II Chronicles (The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries)

II Chronicles (Volume 13 in the acclaimed Anchor Bible Commentary series) is a crucial book for historians of the biblical period and for students of the Bible. Like I Chronicles, it has been both over- and undervalued. In recent years it has, certainly, suffered undue neglect. However, II Chronicles is to be neither accepted as a faithful narrative of the period of biblical history from Solomon to Cyrus nor dismissed as an imaginative re-creation of that history. It must be taken as an important clue to the biblical process, for here we find the Bible quoting itself – sometimes directly, sometimes in paraphrase.Jacob M. Myers has set before himself the enormous task of organizing and correlating the evidence to be found in II Chronicles (as well as in I Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah – for which he is also the editor and translator). Meticulously, he analyzes important aspects of the Chronicler and his work – his method of composition, his conviction that to rebuild the nation of Israel one had to restore and strengthen her traditional religion, his significant post-Exilic perspective. The book also examines the vast literature on Chronicles to find what it yields toward a better understanding of the Chronicler and a fuller appreciation of his work. The appendices in the book provide a list of the parallels and paraphrases that relate Chronicles to other books of the Bible, and genealogical charts summarize the family histories to be found in Chronicles.