What Does 1 Chronicles 1:16 Mean in the King James?
And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The three names encode peoplehood as belonging to a place, so the list is a map of identity rather than a roll call.
THE MEANING
Here, belonging appears as a set of named branches: Arvadite, Zemarite, Hamathite. Each name links a people to a place, keeping distinct origins visible within the genealogy.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that peoplehood is an undifferentiated mass is undone by these three distinct, place-linked names.
THE ROOT
חֲמָתִי
ḥămāṯî
GROWS FROM
חמת
Ḥamath
The three consonants form the place-name Hamath, the base of this gentilic; Hamath is sometimes linked to חםם, “to be hot,” perhaps through hot springs, but that derivation is uncertain.
The verse’s three parallel names are formed as people belonging to places. In Hamathite, the -î ending points back to Hamath; together with Arvadite and Zemarite, it makes place-linked belonging the structure of the list.
ALSO GROWS
ḥămāṯ: Hamath, the place-name.
חֲמָת
This is the place-name at the base of the gentilic.
ḥămāṯî: Hamathite; belonging to Hamath.
חֲמָתִי
The -î ending marks belonging, just as the parallel names mark peoples through their places.
THE PATTERN
A people’s identity remains legible through the kinship and place from which it branches.
And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth,And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad.And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;THE THREAD
And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad.Genesis places the same three names beside the spreading of Canaan’s families. The repeated list reveals these names as branches in a wider kinship map, each retaining its place-name in the word for its people.
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