THE BOOKS OF CHRONICLES AND THE SCROLLS FROM QUMRAN George J. Brooke 1. Introduction In this short study in honour of Graeme Auld I wish to consider briefly four partially interrelated aspects of the Books of Chronicles in the light of the scrolls found in the eleven caves at and near Qumran.1 Graeme Auld’s own work on the historical books of the Hebrew Bible is well known. For the Books of Chronicles in par- ticular he has argued for a reorientation of how the relationship between Chronicles and Samuel–Kings should be envisaged. Rather than seeing a simple line of dependence of Chronicles on Samuel– Kings, Auld has proposed that scholars should consider that both the compilers of Samuel–Kings and the Chronicler used a common source which is readily discernible in the text that the two works share; each then developed that common source in distinct ways. Since the starting point in each section of this paper is the evidence from Qumran, it is not necessary to enter into any lengthy arguments about the composition history of Chronicles or about its date and author- ship.2 Nevertheless, although this paper is primarily about the recep- tion of Chronicles in the second and first centuries bce, such reception offers insight into the nature of the Books of Chronicles too and appears partially to vindicate elements of Auld’s approach. 1 J. Trebolle Barrera, ‘Chronicles, First and Second Books of’, in L. H. Schiffman and J. C. VanderKam (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 129, offers a concise note on Chronicles in the Dead Sea Scrolls but with little explanation or interpretation. 2 ‘[A] consensus for the dating of Chronicles is tending toward the early Greek period, perhaps the late fourth century, but more probably the early third century bce . If the books are to be dated to the early Greek period, however, they may still have been composed substantially in the Persian period’ (L. L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Volume 1: Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah [LSTS, 47; London: T & T Clark International, 2004], p. 98). This view is largely endorsed in the most recent substantial commentary on Chronicles by G. N. Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 12; New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 116–17. 36 george j. brooke 2. 4QSama and the ‘Book of Two Houses’ Auld’s argument that Kings and Chronicles are independent rework- ings of a common source that he labels the ‘Book of Two Houses’3 is based almost entirely, so it seems, on his comparison of the two works on the basis of the Masoretic Text, for all that he acknowledges from time to time that the evidence of the versions may support his approach. In his most complete presentation of his proposal, Kings without Privilege,4 Auld makes no explicit reference to F. M. Cross’s and E. Ulrich’s work on 4QSama,5 though he does note briefly the relevance of Hebrew texts found in the Qumran caves. This is no doubt because his thesis is based on a comparison of large sections of Kings and Chronicles and concerns the Books of Samuel only incidentally,6 and the case for Kings may indeed be rather different from that for Samuel. Nevertheless, it is surely significant for Auld’s thesis that it seems as if the Chronicler worked from a text of Samuel other than that found in the MT. Cross long ago suggested that ‘examination of the passages of the large Samuel manuscript (4QSama) which are paralleled in Chronicles gives direct evidence that the Chronicler often utilised an edition of Samuel closer to the tradition of the Cave IV scroll than to that which survived in the Masoretic recension’.7 This was ratified by Ulrich’s analysis of 4QSama that produced the striking two-pronged result that is worth repeating: Searching for the root of this 4Q C agreement, we are impressed with two observations. First, the 4Q C agreements are mostly original S readings corrupt in M, or narrative expansions typical of the Palestinian text tradition, e.g., the Samaritan Pentateuch. The 4Q C agreements are thus a subset of the larger pattern 4Q = OG/pL OL C ≠ M. 3 The houses of David and of Yahweh in Jerusalem. 4 A. G. Auld, Kings without Privilege: David and Moses in the Story of the Bible’s Kings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 5 F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958; The Biblical Seminar, 30; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 3rd edn, 1995); E. C. Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus (HSM, 19; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978). 6 As he has made plain in the defence of his ideas. See, e.g., A. G. Auld, ‘What Was the Main Source of the Books of Chronicles?’, in M. P. Graham and S. L. McKenzie (eds.), The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture ( JSOTSup, 263; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 91–99. 7 Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies, p. 141 (139 in the 3rd edn)..