1 Chronicles4chapter 4

1 Chronicles 4:1-4

This is a second register of Judah's line through Hur, distinct from the roster already given in chapter two, and the commentators read it as drawn from a separate public document carrying details the first list omitted. The line closes at Ephratah, the ancestor of Bethlehem, keeping David's town in view before the chapter turns to Jabez.

1 Chronicles 4:5-8

Ashur the father of Tekoa carries two households through his two wives, and the list traces both without comment on the polygamy the patriarchal age tolerated. Coz, born of Helah, is the ancestor the next two verses use to introduce Jabez, since the family of Aharhel his son leads directly into the more famous name.

1 Chronicles 4:9-10

The name list stops for two verses of narrative. Jabez is called more honourable than his brethren, and the reason given is his mother's naming him for the sorrow of his birth. His prayer asks four things only, blessing, enlarged territory, God's hand with him, and protection from evil that would grieve him, and the text closes the matter in one clause, God granted him that which he requested. The verse records one man's prayer and one answer, and Spurgeon preached the text directly under the title The Prayer of Jabez.

1 Chronicles 4:11-20

This unit gathers several branches of Caleb's descendants, including the craftsmen of the valley of Charashim at verse fourteen, carpenters and smiths named for their trade rather than for any deed. Verse eighteen preserves an otherwise unrecorded marriage, Bithiah the daughter of Pharaoh taken by a descendant of Caleb, an Egyptian princess grafted into Judah's genealogy without further comment. Most of the names in this stretch occur nowhere else in Scripture, which is part of what these chapters are doing, keeping every family on record even where no story survives to go with the name.

1 Chronicles 4:21-23

Shelah's line is remembered by trade as much as by name, the house of Ashbea that wrought fine linen, likely a craft carried out of Egypt, and men who once held dominion in Moab, called ancient things by the time the Chronicler writes. Verse twenty-three names potters and gardeners who dwelt with the king for his work, ordinary trades set down for permanent record beside the roster of a tribe's princes. Spurgeon took the phrase as a sermon text in its own right, on the honor of any labor done for the true King.

1 Chronicles 4:24-27

Simeon's roster here differs from the lists in Genesis and Numbers, the commentators note, most likely because family lines carried more than one name across generations. Shimei alone had sixteen sons and six daughters, yet the tribe as a whole did not multiply like the children of Judah, a decline some of the bench trace to Jacob's own words over Simeon in Genesis forty nine, that he would be divided and scattered in Israel.

1 Chronicles 4:28-33

Simeon's inheritance is listed as cities held inside Judah's own territory, matching Joshua nineteen's account that the tribe's portion lay within Judah's larger allotment because Judah's share was too much for them. The recurring note, these were their cities unto the reign of David, marks a boundary the Chronicler's source dated its information by, and some of the towns, Ziklag among them, changed hands again in David's own lifetime.

1 Chronicles 4:34-43

The princes named here led their growing families to seek new pasture, first east of Gedor, where they found the land wide and quiet and destroyed a remnant of Ham's descendants who had held it of old, in the days of Hezekiah. A second company of five hundred went further, to mount Seir, and smote the rest of the Amalekites that were escaped, the last blow this book records against the people whose destruction Israel was commanded from the days of Moses and Saul.