A Monument and a Name: The Primary Purpose of Chronicles’ Genealogies

1. The Purposes of 1 Chronicles 1–9

The genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 are so extensive—they amount to about seventeen percent of Chronicles, in fact—that it is unlikely the Chronicler intended them to do just one thing, to have only one purpose, and scholarly investigations of the work have identified quite a number of things that the genealogies do. Some see them as emphasizing the significance of the Davidides, whose long genealogy in 1 Chronicles 3 stands at the center of Judah's genealogical material. ¹ Some see them as having other purposes as well, arguing that the placement of the Levitical genealogies of 5.27–6.66 [ET 6.1-81] at the center of the pre-exilic Israelite genealogical material of 1 Chronicles 2–8 points to the centrality of the Levites in the Chronicler's thought, ² that the genealogies underline the importance of Judah and Benjamin within Israel, ³ and/or provide a portrait of Israel, ⁴ one that includes the North as well as Judah. ⁵ Some scholars also find geographical rationales for the chapters, arguing they point to the centrality of Jerusalem, ⁶ portray Israel as the center of the world, ⁷ and/or display an interest in the extent of the land that should belong to Israel. ⁸ Some even see the genealogies as emphasizing the main themes of the narrative of 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36. ⁹

Yet the Chronicler did not need a whole series of genealogies to accomplish any of these goals. It certainly is true that these chapters evince interest in some issues related to geography, but many long lists of personal names are not necessary to demonstrate Jerusalem's importance or to provide an ideal picture of the land of Israel, ¹⁰ nor, for that matter, to serve any of the other purposes we have just mentioned, especially as those are all clear enough in the narrative that begins in 1 Chronicles 10. 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36 as a whole revolves around the actions of the Davidides and is structured by their reigns, and so the importance of the Davidides is much clearer in the narratives than in the genealogies. The narrative also emphasizes the importance of the people, including Judah and Benjamin, as we shall briefly discuss below. The narrative provides a portrait of Israel, one in which it is clear that the North is as much a part of Israel as Judah is, from the narrative's beginning (as in 1 Chron. 12, where each tribe is mentioned by name as sending troops to David and supporting his right to the throne) to its end (as in 2 Chron. 30.1-9, where Hezekiah insists the North should also worship in Jerusalem). The narrative is clear as to the importance of the Levites as well, making them the centerpiece of David's preparations for the temple cult in 1 Chronicles 23–26 and providing them in these and other chapters with central duties in the cult (e.g. 1 Chron. 15.11–16.42; 2 Chron. 29.34; 30.16; 35.10-11) and in civic administration (2 Chron. 17.7-9; 19.8-11). Strong cases have been made that the genealogies truly are structured to emphasize the importance of the Davidides and the Lévites, and to provide a portrait of Israel that includes the North, but the fact of the matter is the genealogies in and of themselves are not necessary to make these points since the narrative does so perfectly well on its own; the narrative does so, in fact, in a much more straightforward fashion than the genealogies can. It would seem the Chronicler had some other purpose for the genealogies in mind, a purpose that could not be accomplished without them and, in constructing the genealogies to fulfill this primary purpose, structured them also to serve the secondary ones we have just discussed. Of all of the purposes scholars have identified for the genealogies, the only one that would actually seem to demand the presence of long lists of pre-exilic ancestors is the establishment of pedigree for members of the Chronicler's audience, but as we shall see below these chapters really do very little to provide pedigree for fourth-century Judeans. So what do the genealogies do that the narrative cannot? What, in short, is the primary purpose of the genealogies?

