1 & 2 Chronicles (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible)

232 pages

English

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1 & 2 Chronicles (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - J. Leithart Peter

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232 pages

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Peter Leithart, a respected theologian known for his ability to communicate to a broad audience, offers a theological reading of 1 and 2 Chronicles. Leithart uncovers the narrative logic of Chronicles, highlights the role of music and government in Israel and in the church, and shows how Judah's history moves from the world of the monarchy to the postexilic world in which Israel is scattered among Gentiles. This commentary is designed to serve the church, providing a rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups.

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	20 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493418381
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0950€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible

Series Editors

R. R. Reno, General Editor First Things New York, New York

Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017) Center of Theological Inquiry Princeton, New Jersey

Robert Louis Wilken University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia

Ephraim Radner Wycliffe College Toronto, Ontario

Michael Root Catholic University of America Washington, DC

George Sumner Episcopal Diocese of Dallas Dallas, Texas

Puplished py Brazos Press a division of Baker Puplishing Grou PO Box 6287, Grand Raids, MI 49516-6287 www.prazosress.com

Epook edition created 2019

All rights reserved. No art of this uplication may pe reroduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or py any means—for examle, electronic, hotocoy, recording— without the rior written ermission of the uplisher. The only excetion is prief quotations in rinted reviews.

Liprary of Congress Cataloging-in-Puplication Data is on file at the Liprary of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1838-1

Unless otherwise indicated, Scriture quotations are from the New American Standard Biple®, coyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 py The Lockman Foundation. Used py ermission. (www.Lockman.org)

Scriture quotations lapeled AT are the author’s translation.

Scriture quotations lapeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Biple.

To my granddaughter Frankie: May you sing forever in the choir of God

Coveri

Half Title Pageii

Series Pageiii

Title Pageiv

Dedicationvi

Series Prefaceix

Acknowledgmentsxvii

Abbreviationsxix

Introduction1

CONTENTS

1. Israel’s Genesis (1 Chronicles 1–9)9

2. Back to Egypt (1 Chronicles 10)31

3. Royal Moses (1 Chronicles 11–16)39

4. Covenant with David (1 Chronicles 17–20)59

5. The Pattern of the Temple (1 Chronicles 21–29)71

6. The Land at Rest (2 Chronicles 1–9)97

7. After the Death of Solomon (2 Chronicles 10–13)127

8. Self-Inflicted Wounds (2 Chronicles 14–16)143

9. Loving Yahweh’s Enemies (2 Chronicles 17–20)157

10. Judah Becomes Israel (2 Chronicles 21–24)177

11. Israel Becomes Judah (2 Chronicles 25–28)191

12. Rebuilding (2 Chronicles 29–32)205

13. Turnings (2 Chronicles 33)223

14. A New and Very Different King David (2 Chronicles 34–36)231

Bibliography251

Scripture Index253

Subject Index261

Cover Flaps268

Back Cover269

SERIES PREFACE

Near the beginning of his treatise against gnostic interpretations of the Bible,Against Heresies, Irenaeus observes that scripture is like a great mosaic depicting a handsome king. It is as if we were owners of a villa in Gaul who had ordered a mosaic from Rome. It arrives, and the beautifully colored tiles need to be taken out of their packaging and put into proper order according to the plan of the artist. The difficulty, of course, is that scripture provides us with the individual pieces, b ut the order and sequence of various elements are not obvious. The Bible does not come w ith instructions that would allow interpreters to simply place verses, episodes, imag es, and parables in order as a worker might follow a schematic drawing in assembling the pieces to depict the handsome king. The mosaic must be puzzled out. This is precisely the work of scriptural interpretation. Origen has his own image to express the difficulty of working out the proper approach to reading the Bible. When preparing to offer a com mentary on the Psalms, he tells of a tradition handed down to him by his Hebrew teacher:

The Hebrew said that the whole divinely inspired scripture may be likened, because of its obscurity, to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretive principle scattered among them.1

