There doesn’t seem to be much meat on the bones in chapters 1-9. But bones can teach us, too.
As we turn to the first chapter of 1 Chronicles, we might suddenly feel like forensic scientists called to a crime scene. There lies the skeleton—a bare-bones look at the human race—Adam’s family from Seth to Abraham and on to David. What does it tell us? If the author is going to trace the story of Judah’s kings leading to the King of kings, he wants to begin with the widest possible context—all who came from Adam. The original readers must see themselves as the offspring of Abram to lay claim to the promises God made to him regarding a seed and a land, the land to which they were returning after 70 years in captivity. But they also must see their link all the way to Adam, for through him the fatal seed of sin entered every heart, requiring “a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8). Thus the genealogy follows Seth’s line, Abel’s replacement, and doesn’t include Cain or Abel since their lines were severed, one by death and the other by the judgment of God. The final verse of the first paragraph, “Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (1 Chron 1:4), shows the second major narrowing of the human family by the flood, the radical surgery necessary to salvage the race. Verses 5-27 then delineate the rise of the world’s nations, reversing the birth order of the three sons of Noah, leaving Shem to the last, from which Abram came. Some of the family of Japheth (vv 5-7), from which arose the Indo-Europeans, continue in the long war against God right to the last (see Rev 20:7-10), while the line of Ham provided the combatants of Israel throughout history—Mizraim, or Egypt (v 8), the Philistines (v 12), and the various Canaanites (vv 13-16). The stage was being set for the next fork in the road.