1 Chronicles 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter opens 1 Chronicles with a list of names rather than a story. It traces the line from Adam to Noah, then the peoples that came from Noah's three sons, then the line from Shem down to Abraham. From Abraham it follows Ishmael's sons, Keturah's sons, and Isaac's two sons, Esau and Israel, before listing Esau's descendants, the sons of Seir, and the kings and clan chiefs who ruled in Edom. The list sets out the family framework for the history of Israel that the book goes on to tell.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • The genealogy begins with Adam.
   • Seth follows Adam in the line.
   • Enosh follows Seth in the line.
2. 1:2
   • Kenan follows Enosh in the line.
   • Mahalalel follows Kenan in the line.
   • Jared follows Mahalalel in the line.
3. 1:3
   • Enoch follows Jared in the line.
   • Methuselah follows Enoch in the line.
   • Lamech follows Methuselah in the line.
4. 1:4
   • Noah follows Lamech in the line.
   • Shem, Ham, and Japheth are listed after Noah, the verse not stating in words how they are related to him.
5. 1:5
   • The sons of Japheth were Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.
6. 1:6
   • The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.
7. 1:7
   • The sons of Javan were Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim, and the Dodanim.
8. 1:8
   • The sons of Ham were Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan.
9. 1:9
   • The sons of Cush were Seba, Havilah, Sabta, Raamah, and Sabteca.
   • The sons of Raamah were Sheba and Dedan.
10. 1:10
    • Cush fathered Nimrod.
    • Nimrod began to be a mighty man on the earth.
11. 1:11
    • Mizraim fathered the Ludim, the Anamim, the Lehabim, and the Naphtuhim.
12. 1:12
    • Mizraim also fathered the Pathrusim, the Casluhim, and the Caphtorim.
    • The Philistines came out from the Casluhim.
13. 1:13
    • Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn.
    • Canaan fathered Heth.
14. 1:14
    • Canaan also fathered the Jebusite, the Amorite, and the Girgashite.
15. 1:15
    • Canaan also fathered the Hivite, the Arkite, and the Sinite.
16. 1:16
    • Canaan also fathered the Arvadite, the Zemarite, and the Hamathite.
17. 1:17
    • The sons of Shem were Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, Lud, Aram, Uz, Hul, Gether, and Meshech.
18. 1:18
    • Arphaxad fathered Shelah.
    • Shelah fathered Eber.
19. 1:19
    • Two sons were born to Eber.
    • One son was named Peleg.
    • The earth was divided in Peleg's days.
    • Peleg was given that name because the earth was divided in his days.
    • Peleg's brother was named Joktan.
20. 1:20
    • Joktan fathered Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, and Jerah.
21. 1:21
    • Joktan also fathered Hadoram, Uzal, and Diklah.
22. 1:22
    • Joktan also fathered Ebal, Abimael, and Sheba.
23. 1:23
    • Joktan also fathered Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab.
    • All the men named were sons of Joktan.
24. 1:24
    • The line runs Shem, then Arphaxad, then Shelah.
25. 1:25
    • The line continues Eber, then Peleg, then Reu.
26. 1:26
    • The line continues Serug, then Nahor, then Terah.
27. 1:27
    • The line continues with Abram.
    • Abram is the same person as Abraham.
28. 1:28
    • The sons of Abraham were Isaac and Ishmael.
29. 1:29
    • What follows is the record of their generations.
    • Nebaioth was the firstborn of Ishmael.
    • Ishmael's other sons included Kedar, Adbeel, and Mibsam.
30. 1:30
    • Ishmael's sons also included Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, and Tema.
31. 1:31
    • Ishmael's sons also included Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah.
    • These named men were the sons of Ishmael.
32. 1:32
    • Keturah was Abraham's concubine.
    • Keturah bore Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah.
    • The sons of Jokshan were Sheba and Dedan.
33. 1:33
    • The sons of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abida, and Eldaah.
    • All those named were the sons of Keturah.
34. 1:34
    • Abraham fathered Isaac.
    • The sons of Isaac were Esau and Israel.
35. 1:35
    • The sons of Esau were Eliphaz, Reuel, Jeush, Jalam, and Korah.
36. 1:36
    • The sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zephi, Gatam, Kenaz, Timna, and Amalek.
37. 1:37
    • The sons of Reuel were Nahath, Zerah, Shammah, and Mizzah.
38. 1:38
    • The sons of Seir were Lotan, Shobal, Zibeon, Anah, Dishon, Ezer, and Dishan.
39. 1:39
    • The sons of Lotan were Hori and Homam.
    • Timna was Lotan's sister.
40. 1:40
    • The sons of Shobal were Alian, Manahath, Ebal, Shephi, and Onam.
    • The sons of Zibeon were Aiah and Anah.
41. 1:41
    • Dishon is listed as the son of Anah.
    • The sons of Dishon were Amram, Eshban, Ithran, and Cheran.
42. 1:42
    • The sons of Ezer were Bilhan, Zavan, and Jakan.
    • The sons of Dishan were Uz and Aran.
43. 1:43
    • What follows is a list of the kings who reigned in the land of Edom.
    • These kings reigned before any king reigned over the sons of Israel.
    • Bela son of Beor was one of these kings.
    • The name of Bela's city was Dinhabah.
44. 1:44
    • Bela died.
    • Jobab son of Zerah, from Bozrah, reigned in Bela's place.
45. 1:45
    • Jobab died.
    • Husham, from the land of the Temanites, reigned in Jobab's place.
46. 1:46
    • Husham died.
    • Hadad son of Bedad reigned in Husham's place.
    • Hadad struck Midian in the field of Moab.
    • The name of Hadad's city was Avith.
47. 1:47
    • Hadad died.
    • Samlah, from Masrekah, reigned in Hadad's place.
48. 1:48
    • Samlah died.
    • Shaul, from Rehoboth on the River, reigned in Samlah's place.
49. 1:49
    • Shaul died.
    • Baal-hanan son of Achbor reigned in Shaul's place.
50. 1:50
    • Baal-hanan died.
    • Hadad reigned in Baal-hanan's place.
    • The name of this Hadad's city was Pai.
    • The name of his wife was Mehetabel.
    • Mehetabel was the daughter of Matred.
    • Matred was the daughter of Mezahab.
51. 1:51
    • Hadad died.
    • There were chiefs of Edom.
    • Among them were chief Timna, chief Aliah, and chief Jetheth.
52. 1:52
    • The chiefs also included chief Oholibamah, chief Elah, and chief Pinon.
53. 1:53
    • The chiefs also included chief Kenaz, chief Teman, and chief Mibzar.
54. 1:54
    • The chiefs also included chief Magdiel and chief Iram.
    • These named men were the chiefs of Edom.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

