1 Chronicles8chapter 8

1 Chronicles 8:1-7

Bela his firstborn: Benjamin's genealogy resumes here after the roll in chapter 7, and the return signals what the chapter is building toward: a full record of the tribe that produced Saul. Bela's line runs to grandsons already settled at Geba and then moved to Manahath, the ordinary drift of families across generations. Barnes reads the return to Benjamin as the compiler bridging the genealogical section into the historical narrative that opens with Saul at the chapter's end.

1 Chronicles 8:8-12

in the country of Moab: A rare narrative fragment breaks the name list: Shaharaim, having sent away his first household, fathers children in Moab by two more wives, and a line through his son Elpaal reaches two towns, Ono and Lod. Both towns reappear centuries later in the rosters of Benjamites who returned from exile, at Ezra 2:33 and Nehemiah 11:35, so a family founded here by a man who left the land for Moab is remembered again in the list of those who came back to it. Gill and Clarke both treat the record as genuine family history rather than scribal confusion, differing only on whether Hodesh names the same wife elsewhere called Baara or a separate woman.

1 Chronicles 8:13-27

Beriah and Shema, heads of Aijalon, carry the list's one act of war: they drove the inhabitants out of Gath, which Gill reads as payment for what Gath's neighbors had done to Ephraim at 7:21. The roll then runs the sons of Elpaal, Shimhi and Shashak through many verses of names with no further narrative, though Gill passes on a late tradition, traced to Kimchi, identifying one Eliah among them with Elijah the prophet, of the seed of Rachel. Fourteen verses carry the tribe's spread across Aijalon and its towns on the strength of one remembered clash and little else.

1 Chronicles 8:28

The long roll closes with one summary verse: these were heads of the fathers, chief men, and these dwelt in Jerusalem. Wesley reads the preserved list as a small figure of a larger truth, that mighty nations of that age left no name behind while the ordinary households of Israel are written down in careful order, a shadow he draws directly to the Lamb's book of life. JFB adds that these Benjamite chiefs were among those who resettled in Jerusalem after the captivity, alongside families of Judah and the Levites.

1 Chronicles 8:29-32

the father of Gibeon: A second short genealogy opens at Gibeon, tracing Jehiel's line through Abdon, Zur, Kish and Baal to Mikloth and Shimeah, the household that produced Ner and so runs straight into Saul's own line two verses later. The same family appears again at 9:35-44 with small differences in the names, and Clarke passes on the old account that Ezra, finding two source documents that agreed in substance but not in every name, kept both rather than choose between them. The list sets Saul's ancestry among the settled families of Gibeon, the city bound to Israel by Joshua's treaty in Joshua 9.

1 Chronicles 8:33-34

Saul's sons stand named in full here: Jonathan, Malchishua, Abinadab and Esh-baal, and Jonathan's own son is named Merib-baal. Both carry baal, the word for lord, where the parallel record in Samuel gives Ish-bosheth and Mephibosheth, substituting bosheth, shame, for the offending element; Clarke and Gill both read the Chronicles forms as the earlier names, the substitution a matter of later transmission rather than a different family. Saul's line is not erased from the record for its end at Gilboa; a genealogy generations deep follows from here, running alongside the line that took the throne from it.

1 Chronicles 8:35-40

Micah's line runs six generations past him, Jehoadah to Azel, and Azel's own six sons are named individually rather than folded into a summary, an unusual density this late in a Benjamite roll. The record does not stop at Saul's death on Gilboa or at David's dynasty replacing his house; it keeps counting fathers and sons long after the kingdom left this family, evidence the compiler still held records for a line whose claim to the throne was long over. The chapter closes on Ulam's sons, archers and mighty men of valour a hundred and fifty strong, and Henry reads the note as praise for service rather than for rank, a family remembered for usefulness once the crown was gone from it.