As many commentators have argued, the Chronicler's narrative of the monarchic past in 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36 implies a change for its fourth-century readers’ future; specifically, it appears that the Chronicler works to prepare readers for Davidic rule of Judah, ¹¹ even if the Chronicler might foresee the Davidides functioning, like the Phoenician kings, as clients within a Persian or early Hellenistic empire. ¹² Some argue that the Chronicler hoped for a future theocratic rule of temple personnel or was justifying their current leadership, ¹³ although this is far less likely. ¹⁴ Whatever the case, the primary purpose of these long lists of ancestral names is to assuage doubts readers might have about the polity and leadership the work promotes, whether this is the Davidides’ return to power—the most likely scenario—or theocratic rule. To understand this, however, we need to understand the significance fourth-century Judeans would have attributed to these many lists of names of pre-exilic dead. As we shall see in the next section, in most cases the dead in Judah quickly lost their individual identity as their names were forgotten and they were absorbed into an anonymous group of ancestors. This was not the case, however, for the ancestors of the elite, those at the very top of the socio-economic ladder, who were able to maintain their individuality and names long after death, thereby separating them from the amorphous mass of the nameless dead. Having the financial and/or cultural resources to do this, indeed, is one of the things that made them elite. By providing such long lists of names of Israel and Judah's pre-exilic dead before the narrative of the pre-exilic period begins in 1 Chronicles 10, the Chronicler makes the people of Israel and Judah elite. In 1 Chronicles 1–9, the people's dead are no less important than the Davidic ancestors (or, for that matter, those of the temple personnel). By creating a textual monument that names far more ancestors of the people than of the kings, the work predisposes readers to see Israel/Judah as just as important as royalty, and thereby assures them even before they reach the beginning of the historical narrative of their own importance; 1 Chronicles 1–9 implies, then, that there will be a notable rise in status for the people upon a restoration of the Davidides in the post-exilic context. The only way to create a monument to the people's ancestors in a text, however, is to name them, and this is what makes the genealogies indispensable. This is what they do that the narrative cannot; it is the genealogies’ primary purpose, even though the Chronicler has also constructed them to fulfill the secondary purposes scholars have already identified.

If readers believe that, in the pre-exilic past, the people were just as important as the kings, they might well be more inclined to be open to the prospect of a Davidic restoration, one based on the political arrangements of that pre-exilic past (as the Chronicler presents it), and less likely to fear that this restored pre-exilic polity would oppress them rather than treat them as equals or near-equals. (The point stands as well if one believes the Chronicler is writing in support of a future or already-existing theocratic rule. In these cases, the Chronicler can be seen to use the genealogies to persuade readers that their dead are no less important than those of the temple personnel, and thus that they are as important as their present or future leadership.) One could certainly argue that the narrative maintains the importance of the people even without the presence of the genealogies in 1 Chronicles 1–9; the people are, for example, involved in making various Davidides king (1 Chron. 11.1-3; 29.20-22; 2 Chron. 10.1; 22.1; 26.1; 33.25; 36.1) and in important cultic actions undertaken by kings. David receives the people's agreement before he separates the ark from the tabernacle (1 Chron. 13.1-4) and they act with him in the movement of the ark to Jerusalem (15.28), while ‘all the assembly’ accompanies Solomon to the tabernacle (2 Chron. 1.3) and is present at the temple's inauguration (5.2-6). Yet because the narrative overwhelms readers with actions driven by royal decisions, the people frequently slip into the background; by prefacing the history with the genealogies that amount to about a sixth of the work's length, the Chronicler first overwhelms readers with a complementary picture of pre-exilic Israel and Judah in which the people's ancestors are as important as and more prominent than the royal dead.

To understand why the Chronicler would use long genealogies to convince readers of the high status of the people under a monarchy, we need to consider how fourth-century Judean readers would react to this great textual monument to the ancestral dead that opens the work. But before we turn to a consideration of Judean attitudes toward the naming of the dead, we need to consider the scholarly proposal that the author uses 1 Chronicles 1–9 to establish pedigree for fourth-century readers, or at the very least for fourth-century Davidides, ¹⁵ the one previously proposed use of genealogies that would actually appear to demand the presence of long lists of names. Once we understand what pedigrees actually are, however, it is not clear that 1 Chronicles 1–9 does much to provide them. Raymond Geuss writes that a pedigree legitimates or valorizes a person, institution, or thing, and it depends on an origin that is of positive valuation, followed by steps in an unbroken line that preserve or enhance the value. ¹⁶ For philosophers, says Geuss, a genealogy is often thought of as being quite different than this, and for Nietzsche, he argues, genealogies do not legitimate anyone or anything, nor do the steps between origin and end enhance the thing or person's value, and genealogies tend to make the case that there is no single origin of the people or thing in question. ¹⁷ We could conclude with Geuss that genealogies and pedigrees are two different things, or we can simply say that pedigree is a subset of genealogy—that is, all pedigrees are genealogies but not all genealogies are pedigrees—but at any rate it is important to recognize that a genealogy does not always function to provide pedigree, a fact that is obvious enough in the Chronicler's genealogies of Israel.

