2020 SBL

2021 SBL Annual Meeting
November 21–24, 2020
Boston MA

The Curious Case of the Contrafacted King: The Death of Josiah in 2 Chronicles 35

In his work on Chronicles (“Die Suche nach Identität in der nachexilischen Theologiegeschichte“), Reinhard Kratz offered the compelling suggestion that reception history within the canon and “cultural memory” are nearly interchangeable concepts. Kratz submitted that the very act of the Chronicler’s reception of older traditions is in itself memory work. This paper builds on the work of Kratz by proffering a specific example of such activity in the Chronicler’s reception of the exodus tradition. In this paper, I argue that the Chronicler’s deliberate inversion of the exodus motif within its (re)telling of Josiah’s reign (2 Chronicles 34–35) functions as a form of “social remembering,” as Ian Wilson calls it. By scrutinizing the enmeshing of the exodus and legal traditions in the related accounts of Josiah’s legal reforms (2 Chronicles 34) and his death (2 Chronicles 35), we can readily see how the Chronicler recasts events not previously understood as cyclical in order to perpetuate a model of time witnessed elsewhere in the biblical corpus. In so doing, this paper establishes Josiah’s death in 2 Chronicles as an inversion of the exodus, a significant departure from 2 Kings 22–23. I ultimately propose that the reception of older traditions—in this case the exodus tradition and 2 Kings 23—in 2 Chronicles 34–35 is a form of memory work intended to (re)construct identity in the post-exilic period.