fidelity to the covenant, and the fatal fruits of defection from the Lord.
The chronicler's supposed predilection for genealogical lists arose also from the circumstances of his time. From Ezr 2:60. we learn that some of the sons of priests who returned with Zerubbabel sought their family registers, but could not find them, and were consequently removed from the priesthood; besides this, the inheritance of the land was bound up with the families of Israel. On this account the family registers had, for those who had returned from the exile, an increased importance, as the means of again obtaining possession of the heritage of their fathers; and perhaps it was the value thus given to the genealogical lists which induced the author of the Chronicle to include in his book all the old registers of this sort which had been received from antiquity.
2. Age and Author of the Chronicles.
The Chronicle cannot have been composed before the time of Ezra, for it closes with the intelligence that Cyrus, by an edict in the first year of his reign, allowed the Jews to return to their country (2Ch 36:22.), and it brings down the genealogical tree of Zerubbabel to his grandchildren (1Ch 3:19-21). The opinion brought into acceptance by de Wette and Ewald, that the genealogy (1Ch 3:19-24) enumerates six or seven other generations after Zerubbabel, and so reaches down to the times of Alexander the Great or yet later, is founded on the undemonstrable assumption that the twenty-one names which in this passage (1Ch 3:21) follow רפיה בני are the names of direct descendants of Zerubbabel. But no exegetical justification can be found for this assumption; since the list of names, “the sons of Rephaiah, the sons of Arnan, the sons of Obadiah,” etc. (1Ch 3:21-24), is connected neither in form nor in subject-matter with the grandsons of Zerubbabel, who have been already enumerated, but forms a genealogical fragment, the connection of which with Zerubbabel's grandchildren is merely asserted, but can neither be proved nor even rendered probable. (Vide the commentary on these verses.) Other grounds for the acceptance of so late a date for the composition of the Chronicle are entirely wanting; for the orthography and language of the book