Chronicles opens with no introduction at all: nine chapters of names, running from the first man down to the writer's own time. It was compiled after the Babylonian exile, for readers returning to a ruined homeland who needed to know who they were and where they stood in a much older story. Verses 1–4 are a bare chain of fathers and sons (each man is the son of the one named before him) drawn from Genesis 5. The spellings follow the KJV's Hebrew forms, so some names look different from their better-known versions: Sheth is Seth, Henoch is Enoch, Jered is Jared.

1:3

"Henoch" is the same name other books spell Enoch. Old spellings wander, so a name can look different from page to page.

1:4

The Hebrew of this verse is just four names in a row; "Noah's sons were" is supplied to make the relationship clear. In Genesis, Noah survives the flood with these three sons, and the peoples of the whole known world are traced back to them. The lists that follow work through the three in reverse order, Japheth first, then Ham, then Shem, whose line leads to Abraham.

1:5

From here on, "the sons of" often means descended peoples rather than individual men: most of these names are known elsewhere as countries, tribes or regions. Gomer is usually identified with the Cimmerians north of the Black Sea, Madai with the Medes of western Iran, Javan with the Greeks (the Hebrew word is the same as "Ionia"), and Tubal and Meshech with peoples of Asia Minor, in modern Turkey. The group as a whole covers the lands north and west of Israel.

