Tag Archives: 1 Chronicles

Daily Bible Study

May 16, 2020 Bible Study The Importance of Avoiding the Appearance of Giving Preferential Treatment

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 24-26.

I have written previously that I find passages containing genealogies difficult to read and make a blog entry about.  Today’s passage is one such passage as it is a combination of genealogies and who was assigned what task in rituals we no longer follow.  However, there is one element of this passage that is worth taking careful note of.  When priests and Levites were assigned tasks in the Temple, great care was taken to make sure that not only was no preference shown, but that everyone could see that no preference was shown.  We should make an effort to follow this example when selecting leaders today.  There are tasks where it is appropriate to select people based on their relationship with the decision-makers.  There are others where it is important that those chosen not be selected on that basis.  In those latter circumstances, we need to make sure that everyone can see that no one received preferential treatment.  In those circumstances avoiding the appearance of impropriety is almost as important as avoiding impropriety.

Daily Bible Study

May 14, 2020 Bible Study Nathan Prophecies of the Coming Messiah

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 17-19.

The message which God gave to David through the prophet Nathan contains some prophecies which clearly apply to the Messiah and not to Solomon.  In fact, in many ways it more closely tracks as a Messianic prophecy than one fulfilled by Solomon.  While Solomon did indeed build a temple to God, he did not truly keep God’s favor his entire life, as God chose Jeroboam to take the Northern Tribes away from Solomon’s son while Solomon yet ruled.  On the other hand, the Church is indeed God’s Temple, built by Jesus.  Jesus suffered death at God’s command and has His favor for all of eternity.  Speaking of eternity, Jesus will reign over God’s people for all of eternity.

Daily Bible Study

May 13, 2020 Bible Study God Is In Control and He Loves Us

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 13-16.

I am not sure that the order in which the account of David moving the Ark, Hiram sending him messengers, and the Philistine attempt to defeat him is the order in which these events occurred.  I suspect that the compiler of this book was also unsure.  Nevertheless, I find the difference between Hiram’s response to David taking the throne and that of the Philistines interesting.  Hiram sent messengers and offered to help David build palaces and otherwise fortify Jerusalem into a true capital.  The Philistines sent an army and tried to defeat David before he became too powerful for them.  Hiram established a long-term relationship with Israel which benefited both nations.  The Philistines provoked David to war and he completely defeated them.  They were never again a power in the region (although there is evidence that they maintained a separate identity until around the time Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians).

I love the psalm included in today’s passage.  It gives us some instructions which we should follow today, especially now.  Let us give thanks to God and proclaim to the whole world how great he is.  Sing to Him and exult Him and continually seek Him.  Give thanks to God and remember that He is in charge.  If we do these things and truly believe them, we will not be afraid, not even of disease and disaster.  Then when people ask us why we are not afraid, we should tell them that we are not afraid because God is in control; He is good and He loves us.

Daily Bible Study

May 12, 2020 Bible Study

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 10-12.

I find a few portions of today’s passage interesting.  First, it appears to me that David conquered Jerusalem so as to set it up as his capital.  This would have been important because Hebron was very much a town of the tribe of Judah.  One might almost consider it to be the capital of the tribe of Judah.  By moving his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem David made it less like he was the king of Judah who had come to rule over all of Israel.  It made David equally king of all of the tribes.  The compiler of this passage makes the same point in another way at the end of his discussion of David’s mighty men.  After listing the Three and the Thirty, he gives us a list of warriors from each of the tribes who came to follow David while he was at Hebron, and before.  David became king because warriors from all of the tribes chose to follow him and support his claim to kingship.

Going back to look at what this passage says about the Three and the Thirty we see some things which interest me.  As I am reading this it seems like these men were leaders of David’s army.  Unlike some other men who are mentioned from time to time, they had no specific unit which followed their orders.  Instead, they would be given charge of units, or take charge of units in ways that changed from battle to battle and war to war.  More interesting to me is the fact that there were more than thirty members of the Thirty.  Further, according to the translators’ notes and other translations, there was more than one leader of the Three.  The original Hebrew mentions that Joab’s brother was the leader of the Three, even though he was not one of them.  But before that it named one of the Three as the leader of the Three.

 

 

Daily Bible Study

May 11, 2020 Bible Study

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.

Daily Bible Study

May 10. Bible Study

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.

Daily Bible Study

May 8, 2020 Bible Study The Importance of Comparing Multiple Translations

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 1.

I have stated before that genealogical lists like those in today’s passage do very little for me.  So, when I come to such passages I need to approach them a bit differently.  I spent more time than usual looking at the translators’ footnotes.  My first comment regards a large number of comments which result from the fact that Ancient Hebrew did not contain vowels as we understand them today.  This results in different manuscripts indicating the vowels differently, which means some of the names look different when transliterated to English (a similar thing sometimes happens today with Arabic names for different reasons, so that Muammar Gaddafi and Moamar Khadifi refer to the same person).  More interesting, the translators decided to introduce the phrase, “The sons of Noah were,” in front of the names of Noah’s three sons (which we know from other sources).  What makes this interesting is that all of the names before that are one generation followed by the next.  So, in the Hebrew there is no clue that Shem is not the father of Ham, who is not the father of Japheth until the verses where it starts to list each of their descendants.  Finally, by comparing to the NIV translator notes we discover that the translators made judgement calls as to whether or not to translate certain words/phrases as “father of” or “ancestor of” and “son of” or “descendant of”.

Which reinforces something I first became aware of some years back.  We must be careful about reaching conclusions about what a passage means for us based on the connotations of the English word the translators selected.  I first became aware of this when a good friend, whose Biblical understanding I generally respected, supported their understanding of Bible verse on the connotations of a word used by the King James Version which I knew to have not applied when the KJV translation was made.  My point here is that, since I have never learned to read Hebrew or Greek, I must look at multiple translations when I want to do a deep dive into what a particular passage means.  There are many places in the Bible (and in other translated documents) where the translator needed to make a judgement call on what words to use in the translation.