record of earlier events in order to bring it into
accord with the traditions current in his own day. Above all he aimed to
establish the authority and prestige of the Jerusalem temple, and to prove
that Jehovah "was not with Israel" (II Chron. 25:7), which was represented
in his day by the hated Samaritans. The hatred engendered by the Samaritan
feud explains many of the peculiarities of the Chronicler. He was, in
fact, an apologist rather than a historian. Thus post-exilic institutions,
as, for example, the temple song service with its guilds of singers, are
projected backward even to the days of David, and the events of early
Hebrew history are constantly glorified. The numbers found in the
earlier, prophetic sources are magnified, and at every point it is easy to
recognize the influence of the Chronicler's familiarity with the splendor
and magnificence of the great Persian and Greek empires, and of his
desire to inspire his fellow-Jews with national pride and with loyalty to
their religious institutions.

II. The Chronicler's Conception of the Restoration. Fortunately the
Chronicler did not depend entirely upon traditions current in his day, or
upon his own conceptions of the early history, but quoted freely from
earlier sources. As a result a large portion of the prophetic history of
Samuel and Kings is reproduced verbatim in I and II Chronicles. For the
Persian period, regarding which he is our chief authority, he apparently
quoted from three or four documents. In Ezra 4:7-23 is found a brief
description in Aramaic of the opposition of Judah's neighbors to the
rebuilding of the walls, probably in the days of Nehemiah. In Ezra 5 and 6
there is another long quotation from an Aramaic document that describes a
similar attempt to put a stop to the rebuilding of the temple in the days
of Haggai and Zechariah. The Chronicler evidently believed that the second
temple was rebuilt, not by the people of the land to whom Haggai and
Zechariah spoke, but by Jewish exiles who on the accession of Cyrus had
returned in great numbers from Babylon. He assumed that Judah had been
depopulated during the Babylonian exile, and that the only people left in
Palestine were the heathen and the hated Samaritans. He also pictures the
return of the exiles, not as that of a handful of courageous patriots, but
of a vast company laden with rich gifts and guarded by Persian soldiers.

A careful examination of Ezra 2, which purports to contain the