Part of the difficulty of figuring out the chronology of the Bible comes from the ambiguity of the word “son” – a term that ordinarily means a baby boy born in someone’s household. Yet sometimes in the plural it refers to someone’s children, male or female: most translations render it “the children of Amram: Aaron, Moses, and Miriam” (I Chronicles 6:3) but it is the same term that is used in “The sons of Levi” (6:1). And this same word is also used at times to refer to someone’s distant descendant.

Consider the listing of the genealogy of Heman the singer (6:33): some twenty-three generations are listed from Israel (Jacob) through Heman, in what seems to be a direct father-to-son lineage. If we more-or-less-randomly choose Amasai off the list (6:35) – it might be confusing to pick Elkanah, since there are three of them listed in the genealogy! – we could note that there are nine generations between Amasai and Kohath: we might then assess that Kohath was Amasai’s great-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 would be considered not only the son of Elkanah, but (along with those from many other generations) he would be considered 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), even though in both cases there were many many intervening generations. 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, like Amasai the son of Kohath.

Our chief interest in this is usually academic, to try to figure back to when particular events happened; but for the people of Israel it expressed this recurring sense of deep familial connection. We will not understand books like Chronicles, nor the Old Testament as a whole, if we fail to appreciate this deep sense of generational 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.

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