1 Chronicles 12:1

EXPOSITION

This chapter is retrospective, and the contents of it are not found elsewhere. It is occupied, first ( 1 Chronicles 12:1-22 ), with the names and some accounts of those who had come to the help of David in three great crises in time past, to join themselves to him and his cause. And afterwards ( 1 Chronicles 12:23-40 ), with an enumeration of those representatives from the tribes who came ( 1 Chronicles 11:1 , 1 Chronicles 11:3 ) to support the proceedings of the occasion when he was being made king of the whole people. Thus the chapter would divide really into four parts, to which the following sections will be found sufficiently to answer: viz. 1 Chronicles 12:1-7 ; 8-18; 19-22; 1 Chronicles 23:1-32 -40.

To Ziklag . The occasion referred to is evidently that recorded in 1 Samuel 27:1 , 1 Samuel 27:2 , 1 Samuel 27:6 , 1 Samuel 27:7 ; 1 Samuel 30:1 , 1 Samuel 30:26 ; and generally in those and the intermediate chapters. David stayed at Ziklag a year and four months, a period which closed for him with the death of Saul. Ziklag, in Joshus's original allotment, was the possession of Simeon ( Joshua 19:5 ). It was situated south of Judah, and came into the hands of Judah when Achish made it a gift to David for a rest-deuce ( 1 Samuel 27:5-7 ). The site of it has not been identified in later times. It witnessed one of the narrowest and most remarkable of the escapes of David, on an occasion which brought danger, not so much from acknowledged foes, as from the maddened grief and despair of his own friends and people ( 1 Samuel 30:3-6 ). The whole scene of the broken-hearted grief of David and his people, when, on discovering the successful raid of the Amalekites upon Ziklag, "they lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep," is one of the most dramatic on record. The rapid reverse to good fortune, when David turns away their heedless anger against himself and proposal to stone him, by pursuing and overcoming the enemy, and recovering their captives and their goods near the brook Besor, completes the effectiveness of the scene. The middle voice form of expression in this verse, kept himself close, means to say that David was, by fear of Saul and by force of his enemies, more or less hemmed up in Ziklag.