History

What these books are

Twelve books carrying the story forward from Joshua’s entry into the land to Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls roughly a thousand years later. In between: judges, a united kingdom, a split into two kingdoms, conquest by Assyria and Babylon, exile, and return.

How to read them

These are not neutral chronicles. They are told to explain how Israel arrived where it did, and they are unsparing — the heroes fail, often badly, and the narrator rarely pauses to moralise. Watching what the text simply reports versus what it endorses is most of the skill in reading them well.

Chronicles retells much of Samuel and Kings from a later vantage point, after the exile, with different concerns. Reading the two accounts side by side is one of the more rewarding exercises in the Old Testament.