Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Chronicles · About this commentary
Judah's Clans and Simeon's Borders
1 Chronicles 4:1-43
1 The sons of Judah: Perez, Hezron, Carmi, Hur, and Shobal. · WEB
A register that has room for a man's prayer, a potter's trade and a tribe's decline is not keeping a pedigree of the great.
This chapter gathers what the last one did not absorb: fragments of Judah's clans, then Simeon, whose territory lay inside Judah's.
Two verses in the middle of it are unlike anything around them. Jabez was named for pain, because his mother bore him with sorrow 1 Chronicles 4:9. Then he prays, and the prayer is quoted in full 1 Chronicles 4:10.
Its shape is worth following. He asks for blessing, then for an enlarged border, then for God's hand with him, then to be kept from evil — and the last clause turns the whole request around. He asks it that I may not cause pain, using the word his own name was built from. A man given a name that means hurt asks not to become the thing he was called. The request granted is the request as he made it, and the register moves straight back to the names.
The rest of the chapter keeps entering things a pedigree would not. There are craftsmen, and a valley named for them 1 Chronicles 4:14. There are workers in fine linen 1 Chronicles 4:21. There are potters who lived there with the king for his work 1 Chronicles 4:23. There is a daughter of Pharaoh married into the tribe 1 Chronicles 4:18. Trades and outsiders are entered on the same page as princes, in the same formulas.
Simeon's section then records something registers usually suppress. His brothers didn't have many children, and the family didn't multiply like the children of Judah 1 Chronicles 4:27. A tribe is recorded as shrinking, in a document whose purpose is to establish standing.
What Simeon does about it closes the chapter. Herdsmen push east and find pasture wide, and quiet, and peaceful 1 Chronicles 4:40, and take it in the days of Hezekiah. Five hundred men go to Mount Seir and strike the remnant of the Amalekites who escaped 1 Chronicles 4:43. An unfinished task from Saul's reign is completed centuries later by a diminished tribe, and the note to this day means it held.
So the list is not a roll of the great. It has room for a prayer, a kiln, a foreign wife and a losing count.
settled What this mark means