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

Chapter seven lists the descendants of Issachar, Benjamin, Naphtali, Manasseh, Ephraim, and Asher.  I assume the listing for Manasseh is intended to be for the half of the tribe which settled west of the Jordan River, since the half which settled east of the Jordan was listed previously.  I found it interesting that for some of these tribes it lists the number of fighting men which had been counted in a census, but not for all of them.  Additionally, it does not give us any idea when that number of fighting men from these various tribes was  obtained.  Once the list of tribal genealogies was finished the passage gives the family tree for Saul, both his ancestors and his descendants.  When it completes that it tells us that they were taken captive to Babylon because of their unfaithfulness.  Then the passage gives us a list of the first to return from the Babylonian Exile, which gives us an idea about when this book was compiled.  While it is clear that this book was compiled after the Israelites began returning after the Persian conquest of Babylon, it also seems clear to me that it was compiled from various records which they brought back with them.  In fact, this part reads as if the reason for making this compilation was that the records they were sourcing were partial and they were putting the information from those partial records here because they were afraid that if they were not combined those records would be lost.  The writer references other records which he seems to believe were more complete than the records he was compiling here.  Records which have since been lost, supporting his fear that these records might be lost if he did not put them all together.

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