Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Chronicles 27-29.

Once again today I noticed something which I would never have observed if I was not writing this blog.  The list of the leaders of the tribes of Israel listed in today’s passage leave out Gad and Asher.  That is, the passage lists leaders for each of the tribes of Israel, except for these two.  Interestingly, it lists a leader for each half of the tribe of Manasseh (those who settled east of the Jordan River and those who settled west of the Jordan).  I also noticed that in the list of tribal leaders there was a leader listed for the tribe of Levi, and a leader listed for the descendants of Aaron.  At the end of the list of tribal leaders the writer points out that Joab began counting the fighting men of Israel, but did not complete the count.  I am not sure if this is intended to explain why a leader for neither Gad nor Asher is listed, or just as a note about the census being incomplete.  I am sure there are those who would conclude from the absence of a leader being listed for Gad and Asher that during David’s reign those two tribes did not have a leader.  I think a better conclusion would be that no leader is listed for those two tribes because the compiler of this book did not have the information, either because it was not recorded or had been lost from the documents they used.  Which tells me that those who compiled this book honestly recorded the information they found in older sources.  If they had been making things up, they would have invented names for the leaders of Asher and Gad in order to make their document seem more complete.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.