For one thing, a genealogy must have an unbroken line of succession, or else there is no clear connection between its origin and those who stand at the end, and thus no proof that the value of origin has passed to those at the end of the genealogy, yet there are many cases in 1 Chronicles 1–9 where the Chronicler has failed to connect parts of tribal genealogies to the material that precedes it. If we were to assume that belonging to Israel depends on guaranteeing unbroken descent from one of Israel's sons, then there are many cases in the genealogies where the Chronicler fails to provide this guarantee for Judah and Benjamin, the tribes that composed the post-exilic community. And, in fact, while Manasseh and Ephraim receive genealogies in 1 Chron. 5.23-26 and 7.14-29, the Chronicler never actually demonstrates that either one of these figures is descended from Israel, the founding ancestor of the people. Readers would assumedly know of the old tribal traditions, but the Chronicler presents no unbroken succession between Israel and these two tribal ancestors, and so does not demonstrate pedigree for their descendants. And in regard to Judah, 1 Chron. 2.47, for example, refers to the descendants of Jahdai, but there is no mention of Jahdai's parentage. The context of 1.42-50a suggests that Jahdai might be understood as a son of Caleb, but the Chronicler does not demonstrate an unbroken line of succession from Judah through Caleb to Jahdai. Nor does the Chronicler provide evidence that any of the figures named between 4.8 and 4.20 are actually descended from Judah. There is no unbroken chain of Judeans between them and the tribal ancestor, and so it is not clear that they are actually descended from Judah and Israel. The genealogy, that is, does not provide valuation for them as descendants of Israel and so cannot be said here to be a pedigree or to provide these figures and their descendants with pedigree. Benjamin was also part of post-exilic Judah, and its genealogy of 1 Chronicles 8 ¹⁸ is full of sections where individuals, and so also their descendants, are not connected to the tribal ancestor; this is the case for Ehud and his descendants in 8.6-7 and Shaharaim and his descendants in 8.8-28. Even the long genealogy of 8.29-40, which includes Saul, begins with ‘the father of Gibeon' ¹⁹ for whom the Chronicler provides no information that would link him to Benjamin or to any other preceding figure in the genealogy. As it turns out, Benjamin's genealogy of 1 Chronicles 8 provides evidence of Israelite origin—pedigree, in other words—for only a small minority of the names in the chapter.

Moreover, none of the genealogies except for that of the Davidides extends past the beginning of the exile, so Chronicles provides no pedigree for any non-Davidide of the fourth century. Steven Schweitzer suggests that the Chronicler provides the genealogies as a way for disenfranchised groups in post-exilic Judah to claim descent from the national and tribal ancestors and so to claim a position within Israel, ²⁰ and while it is certainly not impossible that some fourth-century Judeans did look to names in this material and claim some of these figures as ancestors, we lack evidence to verify this hypothesis. Had the Chronicler hoped readers might do this, we would expect to see extensive overlap between names in the Judean and Benjaminite genealogies and the names of the ancestral houses—the basis of the social organization of post-exilic Judah, ²¹ in which each house was named after an ancestor—that appear in the many lists of Ezra–Nehemiah, but this is not the case. ²² Moreover, any fourth-century individuals who wanted to use this material to claim Judean ancestry would have had to construct genealogies to link themselves to those pre-exilic names in order to create pedigrees. The Chronicler him or herself, however, does not create such links and so cannot be said to be providing pedigrees, at least for non-Davidides. This is a much different situation than that in Athens mocked by Plato when he writes of those who trace their descent for twenty-five unbroken generations from themselves to Heracles (Theaet. 175a-b), or that of the pedigrees constructed for the Spartan kings Leonidas and Leutychides that Herodotus recites, each directly linking the king to Heracles through a course of twenty continuous generations of descent (7.204; 8.131). ²³ The only situation in Chronicles that seems anything like this Greek tradition of pedigree is that provided for the Davidides, for 1 Chronicles 3 does trace an unbroken line from David to his descendants in the fourth century, and so could be understood as providing pedigree for the Davidides of the Chronicler's time. The same cannot be said, however, of the genealogy of the head of the Aaronide ancestral house in 5.27-41 [ET 6.1-15], ²⁴ for it ends at the beginning of the exile and so provides no evidence for any fourth-century figure hoping to use it as validation for his role in the office. Such a figure might claim descent from Jehozadak, the final Aaronide of this list, but the point is that the list itself does not provide proof for such a claim. This is the problem posed by claims that these genealogies functioned as pedigrees: pedigrees only work if they can link one directly to the original source of value, just as the Greek genealogies did. The very fact that the Chronicler includes genealogical sections that do not link figures to Israel at all suggests pedigree is not his or her interest in this section, and the choice to end all non-Davidic genealogies before the exile points to the same conclusion. And if pedigree is not the Chronicler's interest in these chapters then we will have to search for another rationale for the inclusion of such long lists of pre-exilic Israelites. These extensive lists of names point to a positive valuation of Judah/Israel's ancestors in general and of their individual names, but to understand why this is important we will need to understand the importance of naming the ancestral dead in fourth century Judah.

