Week 19 1 Chronicles
Way more than half of 1 Chronicles is the story of David – chapters eleven to twenty-nine. About two-thirds of the book.
I remember back in March when I was reading the two books of Samuel. The writer spent a lot of time on David too. But a big difference between Samuel’s David and the chronicler’s David is that the Samuels tell the interesting stories: David & Goliath, David the Fugitive, Abigail, some of the David-the-king stories. The Samuels also tell some unsavoury stories: Bathsheba & Uriah, Tamar, Absalom’s revolt, the civil war, Sheba, the Gibeonites, the national census. The chronicler skips them.
A couple of days ago I decided to track the David story in Chronicles. I was wondering: if the chronicler overlooked all the good stories then what did he use in their place? I finished 1 Chronicles today and here’s what I’ve got. I calculate that there’s 521 verses in the chronicler’s David story. Out of those 521 I figure that 301 have to do with the topic of David & Israel’s religion – ark temple Levites religious music and like that. So 58% of the David story is about the king who loved & was devoted to & promoted faith in the Lord. [The next biggest topic is David and the armed forces & international conflict & military combat. I counted 148 verses there – about 28% of the story.]
So it looks like the chronicler wants to convey one main thing to his readers – that David is the Faithful-Believer-King.
Note: the numbers are approximate – don’t bet the farm on them.