Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Chronicles · About this commentary
Those Who Lived in Jerusalem After the Exile
1 Chronicles 9:1-44
1 So all Israel were listed by genealogies; and behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel. Judah was carried away captive to Babylon for their disobedience. · WEB
Nine chapters of names end on the people who kept the doors and counted the vessels, and the restored community is defined by its worship.
One sentence closes the register and opens a gulf. All Israel was recorded in the royal annals — and Judah was carried away captive to Babylon for their disobedience 1 Chronicles 9:1.
The next verse is already on the other side of it. The first inhabitants who lived in their possessions in their cities 1 Chronicles 9:2 are the returned. Between one verse and the next lie the fall of the city and seventy years, and the writer supplies no transition at all. The genealogy simply resumes on the far side, which is its own quiet claim about what the captivity did and did not end.
What follows is a census of the resettled capital, and its proportions are striking. Laypeople of Judah and Benjamin are counted in a few lines. Then the priests, one thousand seven hundred sixty, described as very able men for the work of the service of God's house 1 Chronicles 9:13. Then Levites. Then gatekeepers, who receive sixteen verses.
That is more space than any king in the book gets outside the narrative. What they do is set out in detail: two hundred twelve men posted on all four sides 1 Chronicles 9:24, relatives coming in from the villages on a weekly rotation 1 Chronicles 9:25, the doors opened morning by morning 1 Chronicles 9:27, vessels brought in by count and taken out by count 1 Chronicles 9:28, the spices mixed, the flat cakes baked, the bread of the presence prepared every Sabbath 1 Chronicles 9:32.
And the office is old. These men were appointed in their office of trust by David and by Samuel 1 Chronicles 9:22, and their fathers had kept the entry in the wilderness camp, when Phinehas was over them 1 Chronicles 9:19–20. A gate in a modest rebuilt temple is connected by an unbroken chain of duty to the tent in the desert.
The singers are the last group, and they are excused from everything else for they were employed in their work day and night 1 Chronicles 9:33.
So nine chapters that began at Adam end with men who unlock doors and weigh out flour. The community that came back held no territory worth the name and had no king. What it had was a house and a rota, and the register treats those as sufficient to constitute a people.
The chapter then repeats Saul's genealogy almost word for word 1 Chronicles 9:35–44. The repetition is a hinge: the last name in the list of the returned is the first king, and the narrative begins with his death.
settled What this mark means