As is the case for Irenaeus, scriptural interpretation is not purely local. The key in Genesis may best fit the door of Isaiah, which in turn opens up the meaning of Matthew. The mosaic must be put together with an eye toward the overall plan. Irenaeus, Origen, and the great cloud of premodern biblical interpreters assumed that puzzling out the mosaic of scripture must be a comm unal project. The Bible is vast, heterogeneous, full of confusing passages and obscu re words, and difficult to understand. Only a fool would imagine that he or sh e could work out solutions alone. The way forward must rely upon a tradition of reading that Irenaeus reports has been passed on as the rule or canon of truth that functions as a confession of faith. “Anyone,” he says, “who keeps unchangeable in himself the rul e of truth received through baptism 2 will recognize the names and sayings and parables o f the scriptures.” Modern scholars debate the content of the rule on which Irenaeus re lies and commends, not the least because the terms and formulations Irenaeus himself uses shift and slide. Nonetheless, Irenaeus assumes that there is a body of apostolic doctrine sustained by a tradition of teaching in the church. This doctrine provides the clarifying principles that guide exegetical judgment toward a coherent overall readi ng of scripture as a unified witness. Doctrine, then, is the schematic drawing that will allow the reader to organize the vast heterogeneity of the words, images, and stories of the Bible into a readable, coherent whole. It is the rule that guides us toward the pro per matching of keys to doors. If self-consciousness about the role of history in shaping human consciousness makes modern historical-critical study critical, th en what makes modern study of the Bible modern is the consensus that classical Christian doctrine distorts interpretive understanding. Benjamin Jowett, the influential nin eteenth-century English classical scholar, is representative. In his programmatic ess ay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” he exhorts the biblical reader to disengage from do ctrine and break its hold over the interpretive imagination. “The simple words of that book,” writes Jowett of the modern reader, “he tries to preserve absolutely pure from the refinements or distinctions of later

times.” The modern interpreter wishes to “clear awa y the remains of dogmas, systems, controversies, which are encrusted upon” the words of scripture. The disciplines of close philological analysis “would enable us to separate the elements of doctrine and tradition 3 with which the meaning of scripture is encumbered i n our own day.” The lens of understanding must be wiped clear of the hazy and d istorting film of doctrine. Postmodernity, in turn, has encouraged us to critic ize the critics. Jowett imagined that when he wiped away doctrine, he would encounter the biblical text in its purity and 4 uncover what he called “the original spirit and intention of the authors.” We are not now so sanguine, and the postmodern mind thinks interpretive frameworks inevitable. Nonetheless, we tend to remain modern in at least o ne sense. We read Athanasius and think of him stage-managing the diversity of scripture to support his positions against the Arians. We read Bernard of Clairvaux and assume tha t his monastic ideals structure his reading of the Song of Songs. In the wake of the Re formation, we can see how the doctrinal divisions of the time shaped biblical interpretation. Luther famously described the Epistle of James as a “strawy letter,” for, as he said, “it has nothing of the nature of 5 the Gospel about it.” In these and many other instances, often written in the heat of ecclesiastical controversy or out of the passion of ascetic commitment, we tend to think Jowett correct: doctrine is a distorting film on th e lens of understanding. However, is what we commonly think actually the cas e? Are readers naturally perceptive? Do we have an unblemished, reliable aptitude for the divine? Have we no need for disciplines of vision? Do our attention an d judgment need to be trained, especially as we seek to read scripture as the livi ng word of God? According to Augustine, we all struggle to journey toward God, who is our rest and peace. Yet our vision is darkened and the fetters of worldly habit corrupt our judgment. We need training and instruction in order to cleanse our mi nds so that we might find our way 6 toward God. To this end, “the whole temporal dispensation was made by divine 7 Providence for our salvation.” The covenant with Israel, the coming of Christ, th e gathering of the nations into the church—all these things are gathered up into the rule of faith, and they guide the vision and form of the so ul toward the end of fellowship with God. In Augustine’s view, the reading of scripture both contributes to and benefits from this divine pedagogy. With countless variations in both exegetical conclusions and theological frameworks, the same pedagogy of a doctrinally ruled reading of scripture characterizes the broad sweep of the Christian trad ition from Gregory the Great through Bernard and Bonaventure, continuing across Reformation differences in both John Calvin and Cornelius Lapide, Patrick Henry and Bish op Bossuet, and on to more recent figures such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthas ar. Is doctrine, then, not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the Bible, but instead a clarifying agent, an enduring tradition o f theological judgments that amplifies the living voice of scripture? And what of the scho larly dispassion advocated by Jowett? Is a noncommitted reading—an interpretation unpreju diced—the way toward objectivity, or does it simply invite the languid intellectual a pathy that stands aside to make room for the false truism and easy answers of the age? This series of biblical commentaries was born out o f the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures. The Brazos Theologi cal Commentary on the Bible advances upon the assumption that the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the inte rpretation of the Bible as Christian scripture. God the Father Almighty, who sends his o nly begotten Son to die for us and for our salvation and who raises the crucified Son in the power of the Holy Spirit so that the baptized may be joined in one body—faith inthisGod withthisvocation of love for the world is the lens through which to view the heterogeneity and particularity of the biblical texts. Doctrine, then, is not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the meaning of the Bible. It is a crucial aspect of the divine pedagogy, a clarifying agent for our minds fogged by self-deceptions, a challenge to our languid intellectual apathy that will too often rest in false truisms and the easy s piritual nostrums of the present age

