Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Chronicles · About this commentary
Who Am I, Yahweh God?
1 Chronicles 17:16-27
16 Then David the king went in and sat before Yahweh; and he said, “Who am I, Yahweh God, and what is my house, that you have brought me this far? · WEB
David answers a promise by asking what he is, then asks God to do the thing he has just been promised.
David went in and sat before Yahweh 1 Chronicles 17:16. The posture is worth a moment: not prostrate, not standing to petition, but seated, in the way a man sits when he has been given something too large to respond to quickly.
His first words answer a promise about his house with a question about his house. Who am I, Yahweh God, and what is my house, that you have brought me this far? 1 Chronicles 17:16. He does not accept the honor and he does not decline it. He asks what could possibly have occasioned it.
Then he answers his own question, and the answer is not about himself. It was done for your servant's sake, and according to your own heart 1 Chronicles 17:19. The motive is located inside God rather than in anything found in the recipient — which is the only account of the matter that the preceding chapters permit, since every success in them has already been credited elsewhere.
At the middle of the prayer David stops talking about his family altogether. Two incomparables are set side by side: there is no one like you, neither is there any God besides you 1 Chronicles 17:20, and what one nation on the earth is like your people Israel 1 Chronicles 17:21. The second rests entirely on the first. Israel is unlike other nations only because it was redeemed out of Egypt by a God unlike other gods, and the evidence offered is an event rather than a quality.
The prayer then does something that looks redundant and is not. Let the word that you have spoken concerning your servant... be established forever, and do as you have spoken 1 Chronicles 17:23. David asks for exactly what he has just been promised.
He explains why in the next breath. God has revealed that he will build the house, therefore your servant has found courage to pray before you 1 Chronicles 17:25. The promise is not what makes the prayer unnecessary; it is what makes it possible. A man does not ask boldly for what he has no word about. Asking for the promised thing is what taking a promise seriously looks like.
And the closing verse has already moved into the past tense: you, Yahweh, have blessed, and it is blessed forever 1 Chronicles 17:27. Nothing has happened yet. The son is unborn and the temple unbuilt. David treats the word as the deed, and the rest of the book is a man acting on that.
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