On the other hand, Chronicles contains a great deal which is either independent of or not immediately dependent on earlier books of the Old Testament: note especially the opening nine chapters of genealogies, the last seven chapters of 1 Chronicles, and many passages, long and short, in 2 Chronicles x.‒xxxvi. The origin and significance of this new material will be discussed in the section on the _Sources_, § 5. § 5. THE SOURCES From what has been said in § 1 regarding the nature of ancient historical writings it will be realised that a careful examination of the material used in the compilation of Chronicles is a necessary preliminary to the task of estimating the purpose and value of the work in its final form. Only when the extent of the sources has been determined can we say whether contributions made by the writer who combined those sources into the existing work are so great or so small that we ought to reckon him in the one case a narrator whose personality must be seriously considered, or in the other a mere copyist and compiler. (1) In considering the material of Chronicles, it is convenient to begin with those passages which seem to be copied or adapted from earlier books of the Old Testament. That such passages are numerous, and constitute a very large amount of 1 and 2 Chronicles will be seen by a glance at the table of contents given in § 4. Occasionally the Chronicler reproduced the canonical text _verbatim_, but generally he introduced alterations, which were sometimes both numerous and important. The discrepancies thus produced between Chronicles and other parts of canonical Scripture presented a grave difficulty to the older commentators, and the theory was put forward that the Chronicler used, not the canonical books, but the still older sources from which the canonical books themselves were built up and to which they frequently refer. It was hoped thus to minimise the divergences by supposing that the Chronicler had copied somewhat different portions of these old sources, and had approached them from a different standpoint. Not only was this hypothesis in the highest degree improbable, but the reconciliation it was supposed to effect is now recognised to be for the most part untenable. The theory is finally discredited by the fact that these sources of the canonical books _always_ appear in Chronicles combined together in precisely the same manner in which they are found combined in the canonical books; i.e. they appear always ‘edited,’ and never in their original, independent, form. It may be definitely asserted therefore that for all the passages which are common to Chronicles and other canonical works the Chronicler was indebted solely to the text of the canonical books as it appeared in his time.