rather than search more deeply and widely for the d ispersed keys to the many doors of scripture. For this reason, the commentators in this series ha ve not been chosen because of their historical or philological expertise. In the main, they are not biblical scholars in the conventional, modern sense of the term. Instead, th e commentators were chosen because of their knowledge of and expertise in usin g the Christian doctrinal tradition. They are qualified by virtue of the doctrinal forma tion of their mental habits, for it is the conceit of this series of biblical commentaries tha t theological training in the Nicene tradition prepares one for biblical interpretation, and thus it is to theologians and not biblical scholars that we have turned. “War is too important,” it has been said, “to leave to the generals.” We do hope, however, that readers do not draw the wrong impression. The Nicene tradition does not provide a set formula for the so lution of exegetical problems. The great tradition of Christian doctrine was not trans cribed, bound in folio, and issued in an official, critical edition. We have the Niceno-Cons tantinopolitan Creed, used for centuries in many traditions of Christian worship. We have an cient baptismal affirmations of faith. The Chalcedonian definition and the creeds and cano ns of other church councils have their places in official church documents. Yet the rule of faith cannot be limited to a specific set of words, sentences, and creeds. It is instead a pervasive habit of thought, the animating culture of the church in its intellec tual aspect. As Augustine observed, commenting on Jer. 31:33, “The creed is learned by listening; it is written, not on stone 8 tablets nor on any material, but on the heart.” This is why Irenaeus is able to appeal to the rule of faith more than a century before the first ecumenical council, and this is why we need not itemize the contents of the Nicene trad ition in order to appeal to its potency and role in the work of interpretation. Because doctrine is intrinsically fluid on the marg ins and most powerful as a habit of mind rather than a list of propositions, this comme ntary series cannot settle difficult questions of method and content at the outset. The editors of the series impose no particular method of doctrinal interpretation. We c annot say in advance how doctrine helps the Christian reader assemble the mosaic of s cripture. We have no clear answer to the question of whether exegesis guided by doctrine is antithetical to or compatible with the now-old modern methods of historical-criti cal inquiry. Truth—historical, mathematical, or doctrinal—knows no contradiction. But method is a discipline of vision and judgment, and we cannot know in advance what as pects of historical-critical inquiry are functions of modernism that shape the soul to b e at odds with Christian discipline. Still further, the editors do not hold the commenta tors to any particular hermeneutical theory that specifies how to define the plain sense of scripture—or the role this plain sense should play in interpretation. Here the comme ntary series is tentative and exploratory. Can we proceed in any other way? European and North American intellectual culture has been de-Christianized. The effect has not been a cessation of Christian activity. Theological work continues. Sermons are preached. B iblical scholars produce monographs. Church leaders have meetings. But each dimension of a formerly unified Christian practice now tends to function independen tly. It is as if a weakened army has been fragmented, and various corps have retreated to isolated fortresses in order to survive. Theology has lost its competence in exeges is. Scripture scholars function with minimal theological training. Each decade finds new theories of preaching to cover the nakedness of seminary training that provides theolo gy without exegesis and exegesis without theology. Not the least of the causes of the fragmentation of Christian intellectual practice has been the divisions of the church. Since the Reforma tion, the role of the rule of faith in interpretation has been obscured by polemics and co unterpolemics aboutsola scriptura and the necessity of a magisterial teaching authori ty. The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series is deliberately ecum enical in scope because the editors