The book of I Chronicles begins with lengthy genealogies with lots of unfamiliar names. It is not the most exciting reading, making it tempting to skip past them. Yet they are part of the Bible, and richer in content than people usually give them credit for. The Chronicler – we have no other name for the author of these two books – seems to have written after the Exile was over, wanting to recount the history of Israel from the perspective of someone who knows that God brought the people back home after their difficult time in Babylon. Even though it was written later than the text of I and II Samuel and I and II Kings, we will interweave the Chronicler’s work with the other historical books, to show how two different writers cover the same sequence of events.

Here at the beginning the Chronicler quickly lists descendants for characters whose stories took place much earlier in the Bible’s narrative. All he says about Noah is simply that he was the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth (I Chronicles 1:4). After all the details Genesis gave us about Abraham, the Chronicler simply tells us that he was the father of Isaac and Ishmael (1:28), and also the father of Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah (1:32).

The Chronicler does take a moment to make a pun on the name of Achan, who died for appropriating some of the plunder in the Valley of Achor (Joshua 7:1-26). Achor means ‘trouble,’ and the Chronicler lists Achan’s name as Achar, which means ‘troubler,’ noting that he was “the troubler of Israel” (I Chronicles 2:7).

Many of the people listed are wonderfully obscure: Shobal, Segub, Ozem, Mizzah. (Why does no one today name their children after these Bible characters?) Yet the Chronicler has included them, out of a sense that these distant cousins are part of the family after all, and should not be forgotten.

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We seem to have a narrower view of family connections, Lord – parents and children, probably grandparents, and occasionally great-grandparents and some cousins – where the Bible shows whole nations as our relatives. Teach us that perspective, we pray, so that we may believe that those peoples whose names we cannot pronounce are claimed within the family, just like we are.

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