The Chronicler as a Proto-nationalist

Abstract

This article argues that Chronicles responds to the loss of Israelite sovereignty by reimagining how a people can exist without a state. It reads the Chronicler’s project as a form of proto-nationalism—not nationalism in the modern political sense, but the construction of enduring peoplehood through shared ancestry, memory, homeland, institutions, and boundaries. Genealogies map Israel across time and territory, Jerusalem and its temple provide a center for a dispersed people, Davidic traditions preserve the memory of sovereignty without demanding its restoration, and the rhetoric of “All Israel” imagines a community extending beyond the political boundaries of Yehud. These religious, ethnic, and political dimensions are not treated as separate spheres; cult and covenant themselves become mechanisms for articulating national belonging. Chronicles thus offers a model of nationalism without a state: a national community imagined through the symbolic reconstruction of the institutions, territory, and memories of lost sovereignty.