1 Chronicles
This book takes you all the way back to the beginning, all the way to Adam! The first nine chapters are rather boring genealogies, but they were important if you needed to know who your family was! Why would this matter? Well, you couldn’t serve in the temple as a priest if you weren’t a Levite. How did you know if you were a Levite? You checked these lists.
The rest of the book is about David, but the focus is different than 1-2 Samuel. In Chronicles, most of the attention is on how David got things ready for the temple, including moving the ark to Jerusalem (chs. 13, 15), identified the location of the temple (ch. 21), and appointed lots of people to serve in the temple (chs. 23-26).
It’s also interesting what 1 Chronicles skips: nearly the entire reign of Saul and most of the sins of David.
2 Chronicles
2 Chronicles is a lot like 1-2 Kings, but there is one very big difference: the writer ignores all of the northern kings. They don’t matter because they were carried off into exile and they didn’t come back. The ones who matter are those in Judah who were taken to exile in Babylon but they returned. So the story is mostly about them.
Notice how often in this book a king does something good and God blesses him. Or a king does something bad, and God punishes him. Again and again!
Some kings start off good, but then they turn against God, like Asa and Joash.
2 Chronicles (ch. 33) tells us something very different about Manasseh that we didn’t learn in 2 Kings. See what this is!