Week 18 I Chronicles
I finished through to chapter 10 in two days of hard reading. I didn’t recognize most of the names (fortunately I could identify the sons of Jacob).
Starting in chapter two, and for seven chapters there are a little over 300 verses of family names. Since there are twelve tribes you’d figure there’d be 26 verses of names for each clan, on average.
But I did a rough count and 26 wasn’t close:
Judah’s family counted about 102 verses
Simeon twenty verses
Reuben ten
Gad seven
Manasseh ten (two half-tribes)
Issachar five
Benjamin forty-seven (maybe)
Naphtali one
Ephraim ten
Asher eleven
Dan or Zebulun (I don’t even find them)
Levi eighty-one
So…Judah and Levi have about 180 of 300 verses – 60%.
Take away Benjamin and no one else gets more than 20 verses.
I wonder what’s driving the writer’s choice.
It’s hard to say if the discrepancy means anything.
Pretty clearly the Levi-family of priests and the royal family of Judah dominate the content numerically.
But do the numbers prove anything?
I’m not sure they do. But I’m not sure they don’t, either.
I think the Numbers Discrepancy Question is not a bad place to start, and from there see where the writer goes in the rest of the book. Will he highlight Judah and Levi in some other way that lets me test my question?
I guess I’ll see.
Note: the numbers above are unofficial, so don’t take them to the bank.