Chronicles

Chronicles, in Scripture, is the name for two related things: the royal annals kept by the courts of Israel and Judah, and the biblical book that retells Israel's story from Adam to the return from exile.

The text says that the record of each reign was written in "the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel" or "of the kings of Judah," a formula repeated reign after reign (1 Kings 14:19; 14:29; 15:23; 15:31; 16:5; 16:20; 16:27; 22:39; 2 Kings 20:20). The wording attached to it — "the rest of the acts," together with a king's might, building works, or even his treason — indicates a fuller account than the narrated one, from which the historian selects (1 Kings 16:20; 22:39; 2 Kings 20:20). Scripture never says these annals survive, and nothing in the text identifies them with the canonical books. Linguistically, the Hebrew idiom behind "chronicles" is dibre hayyamim, "words, matters of the days," that is, day-by-day records; the same phrase supplies the Hebrew title of the book of Chronicles itself, whose Greek and Latin titles ("things left over," "chronicle") account for its English name.

The book of Chronicles makes comparable claims about its own sources. The acts of David are said to be written "in the history of Samuel the seer, and in the history of Nathan the prophet, and in the history of Gad the seer" (1 Chronicles 29:29), and for Manasseh the text points to "the acts of the kings of Israel" and "the history of Hozai," where his prayer, his sin, and his humbling were recorded (2 Chronicles 33:18–19). So the term denotes prophetic or official written records behind the narrative, not the narrative alone.

Christian traditions differ less on what the word means than on how to weigh the book that bears it. Some read its departures from Samuel–Kings as deliberate theological interpretation, one way of reading being that the Chronicler foregrounds temple, worship, and the Davidic line; others treat the differences as reconcilable and stress the book's historical value; traditions that receive both corpora as canonical Scripture generally read them together as complementary witness rather than as rivals. The lost annals cited by the kings' historians are read by some as evidence that Israel's record-keeping was extensive, and by others simply as the narrator's way of pointing beyond what is told.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.