Part of the difficulty of figuring out the chronology of the Bible comes from the ambiguity of the word “son” – sometimes it means a person’s direct male child, and sometimes it means someone’s distant descendant.

Thus we can read of the “Sons of Levi: Gershom, Kohath, and Merari” (I Chronicles 6:1); these were Levi’s three immediate biological sons. But when it comes to the listing of “the sons of Kohath” we find a listing of some twenty generations. If we more-or-less-randomly choose Amasai, we could note that there are nine generations between him and Kohath: we might then assess that Kohath was Amasai’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (6:20-23). Clearly Kohath had been dead for many decades before Amasai was born: yet Amasai is listed not only as the son of Elkanah, but along with all the other generations he is listed as one of “the sons of Kohath.”

In similar fashion, Zacchaeus was called a “son of Abraham” (Luke 19:9), and Jesus himself was frequently identified as “son of David” (Luke 18:38, among many other examples). That means that when we see “A was the son of B” we need to be cautious; it may mean that A is the immediate male child of B, but it might well mean that there are many intervening generations.

Our chief interest in this is usually academic, to try to figure back across the generations to when some particular event happened. But for the people of Israel it expressed this recurring sense of deep familial connection. Amasai would not have thought of Kohath as a distant ancestor, scarcely even remembered any more; instead, he would have said, “He is my father.”

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Grant us the grace to recapture that sense of family, O Lord: to come to understand that the characters in the Bible are not just dim memories of ancient peoples, but are our fathers and mothers in the faith, whose words and deeds are carried in scripture – and can be carried in our hearts! – to instruct us.