As I have already suggested, the point of providing so many individual ancestral names is to positively dispose readers to the pro-monarchic narrative they will encounter, to persuade them that, in the pre-exilic monarchic era, their ancestors were just as important as the kings were, and thus to convince them that they would have nothing to fear from a Davidic restoration that reestablished something like the pre-exilic polity as Chronicles describes it. To understand this, however, we need to understand the importance of naming the dead in ancient Judah. Most discussions of the ancestral dead in ancient Israel and Judah are part of a debate concerning whether or not ancestral worship was practiced there, but this is not a question that we need to resolve. Our focus instead is on the differences between the treatment of the elite and non-elite dead in Judah, particularly in terms of how the individuality and names of the elite ancestors were maintained. In the genealogies, the Chronicler provides long lists of names of the dead of the elite and non-elite alike, and this would have sent an important message to readers.

In the ancient Near East it appears as if the preservation of one's name after death was considered to be important, but few could really hope that their names would be remembered for very long. Even in Mesopotamia, where regular festivals were held to recall the individual names of the family's dead (šumam zakāru), and where the head of the household was the zākir šumim, ‘recaller/invoker of the name’, in the ancestral cult as he literally named the dead, ²⁵ the names of individual ancestors that were recalled sometimes included only one generation of the dead, generally no more than three, and never more than five. ²⁶ Because there were only so many ancestral names that could be remembered—those ancestors who still belonged to ‘the living dead’, as Gerdien Jonker puts it ²⁷ —all the other ancestors whose names were no longer recalled belonged to a collective, non-individualized body, the e⃛em kimti, ‘ghost of the family’, invoked simply as ‘family, kin, and relatives’; ²⁸ true death in Mesopotamia occurred when one's name was forgotten. ²⁹ But the Mesopotamian elite had the resources to produce statues and stelae to ensure that their names were remembered much longer than three generations. ³⁰ Ancient Mesopotamians, like ancient Judeans, believed that the dead could speak about the future when contacted, ³¹ but while ghosts were thought to normally make no sound at all, ³² the kings could speak forever in their inscriptions, narrated in the first person, of their great deeds during life. Rituals in Mesopotamia and Ugarit involved the naming of dead kings, as texts like the Genealogy of the Hammurapi Dynasty and KTU 1.161 attest, ³³ thereby ensuring royal names were never forgotten. Elite status and financial resources mattered in preserving one's name after death, and prominent figures at Ugarit and elsewhere in Syria-Palestine utilized these advantages, constructing monumental tombs visible to the living long after their deaths, tombs that also functioned as funerary chapels where the names of the dead could be commemorated for many generations. ³⁴

This distinction between elite and non-elite in regard to the preservation of one's name after death existed in Judah as well. One of the best ways to demonstrate this is through the physical evidence of burial. Burial was clearly important in Judah; non-burial (e.g., Deut. 28.26; Isa. 66.24; Jer. 9.22; 16.1-4; 25.33), disinterment (Isa. 14.18-20; 34.2-3; Jer. 8.1-2), and even a failure to be buried in one's ancestral tomb (1 Kgs 13.22; 2 Chron. 21.20; 24.25; 28.27) are portrayed as punishments. ³⁵ As far as archaeological evidence makes us aware, from the eighth century until the late Second Temple period burial in the Judean highlands was accomplished almost solely through bench tombs. ³⁶ These were dug to create benches on which the recently deceased were laid with their grave goods. After the flesh decayed, something that would take about a year for burials around Jerusalem, ³⁷ a secondary burial would take place in which the bones of the dead and his or her grave goods would be moved to a repository of bones with those of older ancestors in the same tomb, or collected with other ancestral bones in the rear of the tomb. At this point it becomes impossible to distinguish between the remains of individual ancestors without modern scientific tools. Tombs in use for fifty to one hundred years held the bones of between about fifteen and one hundred individuals from the same family, while some, in use for as long as three centuries, contained the remains of as many as four hundred. ³⁸ The bench tombs were located in cemeteries generally close to but always outside of settlements; ³⁹ this separation between the living and the dead was strictly maintained and, as Jerusalem expanded, already existing tombs that then fell inside the new boundaries of the city were relocated outside of them. ⁴⁰

