If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
23 September. 1 Chronicles chapters 26-27
Following the previous chapters with detailed lists of Temple servants, come lists of other people with public duties (civil servants and judges), military leadership, or positions within the royal household. The military commanders, each with 24,000 men, were allocated a month each: presumably this was a form of territorial army, in which able men were expected to leave their usual lives for one month of the year and do (unpaid?) national service.
I never cease to be amazed that this highly organised society, with detailed written records, existed in Israel (and other parts of the world such as Babylon and China) a thousand years before the time of the Romans, and two thousand years before England had anything remotely similar under the Normans. It is something of pride for someone today to be able to spend years researching family history and say “my ancestor was a knight” but for Jewish people at the time Chronicles was written, they could more easily trace their descent back, hopefully as far as Abraham.
A people with a recorded history has so much to learn from – including the mistakes of their ancestors, as well as their successes. One thing that worries me about today’s society is that although the Internet may have made it easier to do family history, there is also increasingly a loss of communal identity, not least in religion. What Abraham, or David, or Jesus and his disciples, did is still relevant today, and so is the history of our own country and its leaders, but increasingly few people understand that, and live only for the experiences of the moment.