B.H. Carroll’s Pastoral Theology
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 58, No. 2 – Spring 2016
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
By Yeong Seon Kim. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2014. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series, no. 51. 232 pages. Paperback. $16.00
Readers of the books of Chronicles have long noticed the prominence of the Levites in its pages, especially as one compares it to the books of Samuel and Kings. In particular, they play an important role in the management and worship of the temple. Yeong Seon Kim has examined how Chronicles portrays the role of the Levites within the temple administration, especially that of the first temple. She takes on one of the prevailing presuppositions of previous Chronicles scholarship on this issue: the presupposition that the portrait of Chronicles mainly reflects the administration of the temple of the author’s own day, that is, the second temple.
Kim argues instead that the picture that the author of Chronicles (aka the Chronicler) paints about the past reflects neither the actual circumstances of the past nor of the present, but rather the way that the Chronicler wants things to be. The Chronicler desires that those who occupy offices within the temple administration be considered Levites and though these Levites serve functions distinct from and subordinate to the priests, they should nevertheless share in the contributions made to the temple. This desire motivates the Chronicler to establish “the legal grounds for the payment of the cultic personnel of the Jerusalem Temple, which was left without any royal sponsorship during the Persian period” (191). In order to demonstrate her claim, she has to reconstruct the Chronicler’s portrait of the Levites in relation to the temple administration and compare it to descriptions of the temple administration in other contemporaneous literature.
Before she can establish the Chronicler’s portrait of the Levites, she has to deal with another common presupposition of Chronicles research: that the block of texts within Chronicles that deal with the establishment of the priestly and levitical divisions (1 Chr 6:31–38; 9:17–32; 16:4–43; 23–26) are secondary to Chronicles itself. She entitles these texts the “Davidic Installation Blocks” and argues for their internal thematic unity based on their common conception of the levitical role in the temple administration and David’s role as “the founder and guardian of the Jerusalem temple as an institution” (31). Generally in Old Testament studies, noticing blocks of texts dispersed through a book but united with distinctive themes is considered evidence of redactional activity. However, she further argues that the blocks are not secondary because the narratives in 2 Chronicles evaluate each king on the basis of their maintaining the roles of the Levites and priests as they are established by David within these blocks of text.
Having identified the blocks of text which she will analyze and demonstrated that they are part of the Chronicler’s work, Kim uncovers Chronicles’ portrait of the Levites within the temple administration. Within this portrait she emphasizes several points. First, Chronicles shows that the legitimacy of the temple administration is guaranteed by the authority of King David since he established it. Second, it further legitimates the temple administration by drawing on the texts of Moses and establishing continuity between the tabernacle of the wilderness and the temple. The Chronicler accomplishes this task through genealogical connections to those serving in the wilderness tabernacle, using vocabulary associated with the tabernacle, and drawing on pentateuchal legislation. Third, besides the priests, Chronicles designates other members of the temple administration as Levites. Kim shows that Chronicles repeatedly mentions the levitical heritage of these members so that, as she argues, their heritage legitimizes their role in the temple. Fourth, she draws out the role that political and civil leaders play in supporting the temple, particularly in 2 Chronicles 24:5–11, the account of Joash’s instructions in collecting funds for the upkeep of the temple and its administration.
Next Kim compares this portrait with that of other sources which precede or are contemporaneous with Chronicles and describe the temple administration. From this comparison she argues that little of the Chronicler’s portrait clearly reflects the conditions of the Chronicler’s context. At this point, her argument is particularly vulnerable because much of it comes from silence.
When she looks beyond the timeframe of Chronicles, she outlines a complicated picture regarding the Levites and their role in the temple. Based on the varieties of portraits, she concludes that “conflicts over the Levites’ roles, whether as priests or as cultic functionaries, known from the exilic and post-exilic periods, continued into the late Second Temple period” (190). This continued conflict undergirds her argument that the Chronicler presented a picture of an ideal temple administration made up of priests, on the one hand, and Levites who perform various administrative functions, on the other.
Kim’s work joins recent conversations regarding the picture of the priests and Levites, especially related to the Second Temple period. Her book also reflects another trend in recent scholarship, especially Chronicles scholarship: that Chronicles intends to portray what should be rather than what really was or is. Surprisingly, she does not interact directly with Schweitzer’s work Reading Utopia in Chronicles, which has laid out many of the terms in the conversation. I suspect that for many readers Kim’s most significant contribution is her description of the Chronicler’s methods in depicting the Levites within the temple administration, in particular, her observations regarding the role of genealogy and the continuity established between the First Temple and pentateuchal narrative and legal texts through various means.