1:6

Ashchenaz, Riphath and Togarmah are peoples of the far north and northeast as an ancient Israelite pictured the world, in the region of Asia Minor and Armenia.

1:7

Kittim is Cyprus, or the Greek settlements on it; Tarshish is a far-off port reached by sea, probably in the western Mediterranean; Elishah may be Cyprus or the Aegean coast. "Dodanim" appears in some Hebrew copies and in Genesis as "Rodanim", the people of Rhodes, the Hebrew letters for d and r are almost identical, and copyists confused them easily.

1:8

Ham's line covers the lands south and southwest of Israel. Cush is Nubia, the region up the Nile south of Egypt (modern Sudan); Mizraim is simply the ordinary Hebrew word for Egypt; Put is generally taken as Libya or the African coast west of Egypt; Canaan is the land Israel later occupied, roughly modern Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.

1:9

These are trading peoples of Arabia and the Red Sea coast. Sheba, in southwestern Arabia (modern Yemen), and Dedan, an oasis on the northern caravan route, were both known to Israel as sources of incense, gold and spices.

1:10

The KJV's "began to be mighty upon the earth" translates a Hebrew word, gibbor, meaning a warrior or a man of great power. Genesis 10, which tells the story more fully, calls Nimrod a mighty hunter and credits him with founding the great cities of Mesopotamia, including Babel and Nineveh.

1:11

The -im ending is the Hebrew plural: these are names of peoples, not of individual men, so the sense is "Egypt was the ancestor of the Ludites, the Anamites" and so on. Most cannot now be identified with certainty; they seem to be groups living in and around Egypt and North Africa.

1:12

The Philistines were a people of the southern coastal plain of Canaan, organized around five cities including Gaza, Ashdod and Ekron, and Israel's chief rivals in the era of Samson, Samuel, Saul and David. Caphtor, from which they are said to come, is usually identified with Crete or the Aegean generally.

1:13

Zidon is the Phoenician seaport of Sidon, on the coast of modern Lebanon; naming it as Canaan's firstborn is a way of saying the city was the oldest of the Canaanite settlements. Heth is the ancestor of the people the Old Testament calls the children of Heth, or Hittites, who appear in Genesis living around Hebron.

1:14

These are the peoples living in Canaan before Israel, listed repeatedly in the Old Testament as the nations Israel encountered there. The Jebusites held Jerusalem until David took it; "Amorite" is often used loosely for the inland population as a whole.

1:16

The last of these are named from towns on the Phoenician and Syrian coast: Arvad is an island city off northern Lebanon, Zemar a town nearby, and Hamath a major city on the Orontes river in Syria that marked the northern edge of Israel's widest borders.

1:17

In Genesis 10, Uz, Hul, Gether and Meshech are the sons of Aram: that is, Shem's great-grandsons, not his sons. The Chronicler's text as it stands has dropped the phrase "and the sons of Aram", so all nine names run together in a single list. Elam lay east of Babylonia in what is now southwestern Iran, and Asshur is Assyria, in northern Iraq.

1:18

Eber's name is built from the same consonants as the word "Hebrew", and ancient readers connected the two, though the exact relationship is uncertain.

1:19

The name Peleg sounds like the Hebrew verb palag, "to divide" or "to split", and the verse plays on that. What the division was is not explained: it may mean the scattering of the world's peoples into separate nations, as in the Babel story of Genesis 11, or the parcelling out of territory, or (since the same root is used of watercourses) the cutting of irrigation channels. The Hebrew leaves it open.

1:23

Joktan's descendants are tribes and places of the Arabian peninsula. Hazarmaveth is Hadramaut in southern Arabia; Sheba and Havilah are incense and gold regions; Ophir was proverbial in Israel for the finest gold, imported by sea in Solomon's day.

1:24

Having spread outward to cover every known people, the list now doubles back and narrows to a single thread. Verses 24–27 repeat names already given in verses 17–19 and carry the line forward to Abraham, in the pattern of Genesis 11.

