Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Northern Tribes
1 Chronicles 7:1-40
1 Of the sons of Issachar: Tola, Puah, Jashub, and Shimron, four. · WEB
Six tribes are compressed into one chapter and counted as fighting strength, and two of the twelve are barely there at all.
Judah took two chapters and Levi took one. Six tribes share this chapter, and the imbalance is the first thing to notice.
It goes further than compression. Zebulun is not listed. Dan appears, if at all, in a single obscure clause among Benjamin's names 1 Chronicles 7:12. Two of the twelve sons of Israel have effectively no register here, and the writer offers no explanation for the gap.
What these tribes are given instead is a muster. The recurring phrase is mighty men of valor, and the recurring detail is a total: Issachar eighty-seven thousand 1 Chronicles 7:5, Benjamin's three houses counted separately, Asher twenty-six thousand listed by genealogy for service in war 1 Chronicles 7:40. The northern tribes are entered as manpower. Their lineages are thin and their numbers are exact.
Then the chapter breaks open for four verses. Ephraim's sons go down to raid cattle and are killed by the men of Gath, and their father mourned many days, and his brothers came to comfort him 1 Chronicles 7:21–22. He fathers another son afterward and names him for the disaster, because there was trouble with his house 1 Chronicles 7:23.
A grief is written into a list of names, and it is a small and unheroic one — a cattle raid that went wrong. The register does not draw a lesson from it. It simply refuses to leave it out.
One more entry in that section is unusual. Sheerah, a daughter, built Beth Horon the lower and the upper, and a third town named after her 1 Chronicles 7:24. Three towns are credited to a woman, in a document that ordinarily records only fathers and sons.
Ephraim's line then runs down through Elishama to Nun, and to Joshua 1 Chronicles 7:27. The man who led Israel into the land is the last name in his family's entry, given without a word of comment.
So the northern tribes get soldiers, a bereavement, a builder, and a conqueror, in ninety lines. What they do not get is the space the writer gives the two tribes that came back.
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