There is no reason to impugn the author's good faith in such emendations of his sources. He thought he knew the laws of history, and if in the particular instance the record did not correspond, it must be defective. But whatever apology may be made for his good intentions, it need hardly be said that the unsupported testimony of a doctrinaire historian who deals so sovereignly with the facts is of no weight.
The Chronicler names a considerable number of books as authorities for different periods of the history; the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel (or Israel and Judah) and the Book of the Kings of Israel are repeatedly cited for things not related in our Book of Kings. For more information about Joash the reader is referred to the "Midrash of the Book of Kings," and for Abijah to the "Midrash of the Prophet Iddo," titles that in later times, at least, would designate an edifying exposition in which full licence was given to the imagination to embroider the theme with picturesque inventions. The favourite references, however, are to writings bearing the names of prophets--Samuel, Nathan, Gad, Ahijah, Iddo, Shemaiah, Jehu son of Hanani. The title History of Samuel the Seer, of Nathan the Prophet, and so on, may mean either _about_ Samuel or _by_ Samuel. Very likely the author entertained the theory which subsequently prevailed among the Jews that in each age the prophets wrote down the events of their own time in which many of them had a conspicuous part.
The question is of no other interest; for an examination of the extracts from his sources which the Chronicler has incorporated or condensed shows that (with small possible exceptions to be considered hereafter) his material was all taken from our Book of Kings. This enables us to confront his history of Judah with his sources and acquaint ourselves with his habitual way of dealing with them, an investigation not only instructive for his method, but of the greatest importance when we come to the Chronicler's history of the Persian period, where, for the most part, his sources are not independently preserved.
In the first place it will be noticed that he has selected from the history in Samuel and Kings the parts which particularly interested him for their own sake, such as the description of religious ceremonies, or could be used as a text for the doctrines he had most at heart, and has therefore passed over a very large part of the contents of his source. Precisely so, the author of Kings, two centuries earlier, had dealt with his sources, though with a different interest. What the Chronicler chose to include he generally copied out without much change; the present variations in the text are chiefly due to divergent transmission. (Compare, for illustration, 1 Chron. x. 1-xi. 47 with 1 Sam. 31 and 2 Sam. xxiii. 8-39, or 1 Chron. xvii. 1-xx. 8 with 2 Sam. 7, 8, 10 and 12.). Often he introduces in these extracts, or appends to them, notes of his own which would in almost all cases be certainly recognizable on internal evidence even if we had not the text of Kings before us. In a few places he condenses or abridges the narrative of Kings, as in 2 Chron. xxxii. 1-23 compared with 2 Kings xviii. 13-xix. 37.