So in the Chronicler's time, just as had been the case for many centuries previously, once the flesh decomposed, the bones of the dead were indiscriminately mixed with those of other ancestors in the same tomb. We see a cultural shift in this regard only by the Herodian period, when the use of ossuaries, in which secondary burial was accomplished by the placement of the bones of individuals in containers dedicated to their remains alone, became common. By that time, ossuaries were distinguished by individualized decoration and, in some cases, inscriptions with the names of the deceased. ⁴¹ This financial or cultural ability to maintain the name or at least the individuality of the ancestor in perpetuity, however, was almost entirely absent earlier in the Second Temple period. While some have argued that texts such as 1 Sam. 1.21; 2.19; and 20.6 point to the existence of annual festivals for the dead in ancient Israel and Judah like those in Mesopotamia, such passages never refer to the dead, and so the conclusion remains speculative. ⁴² This, however, does not mean that ancient Israelites and Judeans did not want their names preserved after death. In one well-known biblical example, Absalom erects a pillar or stela (‭תבצמ‬) because, he says, ‘I have no son to recall/invoke my name (‭ימשׁ ךיכזה‬)’ (2 Sam. 18.18). We find the Hebrew version of the Akkadian šumam zakāru here, and learn that it was expected that a head of a household in ancient Israel, as in Mesopotamia, would invoke the name of his dead father; ⁴³ it tells us, moreover, that someone with means could construct a physical monument to accomplish the same goal of preserving his or her name after death. Genesis 35.20 says that Jacob erected a ‭תבצמ‬ for Rachel, and in Isa. 56.4-5 God says that God will provide ‘a monument (‭די‬) and a name, better than sons and daughters’ for the righteous eunuchs, again showing us that monuments were understood to preserve the name of the dead just as descendants would. ⁴⁴ And monuments could, of course, preserve the name of an ancestor for a much longer period of time than one's descendants were able to. 2 Samuel 18.18 says that Absalom's stela ‘is still called Absalom's Monument (‭די‬) to this day’, just as Gen. 35.20 says that the stela Jacob erected over Rachel's grave is called ‘the Stela of the Grave of Rachel to this day’. Erecting a stela or some sort of memorial to preserve an ancestor's name seems to have been common enough in the Levant, at least among the elite. ⁴⁵

These biblical references suggest that a lengthy preservation of one's name after death was considered as much a cultural good in ancient Israel and Judah as it was elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and the existence of a limited number of costly Iron Age tombs around Jerusalem and Gibeon have been discovered that make the same argument. These graves contained burials of only a few individuals and no repositories of bones of other ancestors, and some even had stone coffins forever guarding the individual remains of the deceased. ⁴⁶ The most extensive known pre-exilic set of such burials is the Silwan necropolis to the east of the City of David. None of these tombs was constructed with pits or niches for the bones of multiple ancestors, ⁴⁷ and in some of them the dead were buried in stone sarcophagi or wooden coffins. ⁴⁸ The tombs, built high into the slope of the City of David, were visible from far away and from the temple. ⁴⁹ Four or five of the fifty to sixty tombs in this cemetery were monolithic above-ground structures, ⁵⁰ meaning they functioned as monuments as well as graves. One of these had an inscription that specifically states that only two individuals were buried there, apparently a married couple, and the man, whose name appears in the inscription, is described as being ‭תיבה לע‬ ‘over the house’, a royal steward, in other words. ⁵¹ One cannot help thinking here, as the excavator did, of the tomb of Shebna mentioned in Isa. 22.15-19: Shebna too is said to be ‭תיבה לע‬; like the tombs at Silwan, Shebna's tomb is ‭םורמ‬ ‘elevated, on high’; like the tombs at Silwan, Shebna's does not have space for the burial of other ancestors or family members, ⁵² and so his individuality in death is maintained forever.

