The Chronicler’s Use of the Book of Judges

The book of Chronicles draws on a wide range of biblical books, yet the book of Judges is not widely recognized as one of the Chronicler`s sources. In this paper, I propose that the Chronicler makes use of the book of Judges multiple times. Specifically, through a number of analogies to the Judges narrative, the Chronicler depicts the Northern Kingdom as regressing to the era of judges, a time without the House of David. Using 2 Chronicles 13’s account of war between Abijah and Jeroboam as a test case, I demonstrate that this narrative contains allusions to three infamous narratives from the book of Judges: the stories of Abimelech, Micah, and the concubine at Gibeah.