The very fi rst work of “history” penned in the Western tradition begins its fi rst
paragraph with setting the context of the work as the confl ict between Greek
and Persian. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, an Ionian Greek from the fringes
of the Persian Empire, constructed his historie as an account of the formation
of Greek identity in relation to the Other. This tendency may also be found in
the annals and royal inscriptions of the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and
eastern Mediterranean cultures that preceded the creation of historiography in
the Persian period. We may also fi nd this tendency in the biblical narratives
of Kings and Ezra- Nehemiah. The book of Chronicles, however, has not been
investigated from this perspective. Previous generations of scholarship were apt
to see the Other in Chronicles as Samaritans, but this construction was based
on the assumed common authorship of Chronicles and Ezra- Nehemiah. In this
essay I will explore another possibility for the Other against whom Israel is
constructed in Chronicles. One possibility that I raise further in the conclusion
is that Chronicles is not a work of historiography at all, or, if it is, it is a radical
innovation in the fundamental rules of the genre as understood in antiquity.