convenience the Chronicler. But we do know something about those for whom he wrote. They were subjects of the Persian empire, descendants of those Israelites who had been restored to their homeland in Judah after the deportations of the sixth century. Practically everything in the Chronicler’s book was for them part of an age gone by. His stories belonged to a world separated from theirs by the gulf of the exile, and the people in those stories were all, by the time of writing, dry bones—as dry for