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very variously explained, and which, as is well known, is the foundation of the announcement made by Christ of the destruction of Jerusalem and the last judgment (Mat 24:6-7; Luk 21:19). As C. p. Caspari (der syrisch-ephraimit. Krieg., Christiania 1849, S. 54) has already remarked, it is so peculiar, and bears so little of the impress of the Chronicle, that it is impossible that it can have been produced by the chronicler himself: it must have been taken over by him from his authorities almost without alteration. From this one speech, whose contents he could hardly have reproduced accurately in his own words, and which he has consequently left almost unaltered, we can see clearly enough that the chronicler has taken over the speeches he communicates with fidelity, so far as their contents are concerned, and has only clothed them formally, more or less, in his own language. This treatment of the speeches in the Chronicle is, however, not a thing peculiar and confined to the author of this book, but is, as Delitzsch has shown (Isaiah, p. 17ff. tr.), common to all the biblical historians; for even in the prophecies in the books of Samuel and Kings distinct traces are observable throughout of the influence of the narrator, and they bear more or less visibly upon them in impress of the writer who reproduces them, without their historical kernel being thereby affected.
Now the historical truth of the events is just as little interfered with by the circumstance that the author of the Chronicle works out rhetorically the descriptions of the celebration of the holy feasts, represents in detail the offering of the sacrifices, and has spoken in almost all of these descriptions of the musical performances of the Levites and priests. The conclusion which has been drawn from this, that he has here without hesitation transferred to an earlier time that which had become established custom in his own time, would only then be correct if the restoration of the sacrificial worship according to the ordinance of Leviticus, or the introduction of instrumental music and the singing of psalms, dated only from the time of the exile, as de Wette, Gramberg, and others have maintained. If, on the contrary, these arrangements and regulations be of Mosaic, and in a secondary sense of Davidic origin, then the chronicler has not transferred the customs and usages of his own time to the times of David, Asa, Hezekiah, and others, but has related what actually occurred under these circumstances, only giving to the description an individual colouring. Take, for example, the