What Does 1 Chronicles 26:21 Mean?
As concerning the sons of Laadan, the sons of the Gershonite Laadan, the heads of the fathers, even of Laadan the Gershonite, were Jehieli.
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
As concerning the sons of Laadan; the sons of the Gershonite Laadan, chief fathers, even of Laadan the Gershonite, were Jehieli.THE KEY
This family line is not a blur of ancestors: it is remembered through named branches and their heads.
THE MEANING
Laadan’s Gershonite line appears as a specific household with identified heads. The verse makes belonging concrete: a family’s continuity takes shape through people and generations. It speaks now wherever your own story is held within a larger one.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that lineage is a faceless mass: this verse gives its households and heads names.
THE ROOT
רָאשֵׁי הָאָבוֹת
rashei ha'avot
GROWS FROM
רֹאשׁ
Head, top, chief.
“heads of the fathers” in this verse is rashei ha'avot. The phrase behind “chief fathers” pictures heads of ancestral households. The same root forms words for what is first or at the beginning, revealing how this genealogy gives a family line visible structure.
ALSO GROWS
reshit: Beginning, first portion.
רֵאשִׁית
This branch makes the link between a household’s head and the front of a line visible.
rishon: First, former.
רִאשׁוֹן
This branch carries the same sense of being at the front or first in an ordered sequence.
THE PATTERN
Shared responsibility and teaching continue through named, entrusted people across generations.
And Eleazar son of Aaron the priest shall be the lifted one over the lifted ones of the Levites, and shall be set over those who keep the watch of the set-apart place.And these things you heard from me among many witnesses, place beside steady people who will be able to teach others also.THE THREAD
The sons of Jehieli were Zetham, and Joel his brother, which were over the storehouses of the house of the LORD.Read beside this verse, it shows named succession taking shape as entrusted responsibility: Jehieli’s sons Zetham and Joel oversee the treasures of the LORD’s house. The household structure is the frame for that charge.
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