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Abstract
This dissertation examines the Royal Speeches and Royal Prayers in Chronicles to see if the Chronicler has composed speeches and prayers and placed them on the lips of the kings in such a way that clues to his basic structural framework and theological convictions may be discerned by careful analysis.
Previous scholarship has tended to examine those portions of Chronicles that are paralleled in II Samuel and the books of Kings and to distill the Chronicler's theology on the basis of his supposed tendentious alterations of that synoptic material. W. Lemke has shown that the recent discoveries at Qumran have called this methodology into question. Thus, this dissertation is an attempt to examine the Chronicler on the basis of an extensive portion of his own, non-synoptic material: the Royal Speeches and Prayers. (Chapter I)
Chapters II and III analyze the Royal Speeches and Royal Prayers, respectively, as to translation, structure and intention of the material, and conclude that the Chronicler has placed Royal Speeches at decisive points in the narrative and has used the Royal Prayers to espouse a favorite doctrine: the omnipotence of God and the dependence of his people.
The final four chapters apply the results obtained in Chapters II and III to four areas of interest in the current discussion about the Chronicler. In Chapter IV the findings of our analysis of the non-synoptic material are compared with those discovered by Lemke's analysis of the synoptic material in an attempt to ascertain what is tendentious in the Chronicler. Chapter V examines the character of I Chron. 29. Since this portion of Chronicles contains both a Royal Speech and a Royal Prayer which have recently been attributed to later redaction, it forms an ideal test case for the applicability of the results obtained in Chapters II and III. In Chapter VI the dating and historical setting of the Chronicler are discussed. Arguments are made for a date of ca. 527-515 B.C. and a theological setting at home with the prophetic works of Haggai and Zechariah 1-8.
Finally, in Chapter VII the significance of the Royal Speeches for understanding the structure of the Chronicler's presentation is demonstrated by uncovering his periodization of the history of the monarchy. Not only do the Royal Speeches occur at decisive points in the narrative, they also give structure and shape to the Chronicler's conceptualization of the monarchy in Judah, which allows a theological probing of this particular ordering of the material, an ordering that claims unity as the greatest good in the divine economy. This, of course, is at odds with a point of view that interprets Chronicles as anti-Samaritan polemic and since the anti-Samaritan material usually adduced in support of such a position is contained in Ezra-Nehemiah, this chapter provides yet one more argument against the common authorship of these books and the books of Chronicles.