Certainly tombs like those of our royal stewards are extremely uncommon in the Judean highlands, so one imagines that even most of the elite could not afford a tomb used for only one or two interments. That the wealthy were willing to spend their resources to maintain their individuality after death suggests that this in and of itself was desirable, but it was very unlikely to have been an affordable option for most of the population. That the graves of the elite were constructed to be visible from afar, and that the wealthiest constructed monuments suggests that this visibility was also desirable. The hope was likely that one's name would be remembered by many in perpetuity because the prominent grave or additional monument that marked out the burial of only one person would bring that individual's name to mind to be passed down from generation to generation, the function served by Absalom's stela even at the time the Deuteronomistic History (or at least the Succession Narrative) was composed. And it seems that the graves of those at the very top of the socio-economic ladder, the kings, were inside of Jerusalem itself; their prominent placement was apparently considered to be so important that they could violate the taboo against tombs within settlements. David was buried inside Jerusalem (1 Kgs 2.10) as were Solomon (11.43) and the other Davidides until the time of Ahaz. ⁵³ Burial of royalty was obviously important, and even when Jehu assassinates Jezebel, one of Kings's arch-villains, he commands she be buried ‘because she is the daughter of a king’ (2 Kgs 9.34). ⁵⁴ Ezekiel 43.7-9 appears to suggest that ‭םהיכלמ ירגפ‬ ‘the corpses of their kings’, were buried right beside the entrance to the temple, a site of obvious visibility and prominence. ⁵⁵ And while Tannaitic literature clearly states that graves must not be placed within settlements (m. B. Bat. 2.9), assumedly because burials convey impurity (e.g., m. ‘Ohal. 2.3; 17.5; 18.3; Ṭehar. 4.5), at least one rabbinic tradition held that David's tomb was still inside Jerusalem (t. B. Bat. 1.11). ⁵⁶ Certainly in the fourth century BCE the Chronicler exhibits no discomfort in claiming the Davidides were buried inside the city. ⁵⁷

We simply do not know how long it took for most of the ancient Judean dead to lose their individuality as their non-elite descendants forgot their names, but the physical evidence from the bench tombs suggests that preserving the individuality of the ancestors was not something Judeans generally had the resources to do for very long. As soon as a bench was needed to accommodate a new body, the bones of the ancestor occupying that space were jumbled together with those of other dead relatives, and the individuality of the dead was lost, at least in that physical sense. It is possible that the distinction between elite and non-elite burial was as much cultural as it was financial; perhaps only kings were allowed to be buried inside Jerusalem and perhaps, before the late Second Temple period, only the very upper strata of society, such as high-ranking members of the royal court, were permitted to distinguish themselves in death with monumental tombs the way royal stewards like Shebna did. But whether because of financial ability or cultural norms, the vast majority of Judeans were simply not able to create physical memorials to maintain the individuality and names of their ancestors. It seems that the graves and monuments that only the very elite could afford, or that Judean culture permitted only for them, were meant to cause people to recall their names long after they were dead, and a prominent grave in which only one or two deceased were buried would be far more likely to fulfill this function than one in which scores of dead were interred. On the other hand, the names of the non-elite ancestors, with no monument to bring their memory to mind, would be forgotten within a few generations. Yet even monuments are destroyed and their purpose and names can fade from memory; if Absalom's stela caused people to remember his name ‘to this day’ at the time when his story was recorded in Samuel, he is remembered now because of the text, not the monument. Texts have the ability to preserve names much longer than even prominent physical monuments, but in ancient Judah only the most important names, like those of the kings, would have been so preserved. And this is the primary purpose of the genealogies the Chronicler assembled in the opening chapters: it treats Israel and Judah's pre-exilic ancestors like kings.