1:27

Abram means something like "exalted father"; in Genesis 17 God renames him Abraham, explained there as "father of a multitude". The Chronicler notes the two names refer to one man.

1:28

Ishmael was in fact the elder, born to Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian slave; Isaac was born later to Sarah herself. The order here is not birth order. The Chronicler's method throughout is to name the side branches, dispose of them quickly, and then return to the line he is actually following, so Ishmael's descendants come first, in verses 29–31, and Isaac's line resumes at verse 34.

1:29

"Generations" translates a Hebrew word (toledot) used throughout Genesis for a family record or register, the account of what came from a given ancestor.

1:31

Ishmael's twelve sons correspond to nomadic tribes of the northern Arabian desert. Several (Kedar, Nebaioth, Tema, Dumah) appear in Assyrian records and elsewhere in the Old Testament as real Arab peoples and oasis settlements.

1:32

A concubine was a secondary wife: legally recognized, living in the household, and her children counted as the man's own, but she ranked below a full wife and her sons normally had a weaker claim on the inheritance. Genesis 25 calls Keturah Abraham's wife; the Chronicler uses the lower term, placing her clearly beneath Sarah.

1:33

The Midianites were a people of the northwestern Arabian desert and the Sinai region who appear often in Israel's story, Moses married a Midianite and herded her father's flocks, and Gideon fought off Midianite raiders.

1:34

Israel is the second name given to Jacob in Genesis 32; Chronicles almost always calls him Israel rather than Jacob. Esau was the elder of the twins, but as with Ishmael, the Chronicler names him first only in order to deal with his descendants (verses 35–54) and clear the way for Israel's line, which occupies the rest of the book.

1:35

Esau is also called Edom, and his descendants are the Edomites, who settled the rugged country southeast of the Dead Sea. They were Israel's nearest kin among the surrounding nations and, for most of the Old Testament, among its most persistent enemies.

1:36

In Genesis 36 Timna is not a son but a woman, a concubine of Eliphaz who bore him Amalek. The Chronicler's compressed list runs her name into the sequence so that she reads as one more son. Amalek is the ancestor of the Amalekites, desert raiders who attacked Israel after the exodus.

1:38

Seir was not descended from Esau at all. He is the ancestor of the Horites, the people already living in the land of Seir when the Edomites arrived; the two groups intermarried and merged, which is why their family lists are set side by side here.

1:40

Several names in this section are spelled slightly differently from the parallel list in Genesis 36, Alian for Alvan, Shephi for Shepho, and in the next verse Amram for Hemdan. These are copying variations between Hebrew letters that look much alike, not different people.

1:43

Edom had a monarchy before Israel did. Note that not one of these eight kings is the son of the one before him: the throne did not pass from father to son, which suggests each was chosen or seized power, more like a paramount chief than a dynastic king. Each ruled from his own town rather than from a fixed capital.

1:44

Bozrah was the principal city of northern Edom, and later prophets use its name as shorthand for Edom itself.

1:45

Teman was a district of Edom, proverbial for wisdom; one of Job's three friends is Eliphaz the Temanite.

1:46

"In the field of Moab" means in the open country of Moab, the plateau east of the Dead Sea, north of Edom. Midian's herding tribes ranged widely, and this records a battle fought on Moabite ground.

1:48

In the Hebrew Bible "the river", used on its own without a name, normally means the Euphrates. Rehoboth is otherwise unknown.

1:50

It is unusual for a genealogy of this kind to name a king's wife at all, still less her mother and grandmother; something in the tradition evidently made this family worth recording. Mezahab means "waters of gold".

1:51

"Duke" here is the KJV translating a Hebrew word (alluph) for the head of a clan or tribal division; it has nothing to do with European nobility, and the seventeenth-century English word simply meant a leader, from the Latin dux. Most of the names that follow are also known as place names, so this is probably a list of the districts of Edom and the clans attached to them rather than a list of successive rulers.