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What declarations does Maier discuss and their importance in American Scripture, chapter 2?
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Maier points out that Jefferson drew heavily on a number of other documents to create the Declaration, including the English Bill of Rights and Virginia's new constitution, which he wrote.
Maier points to at least ninety "other declarations" issued by colonies and by localities. She writes that "what [the declarations] said was everywhere remarkably alike." Most of these declarations were resolutions passed by provincial conventions, town or county committees of safety, or other bodies. Some were really sets of instructions to delegates to the Second Continental Congress in which the colonies called for independence. Almost all of these documents pointed to abuses by the King of England, and they claimed that these transgressions justified a fundamental change in the relationship between England and the colonies—independence. Many of these declarations contained similar language to the Declaration of Independence, referencing basic, "unalienable" rights. The Preamble to the new Virginia constitution, for example, contained almost identical language because its author was the same as the author of the Declaration: Thomas Jefferson.
Other "declarations" included historical English documents like the 1689 Declaration of Rights,...
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which included language justifying the overthrow of King James II on the grounds that he had violated the rights of Englishmen. The structure of the opening to this document was very similar to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson did not, in short, create the Declaration in the few days he had to write it in Philadelphia. Rather, he drew on a number of other declarations to ground the Americans' case in language and ideas that were familiar to the Anglo-American world. So the document, in a very real sense, was created from the bottom up, and not the top down.
References
One of the major things that Maier is trying to do in her book is to argue that the Declaration of Independence was an American document, not just one that was written by Thomas Jefferson. Her argument in Chapter 2 ties in to this.
What she says in Chapter 2 is that many states and even localities (she says as many as 90) produced their own declarations of independence. Many of these were written before the Congressional one that Jefferson wrote. She says that these declarations tended to be in the same format as Jefferson's declaration. They tended to, for example, talk about what events had happened that justified them declaring their independence.
So Maier is saying that these documents provided an inspiration for Jefferson and the Congress as they worked on their declaration -- the one we now know.