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Context No. 172 of 4322 · 1 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

1 Chronicles 7:30-40: in context

30The sons of Asher: Imnah, Ishvah, Ishvi, and Beriah. Serah was their sister. 31The sons of Beriah: Heber and Malchiel, who was the father of Birzaith. 32Heber became the father of Japhlet, Shomer, Hotham, and Shua their sister. 33The sons of Japhlet: Pasach, Bimhal, and Ashvath. These are the children of Japhlet. 34The sons of Shemer: Ahi, Rohgah, Jehubbah, and Aram. 35The sons of Helem his brother: Zophah, Imna, Shelesh, and Amal. 36The sons of Zophah: Suah, Harnepher, Shual, Beri, Imrah, 37Bezer, Hod, Shamma, Shilshah, Ithran, and Beera. 38The sons of Jether: Jephunneh, Pispa, and Ara. 39The sons of Ulla: Arah, Hanniel, and Rizia. 40All these were the children of Asher, heads of the fathers’ houses, choice and mighty men of valor, chief of the princes. The number of them listed by genealogy for service in war was twenty-six thousand men.

Chronicles opens with nine chapters of genealogy, and this passage is the register of Asher, one of the northern tribes. It runs sons, brothers, and heads of houses for eleven verses, and closes with a count: twenty-six thousand men fit for war.

Two things are worth noticing in a list like this. The first is Serah, named in verse thirty as the sister of Asher's sons. Women appear rarely in these registers, and she appears in the earliest lists in Genesis and Numbers too, carried forward across centuries of copying for reasons no one now knows. Later Jewish tradition built stories around her precisely because she survives in the record without explanation.

The second is who this list is for. Chronicles was written for the community that came back from exile, mostly people of Judah and Benjamin. Asher was a northern tribe, scattered by Assyria generations earlier and never reconstituted. The chronicler writes out their families anyway, choice men, mighty warriors, chief of the princes. He is keeping the roll of relatives who are not coming back. Whose names am I still keeping a place for, and does it matter that they will not be filling it?

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