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

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

I said yesterday that it seemed as if possibly the less detailed genealogical list for the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh were because few had returned from those tribes.  Today’s passage suggests and alternate explanation.  Perhaps their detailed genealogies derived from the records of a census taken before the Exile.  The most likely candidate would be the census which King David took, but nothing here would allow someone to reach a definitive conclusion on that.  Once again, the general tone of the passage indicates that it was a summary of information taken from another record which was available to the compiler.  While it is certainly likely that a good part of the reason for creating this document was to provide justification for the Returned Exiles to exert control over Jerusalem and the area around it, it also seems likely that it was based on pre-existing documents.  That is, the people who compiled this document did not make their claim up at the time, but instead compiled here the arguments for a claim which had been made by their ancestors for several generations going back to the Exile itself.

In fact, they seem to have included people in that claim who had not yet joined them.  In fact, it seems similar to what the modern state of Israel has done in seeking out those of Jewish descent throughout the world and inviting them to join them in Israel.  An example would be the Ethiopian tribe which had claimed for as long as we have a record of them to be descended from Jews who fled to Egypt with Jeremiah.  The Israeli government investigated their claim, and then arranged an emergency airlift to rescue them from persecution in Ethiopia.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Chronicles 5-6.

It is unclear to me why the genealogical records here for the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh are so sparse relative  to those for Judah previously and Levi later in today’s passage.  Perhaps the reason is that few, if any of their descendants had returned to the land of Israel in the post-Exilic period.  However, it is clear that the writer was familiar with communities of them living in the areas where they had been taken into exile.  This suggests to me that the post-Exile residents of the land of Israel interacted with and traded with those who remained settled elsewhere.

In both the genealogies of the tribes which had settled east of the Jordan and the more detailed one of the Levites the compiler gives a rather detailed account of where they had lived within the the Kingdom of Israel.  The writer probably included this to establish a claim to the lands being described, or perhaps a better wording would be to establish the lands which he felt his people should aspire to regain control over.