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 2-4.

There is a line of thinking which postulates that the Old Testament was put together by post-Exile Jews in order to justify their rule over the territory around Jerusalem.  Many of those who take this position believe that those who came to rule Jerusalem in the post-Exile period were not actually descended from people who had lived in and around Jerusalem.  There is some merit to the first position in that 1 and 2 Chronicles were certainly compiled at least partially for that purpose.  We can see that to an extent in the genealogies in today’s passage.  However, the first thing we see is that this list of genealogies is designed to allow confirming whether or not a returning Exile was indeed descended from those taken into Exile.  In this passage we see evidence that the Jewish people in Exile (and quite likely before that) had maintained genealogical records similar to the family Bibles which many people had maintained from colonial times up until recently in which a record was kept of family births and deaths.  Further, I believe that the stories about what certain individuals did was to allow those whose record had used alternate names, or where the name was copied incorrectly at some point, to show that they were indeed genuinely descended from the people of Israel.

What makes this important is that it shows that those who compiled 1 and 2 Chronicles had actual records from which they put these books together.  They did not just base it on family stories they vaguely remembered Grandpa and Grandma telling.  They had things which had been written down and passed from one generation to the next.  Here they brought those records together and made a systematic compilation of them, just as the compilers of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings had done.