1 Chronicles 1

Why would the anonymous historian who wrote 1-2 Chronicles begin with a Jewish family tree that starts with Adam? This takes the family back to long before Jewish times. Abraham is considered the father of the Jews. Many scholars guess that the writer pulled the history together from various sources sometime during the Persian era, after Persians conquered the Babylonian Empire. If so, Israel didn’t exist anymore. Babylon had exiled them to what is now Iraq in 586 BC. But Persians freed them and other political prisoners to go home. Many Jews did, but to only a plug of territory called Judah, which was a province of the Persian Empire. Judah had a governor instead of a king. Jews must have been wondering if they had lost the privilege God had given them to call themselves his Chosen People. Prophet Hosea said as much: “Israel isn’t my people anymore and I’m not their God,” Hosea 1:9 . But the history writer seems to use the family to suggest that God had a plan for the Jews from the very beginning, and that he wasn’t finished with them because they were still the Chosen People. That’s some of the speculation behind why 1 Chronicles starts with Adam.

Peleg in Hebrew refers to a ditch, such as an irrigation canal. It cuts a field in two. Palag in Hebrew means to divide or cut something open. The writer’s implication that Peleg’s name was a spinoff from the similar-sounding Hebrew word palag seems odd to some because the earliest written example of Hebrew dates to about the time of King David, 1000 BC. Peleg likely lived at least 1,000 years before David. Beyond the mystery why Peleg’s name means “something divided,” there’s this follow up question: In what way was the land divided? Some say the clue is in Genesis 10, where his name appears, followed in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel story. That’s the event that suddenly split the world into different language groups, dividing the people into what later became competing kingdoms and nations. Many scholars say this history was likely written in about the 500’s BC, after some Jews returned from exile to what used to be Israel but was now Judah, just another small Persian province.

Genesis 17:5.

A concubine was a woman who lived with a man in a legally binding relationship as a secondary wife, but who had less social status and fewer privileges than a wife.

Genesis 32:27-28.

“Seir” became another name for the country of Edom. The two names were sometimes used synonymously, like the various terms for the United States of America: USA, America, United States.