Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Roll of the Mighty Men
1 Chronicles 11:26-47
26 The mighty men of the armies also include Asahel the brother of Joab, Elhanan the son of Dodo of Bethlehem, · WEB
The roll of David's loyal men includes foreigners and the husband he had killed, and the book that omits the crime keeps the name.
Twenty-two verses of names, each with a home town or a father attached. Read as a map the list is wide: Bethlehem, Tekoa, Anathoth, Netophah, Carmel, Gibeah of Benjamin. Men from Saul's own tribe are on it.
It is wider than that at the edges. Zelek is an Ammonite 1 Chronicles 11:39. Ithmah is a Moabite 1 Chronicles 11:46. Adina leads a Reubenite contingent from beyond the Jordan 1 Chronicles 11:42. Israel's standing enemies supply men to the guard of Israel's king, and the register enters them by nationality without a note of explanation.
One entry is heavier than the rest, and it sits near the end. Uriah the Hittite 1 Chronicles 11:41.
The parallel roll closes on that name and counts the total 2 Samuel 23:39. This one keeps going for six more verses, adding the men from the east — so the writer had the older list in front of him, kept its shape, and extended it.
Which means the inclusion is deliberate. This book tells nothing of Bathsheba, nothing of the letter Uriah carried, nothing of the siege where he was left to die. It also declines to remove him. The name stands on the roll of the loyal, in a book whose subject is the man who arranged his death, and no comment is attached to it.
That should not be read as a hint dropped for the alert. Nothing in the chapter points at it. It is the register doing what registers in this book consistently do — entering what was true and leaving the reader to hold it. The troubler of Israel was entered under his own verdict 1 Chronicles 2:7, a tribe was recorded as failing to multiply 1 Chronicles 4:27, and the house of the rejected king was carried ten generations past its fall.
The list of the great, in this book, is not cleaned. It is a document, and the last thing a document does is protect its subject.
held with reason What this mark means