Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Chronicles 7-9.

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Another tough read.  I really think there is value in tracking the names in this passage and how they are connected, but just as I start to see a thread I think maybe I should follow I lose it in the “noise” of all of these names.  Perhaps as I keep reading this year after year I will see one of those threads finally come out.  In the meantime, the first thing I did notice is in the genealogy of Ephraim’s descendants.  We know from Genesis that Ephraim was born to Joseph in Egypt and lived his entire life in Egypt.  Yet this passage seems to tell us that two of Ephraim’s sons were killed when they tried to raid livestock from near the city of Gath.  Related to that the passage seems to say that Ephraim’s granddaughter, Sheerah, built three towns in the land of Canaan.  That doesn’t entirely make sense because the people of Israel left Egypt long after the grandchildren of Ephraim would have been dead.  Which suggests to me that the way this passage lists descendants would have been understood differently by the writer than how we understand it.  Related to that, it seems to me that at several points when the writer switches from the genealogy of one tribe to another he also switches the way in which he recounts these genealogies.  Which brings me to the fact that this passage contains a hint about when this book was compiled.  In chapter 9 the writer tells us that he is listing some of those who were among the first to dwell in the land of Israel after the Babylonian Exile.  That tells us that this Book was compiled after the Jews returned to the area of Israel after the Babylonian Exile.  So, I believe the reason we see the changes in the way that some of the genealogies are recorded is because the sources which the writer relied upon varied in the way in which they presented genealogies.

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