. This arrangement defies the natural order by making
Chronicles follow, rather than precede, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah,
suggesting that it was more important to end the Jewish canon with Chronicles
than to honor the logic of the narrative flow.
The significance of being last becomes clear when one compares the
Jewish and Christian Bibles. The Christian Bible ends with The Revelation to
John and its vision of a future apocalypse presided over by Christ. In the
broad scheme of Christian soteriology, Chronicles is part of a greater history
of events that culminates in this salvific moment. In concluding with
Chronicles, by contrast, the Jewish Bible anchors its lengthy epic of Israel
with a recapitulation of that history. The arrangement indicates that for the
community that canonized Jewish Scripture, past events—not those of the
future—hold the interpretive key to the present. Also, the final scene of
Chronicles appears to parallel the ending of the Pentateuch. Like Deuteronomy,
Chronicles closes with the people of Israel on the cusp of return to the land,
perpetually poised to reclaim God’s covenantal promise. (Blaire A.
French, Chronicles through the Centuries
[Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentaries; West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley Blackwell, 2017],
10)
