Since the book of Ezra begins where Chronicles ends, with the decree of the Persian king Cyrus the Great that allowed the exiled Jews to return home from wherever they had been dispersed throughout Cyrus’s kingdom and to rebuild the Temple (538 bce), some scholars have suggested that Chronicles, and Ezra‐Nehemiah, had a single author or editor. Most other scholars think that the linguistic, thematic, and historiographic differences between Chronicles and Ezra‐Nehemiah are too great to posit a common author.
