Books of Chronicles - Name

Name

In Hebrew the book is called Divrei Hayyamim (i.e. "the matters the days"), based on the phrases sefer divrei ha-yamim le-malkhei Yehudah and "sefer divrei ha-yamim le-malkhei Israel" ("book of the days of the kings of Judah" and "book of the days of the kings of Israel"), both of which appear repeatedly in the Books of Kings. Chronicles was formerly presumed to represent the source-material whence Samuel and Kings were composed; that is, the kings' official Day-Books, much like the U.S. Congressional Record of modern times.

In the Greek Septuagint (LXX), Chronicles bears the title Paralipomenon (Παραλειπομένων), i.e., "that which has been left out or left to one side". According to the Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah theory, it contains material set aside from the rest of the book of Ezra, which was canonized first. In other words, scholars have theorized that these books were originally composed as one book by a single author, but later were split apart. Although now debated, this theory has been the scholarly consensus for many centuries. In some published editions of the Bible, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah have been presented together as a single book, for example, in The Modern Reader's Bible (1907) and The Books of the Bible (2007).

Chronicles summarizes and reviews the deuteronomic history of the foregoing books, adding only minor details here and there, and therefore does not "supplement" the history to any noteworthy degree.

Jerome, in the introduction to his Latin translation of the books of Samuel and Kings (part of the Vulgate), referred to the book as a chronikon ("Chronicles" in English). The book itself is titled Paralipomenon in the Vulgate.