1 Chronicles 2:1-2 -

EXPOSITION

The interest of this chapter owes something to the several unsatisfied questions which it suggests, to difficult and knotty points which nevertheless do not altogether counsel despair, and to occasional significant indications of sources drawn upon by the compiler, certainly quite additional to the contents of the existing books of the Old Testament.

We know something of what we have to expect when the name of Israel, or Jacob, is announced in the first verse, with his twelve sons—those "patriarchs," some of whom (certainly not as many as eleven, for Reuben was absent, and, with scarcely a doubt, Benjamin), "moved with envy, sold into Egypt Joseph," the twelfth ( Acts 7:9 ). We here enter, in fact, upon the genealogies and tables and enumeratious of collateral lines of "all Israel," to which the whole of the following seven chapters are devoted ( 1 Chronicles 9:1 ). This second chapter leads off with the most important line of descent of the twelve—that of Judah. And the contents of this chapter do not exhaust the one line, which, on the contrary, stretches as far as to 1 Chronicles 4:23 . Within these limits there are just that amount of repetition ( 1 Chronicles 2:3 ; 1 Chronicles 4:1 , etc.) and appearance of confusion which betoken the recourse of the compiler to various records and sources of in-formation—themselves sometimes but fragmentary, and probably to mere memory and the tradition that depends upon it.

The contents of this chapter are best mastered by noticing that they consist of:

1. The table of Israel's twelve sons ( 1 Chronicles 4:1 , 1 Chronicles 4:2 ).

2. The line of Judah to the stage where it branches into three great-grandsons ( 1 Chronicles 4:3-9 ).

3. The line of Judah pursued through those three branches to a point manifestly significant in one, and presumably so in the others ( 1 Chronicles 4:10 -55).

1. TABLE OF ISRAEL 'S TWELVE SONS . The twelve sons of Israel , not in the order of age (cf. Ge 29:31-30:24; Genesis 35:16-19 ), nor exactly in the order of children of wives as against those of handmaids ( Genesis 25:23-26 ), nor in that of the aged father's dying blessing ( Genesis 49:1-33 .), nor in that of Exodus 1:2-4 . It is the place of Dan which disturbs the fittest order, and Keil suggests that his place in this text is accounted for by Rachel's desire that her handmaid's child should be accounted her own; but surely this was not exceptional, but applied to all or most of such cases, and should have been far rather taken into consideration in any of the other lists than in this. However accounted for, the order is— lest , the six sons of the first wife Leah; secondly , the elder son of Rachel's handmaid Bilhah; thirdly , the two sons of the loved wife Rachel; fourthly , the other son of Rachel's handmaid Billah; lastly , the two sons of Zilpah, handmaid of Leah. As this order corresponds with nothing in our Old Testament, it may serve as one slight indication that the compiler of Chronicles was not dependent on these records alone. The Hebrew text and the Septuagint accord exactly with the Authorized Version here.