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What you get in 2 Chronicles Bible maps
With the 2 Chronicles Bible maps collection, you get a whopping 64 high resolution maps (the most in any single book of the Bible). There’s that much history going on in these 36 chapters. We track the stories from Israel’s Golden Age under King Solomon all the way to the end of Israel and Judah—when invader erase both Jewish nations from the world map. That was perhaps the darkest moment in ancient Jewish history.
Optimist prime
The Chronicles writer would brag King Solomon red in the face. This book puffs the king’s wealth, wisdom, and fame. But it fails to report the sad ending of Solomon’s life. No mention of his 1,000 wives, or of his slip-slide into idol worship—and into what sounds like some brassy worship practices that would leave a Puritan red in the face.
Most Israelite kings were stinkers, based on their stories in the books of Samuel and Kings and the books by the prophets. We wouldn’t know that by reading 2 Chronicles.
Instead, this writer highlights the bright lights of Judah—godly kings from the Jewish nation ruled out of Jerusalem in the south. If this writer mentions the bad stuff a king did, it’s usually just a short puff of words. Good and bad, we track the stories in our collection of 2 Chronicles Bible maps.
More preacher than teacher
More preacher than teacherBible scholars generally seem to agree this writer wasn’t a historian as much as a minister who was trying to heal a group of people who had lost themselves in history. They didn’t know who they were anymore.
It seems they and their ancestors had broken every law God wrote into the contract he made with the Jewish people when he offered to protect and prosper them. By this time in Jewish history, when Chronicles was written, perhaps in the 400s BC, it was obvious that God had invoked the full range of penalties for breech of contract. He kicked the Jewish people out of the Promised Land. They ended up as slaves in what is now Iraq and Iran.
So they wondered if they were still the Chosen People. And if so, chosen for what and where.
Persians from what is now Iran freed them to go home in 538 BC. Some did. But they weren’t Israel anymore. They weren’t free, either. They were just another province in the sprawling Persian Empire.
A nation of slow learners
Chronicles uses Israel’s bright history to remind the people that God rewards devotion. And through the brief reports about Judah’s rotten kings, the writer shows that God not only holds people accountable for making harmful decisions that hurt themselves and others. God forgives his people whenever they come to their senses, however long it takes.
It took Israel half a millennium.
Moses seemed to promise God would give them another chance: “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been shipped off to a faraway country. He’ll bring you back” (Deuteronomy 30:4).
They started coming home in 538 BC. And they eventually rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple.
A mission for Jewish people
This is what the writer wants them to recognize. They are still God’s people chosen for a mission to introduce the world to God.
One of the prophets who shows up in 2 Chronicles put it this way:
“I am the LORD. I’ve given you a mission:
Do the right thing. Live as a good human.
I’ll give you a hand and protect you,
While you fulfill a promise I made:
Be my beacon of hope to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6).
You might consider the atlas of Bible maps for 1 Chronicles
