1 Chronicles 20: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Joab leads Israel's army against the Ammonites and lays siege to Rabbah while David stays in Jerusalem, and Joab takes the city. David takes the king's gold crown and a large amount of plunder, puts the people of the city and of the other Ammonite towns to forced labor, and returns to Jerusalem. The chapter then lists three later battles with the Philistines in which Israelite fighters kill three descendants of Rapha, men of unusual size, including the brother of Goliath.

Claim by Claim

1. 20:1
   • At the turn of the year, the season when kings go out to war, Joab led out the fighting force of the army.
   • Joab ravaged the land of the Ammonites.
   • Joab came to Rabbah and laid siege to it.
   • David stayed in Jerusalem.
   • Joab struck Rabbah and tore it down.
2. 20:2
   • David took the crown from the head of their king.
   • The Hebrew is ambiguous as to whether the crown was taken from the Ammonite king or from the idol of the Ammonite god Milcom.
   • The crown was found to weigh a talent of gold.
   • There was a precious stone in the crown.
   • The crown was placed on David's head.
   • David brought out a very great amount of plunder from the city.
3. 20:3
   • David brought out the people who were in the city.
   • The Hebrew is ambiguous as to whether David cut the people with the saws, iron picks and axes or set them to labor with those tools.
   • David did the same to all the cities of the Ammonites.
   • David and all the people returned to Jerusalem.
4. 20:4
   • After this, war broke out at Gezer with the Philistines.
   • Sibbechai the Hushathite struck down Sippai.
   • Sippai was one of the descendants of the Rephaim.
   • The Philistines were subdued.
5. 20:5
   • There was war with the Philistines again.
   • Elhanan son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite.
   • The shaft of Lahmi's spear was like a weaver's beam.
6. 20:6
   • There was war again at Gath.
   • At Gath there was a man of great size.
   • The man had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.
   • The man's digits numbered twenty-four in all.
   • The man too was born to the Rapha.
7. 20:7
   • The man taunted Israel.
   • Jonathan son of Shimea, David's brother, struck the man down.
8. 20:8
   • These men were born to the Rapha in Gath.
   • They fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.

Words Worth Explaining

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

20:1

"In the spring" is literally "at the turn of the year." Ancient armies campaigned after the winter rains stopped: roads were passable, and the new harvest meant food could be found in the field. Rabbah was the Ammonite capital, on the site of modern Amman in Jordan; the Ammonites lived east of the Jordan River and were long-standing rivals of Israel. The detail that David stayed behind is where the parallel account in 2 Samuel 11 places the episode with Bathsheba and Uriah, which Chronicles does not include.

20:2

A talent was roughly 75 pounds (about 34 kilograms), far too heavy to wear for any length of time, so the weight is being given as a measure of value, or the crown was held above David's head rather than worn. The Hebrew behind "their king" (malkam) can equally be read as the name Milcom, the chief god of the Ammonites, in which case the crown was taken from an idol's head rather than a man's. Both readings are old and neither can be ruled out.

20:3

The Hebrew here is disputed. The consonants can be read as "he sawed them" (a form of execution) or "he set them to saws" (forced labor with the tools named). The parallel verse in 2 Samuel 12:31 has the same ambiguity. Older English versions, including the King James, took it as mutilation; most modern translations take it as conscripted labor.

20:4

Gezer was a fortified town in the lowlands on the border between Israelite and Philistine territory, controlling a main road. The Philistines were a people settled along the coastal plain southwest of Israel, organized around five cities, and Israel's principal military rival in this period. "Rapha" (plural Rephaim) is the name of a people remembered in Israelite tradition as unusually large; the King James renders it simply "the giant," but the Hebrew is a proper name or clan name, not a description.

20:5

The parallel verse at 2 Samuel 21:19 says Elhanan killed "Goliath the Gittite", not Goliath's brother. Chronicles either preserves an older reading or resolves the clash with the famous account of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Scholars have argued both ways. "Gittite" means a man from Gath. A weaver's beam was the thick wooden roller on an upright loom; comparing a spear shaft to one was a stock way of saying it was enormous.

20:6

Gath was one of the five main Philistine cities and, in 1 Samuel 17, Goliath's home town. Six fingers and six toes (polydactyly) is a real and inherited trait; the writer records it as a distinguishing mark of this family, alongside the man's height.

20:7

Shimea is a variant spelling of Shammah, one of David's older brothers (1 Samuel 16:9), so Jonathan is David's nephew. To "defy" or taunt Israel, as the King James puts it, describes a formal battlefield challenge, a champion insulting the opposing army to provoke single combat, exactly as Goliath does in 1 Samuel 17.

20:8

"Born unto the giant" translates a phrase meaning born to Rapha, treating Rapha as the ancestor of a lineage rather than as one individual. The short list in verses 4–8 functions as a record of Israel's warriors who ended that line, crediting the kills both to the named men and to David as the king under whom they served.