I am back in 1 Chronicles these days, working my way through passages that once inspired a post entitled “Does God Need An Editor?” (Spoiler: my answer was a hard no.)
For those unfamiliar, the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are almost entirely composed of Hebrew genealogies: descendants of Adam, Abraham, David, twelve of the thirteen tribes of Israel (mysteriously, not including Dan, none of whose progeny appear in Chronicles prior to chapter 27), Israel’s first king Saul, and a number of the returned exiles from the Babylonian captivity.
That’s a whole lot of Hebrew names one after another with very little intervening detail or editorial commentary. The modern Christian reader quite reasonably asks, “Er … what’s in this for me, if anything at all?”
Good question.