What Does 1 Chronicles 1:23 Mean?
And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan.THE KEY
The line named for smallness still preserves each descendant individually.
THE MEANING
Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab appear as distinct names within one line of descent. Joktan’s name carries the sense of “small,” yet the line is not left anonymous. You are held in relation without being reduced to the line that holds you.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Smallness makes a life or family line insignificant and forgettable; here, the descendants are still named.
THE ROOT
יָקְטָן
Yoqṭān
GROWS FROM
ק־ט־ן
q-ṭ-n
To be small, little, or young.
Joktan’s name is formed from the root for smallness. The verse then names three descendants of this “small” one, showing a line carefully kept in the record rather than erased by its scale.
ALSO GROWS
qāṭōn: Small or little.
קָטֹן
This adjective makes the smallness carried in Joktan’s name audible rather than leaving it as an opaque family label.
qəṭannōt: Small things.
קְטַנּוֹת
This form appears in the phrase “the day of small things”; it echoes the way a small beginning can still be seen and counted.
THE PATTERN
Smallness does not erase a name from the record or exclude it from what comes next.
And Saul answered and said, Am I not a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel? And is not my family the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin? Why then do you speak to me so?For who has looked down on the day of small things? They will rejoice and see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel, along with these seven, the eyes of the LORD, roaming through all the earth.Which is indeed the smallest of all seeds; but when it has grown, it is the greatest of the garden plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.THE THREAD
And Saul answered and said, Am I not a Benjamite, of the smallest of the tribes of Israel? And is not my family the least of all the families of the tribe of Benjamin? Why then do you speak to me so?The root behind Joktan’s name is the same root Saul uses for “smallest” and “least.” The shared root lets this genealogy’s smallness be heard beside Saul’s family line: being described as small does not remove a name from the record.
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