Despite all of the purposes scholars have, mainly correctly, understood the genealogies in 1 Chronicles 1–9 to accomplish, none of them demands the presence of the many extensive lists of pre-exilic dead we find there. Yet one imagines that the primary significance of these many, many names would not escape a fourth-century Judean reader. An author would have no reason to provide such a quantity of lists of their ancestors were the pre-exilic Judeans and Israelites not as important as the ancestors of the kings and the heads of the priestly and Levitical houses. The readers of Chronicles may have forgotten the identities of all but their most recent ancestors, but the Chronicler has not forgotten even those of long ago. and has created a monument for their names that is just as impressive as that created for the kings in 1 Chronicles 3 and temple personnel in 1 Chronicles 5–6. As far as readers can judge from these chapters, in pre-exilic Israel and Judah the people were just as elite, just as important, as the kings were. It is true that the Davidic genealogy extends beyond the exile where the narrative of 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36 ends, and this speaks to the Chronicler's pro-Davidic proclivities, but in 1 Chronicles 9 readers encounter the names of some of their own post-exilic ancestors as well. Moreover, because 1 Chronicles 3 never refers to the Davidides as kings, they are first and foremost Judeans, just as the readers’ Judean ancestors in 1 Chronicles 2 and 4 are. That their own dead are remembered by name and distinguished from the anonymous mass of the ancestors to a much broader extent than those of the Davidides signals to readers the elite status of pre-exilic Judah and Israel. 1 Chronicles 2–4 tells Judean readers that there was no real difference between kings and non-royalty in the pre-exilic period. The names of the ancestors of ordinary Judeans are recalled and preserved here just like the names of the royal ancestors, and so the Chronicler tells readers that in that pre-exilic period the people were thought of as if they were of the highest socio-economic class. The Chronicler can then move to prosecute a pro-Davidic agenda in the narrative with the hope that readers enter it with the belief that a monarchic restoration would lead to a rise in their own status and with the belief that, as the post-exilic polity becomes like the pre-exilic one, the people would return to the elite status the genealogies imply they had when the Davidides were in power.

In fact, while the word ‘king’ is absent from the Davidides’ genealogy in 1 Chronicles 3 and the noun ‘priest’ is missing from the Aaronide genealogy of 5.27-41 [ET 6.1-15], the title of ‘head’, the leadership office of the ancestral house, ⁵⁸ the basic social organization of post-exilic Judah, is frequently invoked in the genealogies of Israel. ⁵⁹ If there is one kind of leadership in Israel/Judah that particularly seems to matter in 1 Chronicles 1–9 it is that associated with the ancestral houses themselves; the word ‘king’ appears only twice in these chapters in reference to Davidides (4.41; 5.17), and then only within the context of naming individual kings to provide chronological references in stories about the activities of the people. The Chronicler suggests here that the pre-exilic office that mattered is the same one the fourth-century community used to govern itself, and thus also suggests to readers that their local leadership will continue to occupy an important position under a restored monarchy.

This reading of the genealogies has not yet said anything about 1 Chronicles 1, a chapter that does not include any Israelite names, but still has a role to play in the primary purpose of the genealogies that we have identified. 1 Chronicles 1 is notable, of course, for listing the ancestors of the nations, and while not all fourth-century Judeans might have been clear as to where the descendants of Gomer (1.5) or Sheleph (1.20) or Massa (1.30) lived, we might expect that names such as Egypt (1.8, 10), Sidon (1.13), and Assyria (1.17) would have been widely recognized by readers. In the context of 1 Chronicles 1, these are the names of individuals, ancestors of the great peoples descended from them, but in the context of 1 Chronicles 1–9 as a whole the name of one pre-exilic Judean or Israelite ancestor is given the same weight and importance as that of an ancestor of a whole empire. There is nothing about 1 Chronicles 1–9 that demands that readers conclude that even Adam or Abraham is more important than a single pre-exilic ancestor of Judah. 1 Chronicles 1 links Judah to the peoples, but 1 Chronicles 1–9 tells readers that they are far more important than all of the nations of the earth put together. A people as important as this would consider themselves to be at the same level as royalty, precisely the status the genealogies imply pre-exilic Judah and Israel had.

We can, as others have observed, argue that the Chronicler has structured these chapters to do things such as emphasize the importance of the Davidides and temple personnel and so on, but the Chronicler did not need genealogies to provide such emphasis. The genealogies are necessary, however, if the Chronicler wished to create a monument to the pre-exilic dead of Judah and Israel that put the pre-exilic population on the same elite level as the kings and temple personnel. Even though the narrative that begins in 1 Chronicles 10 refers to the people's pre-exilic importance in regard to political and religious matters from time to time, with the names of the genealogies that occupy the opening sixth of the work the author literally builds a monument to that importance, and this is the genealogies’ primary purpose.