Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Divisions of the Army and the King's Stewards
1 Chronicles 27:1-34
1 Now the children of Israel after their number, the heads of fathers’ households and the captains of thousands and of hundreds, and their officers who served the king in any matter of the divisions which came in and went out month by month throughout all the months of the year—of every division were twenty-four thousand. · WEB
The army serves one month in twelve, the herds are run by hired foreigners, and one count is deliberately left unfinished.
The army is organized as twelve divisions of twenty-four thousand, each on duty for one month of the year 1 Chronicles 27:1. Every man serves a twelfth of his time and goes home for the rest.
The arrangement is worth pausing on. It produces a force of nearly three hundred thousand trained men without a standing army — no professional soldiery kept under arms, no permanent military class, and no month in which the fields are unworked. A kingdom described as having rest on every side organizes its defense so that defense is nobody's whole life.
Tribal officers are then listed 1 Chronicles 27:16–22, and two tribes are simply absent from the roll. No reason is given, and the list ends without noting the gap.
What comes next is the book's own account of a count it refused to complete. David didn't take the number of them from twenty years old and under, because Yahweh had said he would increase Israel like the stars of the sky; and Joab's census didn't finish, and wrath came on Israel for this, and the total was never entered in the royal record 1 Chronicles 27:23–24.
The register declines to supply a figure it possessed, and gives a promise as the reason. A nation told it would be uncountable does not publish its total.
The stewards then take over, and the chapter becomes an inventory of an estate: treasuries, field workers, vineyards, wine cellars, olive and sycamore groves, oil cellars, herds in the coastal plain, herds in the valleys, camels, donkeys, flocks 1 Chronicles 27:25–31. Each has a named officer.
Two of them are foreigners. Obil the Ishmaelite is over the camels and Jaziz the Hagrite over the flocks 1 Chronicles 27:30–31 — men from the desert peoples who bred those animals, hired for the thing they knew. Competence is recruited where it exists.
The counselors close the chapter, including one titled the king's friend 1 Chronicles 27:33, which is an office rather than a description. And the man named first as counselor is quietly succeeded in the next verse 1 Chronicles 27:34. What lay behind that replacement is not told here. The record notes who held the post, and moves on.
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