From Solomon to the decree of Cyrus, told by a writer with a temple to defend and a northern kingdom to ignore. It ends mid-sentence in the Hebrew Bible, and the sentence it stops in is a Persian one.
What the book is
2 Chronicles narrates the reign of Solomon, the building of the temple, and then the kings of Judah down to the Babylonian destruction and the Persian decree permitting return. It runs parallel to 1 and 2 Kings for most of its length and diverges from it consistently in what it chooses to include.
The most conspicuous omission is the northern kingdom. Kings tells the story of two kingdoms in interleaved chapters. Chronicles drops the north almost entirely, mentioning northern kings only where they intersect with Judah. Elijah and Elisha, who dominate large stretches of Kings, appear in Chronicles only in a single letter.
How it is put together
Solomon gets nine chapters, and they are almost entirely about the temple: its construction, its furnishings, its dedication, and the prayer at the dedication. The failures that Kings attributes to Solomon — the foreign wives, the high places, the resulting loss of the kingdom — are not narrated.
The Judahite kings that follow are graded by their treatment of the temple and the cult. The reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah are expanded well beyond what Kings gives them. Manasseh, condemned without qualification in Kings, is given a repentance in Chronicles that Kings knows nothing about.
The book ends with the decree of Cyrus, and in the Hebrew Bible — where Chronicles stands last — the whole collection therefore ends on a permission to go home.
The dating question
The ending is the argument. A book that treats the decree of Cyrus, 538 BCE, as the resolution of its story cannot have been finished before it, and the Hebrew of Chronicles is late by every linguistic measure applied to it. The genealogy in 1 Chronicles 3 runs several generations beyond Zerubbabel.
The working range is the fourth century BCE, possibly the late fifth. What is genuinely open is whether Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah come from the same hand; the older view that they do has lost ground, and the question is live.
Where the external record touches it
Two points, and they are strong ones.
The Assyrian record independently attests Sennacherib’s campaign of 701 BCE, which 2 Chronicles 32 narrates. The prism inscriptions name Hezekiah, describe the taking of the fortified cities of Judah and the confinement of Hezekiah in Jerusalem, and list tribute. The dossier on this site works through what that comparison supports and what it does not.
The Cyrus Cylinder attests a Persian policy of repatriation and sanctuary restoration consistent with the decree at the end of the book, without naming Judah. It is corroboration of a policy, not of a document.
For the temple itself there is no direct archaeological evidence, because the site has never been excavated and is not going to be. That gap is permanent and should be stated rather than worked around.
A note on how it reads
Chronicles is often dismissed as a sanitised version of Kings. It is a shaped version, which is not the same accusation. Every ancient history is shaped; the interest here is that we can see the shaping happen because the source survives.
Read alongside Kings rather than instead of it, the book is one of the most instructive texts in the Bible for understanding how the Bible was written.
Related: 1 Chronicles, 2 Kings for the parallel account, and the dossier on Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem.