1 Chronicles 1:34-42: in context

Chronicles opens with nine chapters of almost pure names, and this stretch is among the barest: the descendants of Esau, who became Edom, and mixed in with them the sons of Seir. It is the kind of passage a reader's eyes slide off. But one of the two families listed here is worth stopping for, because of who they were.

The sons of Seir are the Horites, the people who lived in the land of Edom before Esau's descendants moved in and took it over. They are one of the vanished peoples of the ancient world, a nation displaced and absorbed until they left almost no trace anywhere. And yet here they are, their clans and their names set down carefully in the record book of Israel, a nation that was not even their own. Lotan, Shobal, Zibeon, Anah, the sons of Seir who were pushed aside by history, kept in writing long after the people themselves were gone. The list even notes Timna, the sister of Lotan, tying the displaced Horites into the line of Esau by marriage, so that the replaced and the replacers end up recorded together in one family tree.

Chronicles begins its whole account at Adam, and that is the quiet claim underneath even this dry list: everyone belongs to one human family, and the names of the erased are worth writing down. The people history rolled over still get their names kept. Whose names, of the displaced or the forgotten or the ones simply replaced by someone newer, have I stopped bothering to remember at all?