The Catholic Biblical Quarterly

Abstract:

In this article, I argue that the Chronicler uses the words for heart (לב/לבב) to illustrate the measure of a king's faithfulness toward the temple. In the Books of Samuel, Yhwh chooses David as king because Yhwh "looks on the heart" (1 Sam 16:7) and David is "a man after his own [i.e., Yhwh's] heart" (13:14). The narrative, however, never states later how David acted with his heart in any pious way, even though his heart desired to build the temple (2 Sam 7:3; 1 Kgs 8:17, 18; see also 3:6; 9:4). The Chronicler, on the other hand, explains that David offered much of his own wealth to the temple project "in the uprightness of his own heart" (1 Chr 29:17). He then encouraged Solomon and the people to have hearts to finish what he started (vv. 18-19). In the divided monarchy, the Chronicler inserts expressions with the heart frequently to show how later kings either did or did not follow David's faithful behavior. Forty-four of sixty-three occurrences of the words לב/לבב in Chronicles have no parallel in Samuel–Kings, making it more prominent than any of the Chronicler's other paradigmatic vocabulary.