I Chronicles דִּבְרֵי הַיָּמִים א

Chronicles — Divrei HaYamim, 'the words of the days' — is the Bible retelling its own story. In the Hebrew Bible it is a single book (the division into two is inherited from the Greek translators), and tradition assigns its writing to Ezra the scribe. This first half opens with the boldest doorway in the Bible: nine chapters of genealogy that compress everything from Adam to the returned exiles into columns of names — the whole of Genesis passes in a single chapter — before Saul is given exactly one chapter to die in, and the rest is David. But it is a different David than the book of Samuel’s. There is no Bathsheba here, no Amnon, no Absalom; instead the ark brought up 'according to the ordinance,' the singers appointed to prophesy with harps, the census that ends with an angel’s drawn sword and a threshing-floor bought for full price, and — filling the book’s last third — the immense preparations for a Temple David will never see: gold and iron beyond weighing, the courses of priests, Levites, singers, and gatekeepers, and the pattern handed to Solomon 'in writing, as Hashem has made me wise by His hand upon me.' The king of the court histories becomes the founder of the sanctuary’s worship, and the book ends not in death but in doxology — 'for all things come of You, and of Your own have we given You' — and an old man dying 'in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honor.'

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Five classical commentaries accompany the text — the commentary printed as Rashi (the work of a later hand of his school), Ralbag (Levi ben Gershom, Gersonides), the Metzudat David and Metzudat Zion, and the Malbim.