Ebook: Zur Geschichtsschreibung des Chronisten: Literarisch-historiographische Abweichungen der Chronik von ihren Paralleltexten in den Samuel- und Königsbüchern

This monograph is a systematic classification and study of the literary alterations from the parallel texts in Samuel and Kings employed in the books of Chronicles. In contrast to many earlier scholars, Kalimi maintains that these changes are not the results of errors in textual transmission, the tendentious or mistaken reading of Samuel and Kings by the Chronicler, or that both the Deuteronomistic historian and the Chronicler worked from the same sources but produced different texts. Instead, he argues that the changes demonstrate the Chronicler's deliberate use of various literary conventions as part of a plan to present a discrete work of history that stands alongside Ezra-Nehemiah. Chronicles is a unified work, independent from Ezra-Nehemiah, that was written in the late-fifth or early-fourth century B.C.E. Kalimi contends that the Chronicler must be recognized as a history writer who works with older sources and modifies them according to the Chronicler's own historiographica l plan and principles. Because the books of Samuel and Kings were not considered to be canonical works in the time of the Chronicler, they did not have to be treated as closed and unchangeable works that could only be read and interpreted as they stood. Rather, they constituted the raw material which the Chronicler reworked in accordance with the Chronicler's own ideological-theological outlook. Like the Deuteronomistic historian, the Chronicler must consequently be regarded seriously as a historian.