II Chronicles דִּבְרֵי הַיָּמִים ב

The second half of Chronicles is the story of a building and of the hearts that kept it or lost it. It opens with Solomon at Gibeon asking for wisdom, builds the house on 'mount Moriah, where Hashem appeared to David his father,' and brings the glory down in cloud and fire — then answers the dedication with the promise the book exists to teach: 'if My people, upon whom My name is called, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their evil ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.' After the kingdom breaks at Shechem, the chronicler follows only Judah — and grades every reign by that one promise. Kings who seek, humble themselves, and rely are delivered against all arithmetic (Abijah outnumbered two to one, Asa against a million, Jehoshaphat sending singers out ahead of the army); kings who forsake are handed to small companies of Arameans. Even the worst of them, Manasseh, prays from his Babylonian chains and is brought home. The book ends with the house burnt and the land keeping her sabbaths — and then, in its final breath, with Cyrus’s edict flinging the door open: 'let him go up.' The Hebrew Bible closes not with exile but with return.

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.