Week 19 1 Chronicles 9
My bible reader’s Prime Directive is: read the bible. On the secondary-directive level I’d include: try to understand what you’re reading.
So anyway yesterday I lumped 1 Chronicles 1-9 together as one big list-of-names. But today I see something I missed in chapter nine: the people of Judah were exiled to Babylon…The first to return to their property in their former towns were common people.
Hmmm… I missed the time difference. I check a couple of other bible versions and they give me the same impression – that chapters 1-8 is a long list of family names from the older-past (before the exile to Babylon). But chapter 9 is a different list that jumps forward to the newer-past (after the exile was over).
[I’ve read Chronicles before and I figure I know what I’ll find but I still page through the next 56-chapters…quickly…only looking at title headings…double-checking. Sure enough I’m seeing things I expected…stories about David Solomon Rehoboam Abijah Asa…like that. All the kings of Judah. I look at chapter nine again. I see it’s people from long after the kings of Judah…names with marginal cross-references to Ezra & Nehemiah – both of them after-the-exile guys.]
I come away with two things…
A) it looks like the Chronicles were written after the exile was over (I don’t care too much about exact dates…but I like being in the right century)
B) if I could flip-flop chapters I’d make 1 Chronicles 9 2 Chronicles 37.
Note: quote from 1 Chronicles 9:1-2 (NLT)