The end of the genealogies! One of the main points of the genealogies in today’s reading is that temple worship was being restored after the Exile with great care for the choice of staff. God had designated the Levites as the only tribe to serve in the Tent of Meeting; there was no change of law when they moved worship from the Tent of Meeting to the Temple, so that practice continued until the entire nation was exiled from their land by the Babylonians (again, much later than David’s time). They understood when they returned from exile that re-establishing worship according to God’s design would require the service of the Levites. They were careful to ascertain that the Temple servants they employed were in fact qualified by their genealogy, as were those serving in the offices of priests and High Priest. This would have been very important to the recorders and first readers of these genealogies. It was because of their nation’s unfaithfulness that they had been punished with exile in the first place. Once removed from their land, they weren’t certain if they would ever be restored to it, if they would survive as a people, or if they would enjoy their special relationship with God again. When God gave them a second chance, they didn’t want to blow it by failing to observe all that God had commanded in the Law, just as their forefathers had been careful in Moses’s day.
The books of Chronicles relate the same history that the books of Samuel and Kings relate, but they are specific to the tribe of Judah. Some of the history is copied verbatim from Samuel and Kings, but some of the accounts are fleshed out. These books are some of the places in Scripture where people think they find contradictions in God’s word, but we must understand that Chronicles offers a closer view into the events. The effect is something like a close-up photo of a part of an object: the photo of the object as a whole and the photo of the part may not look like the same thing.
From the genealogies of the returning exiles, verse 9:35 zooms in on the tribe of Benjamin to focus on Saul’s genealogy – for the second time in this passage. Although the book of I Chronicles is all about David, his story starts with Saul, for the nation’s kingdom began with Saul. In case anyone wanted to claim that Saul’s heirs should have been the rightful kings, the writer was careful to cover that base and justify David’s becoming the second king of Israel. Saul had failed to keep the word of the Lord, and to even inquire of the Lord. David didn’t take the kingdom, but the Lord turned it over to him for good reason upon Saul’s death.
With all of this business taken care of, we are ready to resume the history of David’s reign over the nation of Israel. We intersperse the story with the psalms because this is the historical context of many of the psalms. David of course wrote many of the psalms, but many of the other psalms were either written in his day or in the context of the temple worship service he instituted for the nation. As a man after God’s own heart, meaningful worship of God was important to David; this became a passion of his life, as you will see, and he established practices for the temple worship. Since David was a musician, music was an important part of the temple worship he established. In his day the music program flourished, with psalmists like Asaph. You saw in the genealogies that the musicians were on duty night and day, and were so important that they lived in the rooms of the temple designed by David, and did no other work. Much of what David implemented became institutions of temple worship throughout the nation’s history up to the Exile, to be re-established by the returning exiles.