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1 Chronicles1:6

✦ Public-domain source — quoted & attributed⚙ AI synthesis — generated, verify

1 Chronicles 1:6 — . Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.

6

The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.

Berean Standard Bible · CC0

Hebrew — tap a word ↓

ū·ḇə·nê gō·mer ’aš·kă·naz wə·ḏî·p̄aṯ wə·ṯō·w·ḡar·māh

Word by word5 · parsed
וּבְנֵ֖יū·ḇə·nêThe sonsH1121
√ bên — a son (as a builder of the family name), in the widest sense (of literal and figurative relationship, including grandson, subject, nation, quality or condition, etcConjunctive wawNounmasculine plural construct
bên: a son, as a builder of the family name The conjunctive waw plus construct plural is the Chronicler's hinge, not decoration. K&D observes that vv. 5-9 are stitched by this very word exactly as Genesis 10:2-7 is, and that the register changes gear at v. 10 to yālaḏ (“begot”), matching Genesis 10:8. So the grammar itself is the citation: the form of the seam proves the source. The lexicon's own definition, a son “as a builder of the family name,” is why a bare list of names can function as an argument about who the world is.
גֹּ֑מֶרgō·merof GomerH1586
√ Gômer — Gomer, the name of a son of Japheth and of his descendantsNounpropermasculine singular
Gômer: son of Japheth and his descendants H1586 occurs in only six verses in the whole Hebrew Bible, and one of those six is Hosea's wife, a different person entirely. Gomer heads a northern branch: Cambridge locates his seat around Cappadocia and calls Ashkenaz “probably a neighbour of Armenia.” In Ezekiel 38:6 Gomer and Togarmah appear together again, still northern, still remote. The Chronicler, writing for a small returned community, begins his national record by naming peoples who live at the far edge of the known map.
אַשְׁכֲּנַ֥ז’aš·kă·nazAshkenazH813
√ ʼAshkᵉnaz — Ashkenaz, a Japhethite, also his descendantsNounpropermasculine singular
ʼAshkᵉnaz: a Japhethite, also his descendants A genuinely rare name, standing in only three verses. Cambridge supplies the one place where it is more than a name: “In Jeremiah 51:27 ‘the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz’ are to be summoned against Babylon.” That is the whole theological weight of the word. A name filed here among Japheth's grandsons is, in the prophets, a weapon in the LORD's hand against the empire that burned the temple. The genealogy lists him; Jeremiah conscripts him.
וְדִיפַ֖תwə·ḏî·p̄aṯRiphathH7384
√ Rîyphath — Riphath, a grandson of Japheth and his descendantsConjunctive wawNounpropermasculine singular
Rîyphath: a grandson of Japheth and his descendants H7384 appears in two verses only, and this is one of the two, spelled with a dalet rather than a resh. The tradition is candid about it. Poole and Cambridge both explain the confusion of the letters; K&D files it under transcription errors and adds the honest verdict that “it cannot with certainty be determined which form is the original and correct one.” Cambridge is blunter still: “Nothing certain is known of either Riphath or Diphath.” A name survives; its people do not.
וְתוֹגַרְמָֽה׃wə·ṯō·w·ḡar·māhand TogarmahH8425
√ Tôwgarmâh — Togarmah, a son of Gomer and his posterityConjunctive wawNounpropermasculine singular
Tôwgarmâh: a son of Gomer and his posterity H8425, four verses. Cambridge gives both: in Ezekiel 27:14 Togarmah trades horses, war-horses and mules with Tyre, and in Ezekiel 38:6 “the house of Togarmah in the uttermost parts of the north, and all his hordes” marches with Gomer. Horses and hordes, commerce and cavalry. The same name that is a market in one prophet is an army in the other, and here it is neither, only a son. Genealogy holds the name still before prophecy puts it to work.

The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.

⚙

Grand Commentary — the unit, read whole

synthesis · verify

AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.

i. A seam, not a sentence — 1 Chronicles 1:6

The verse opens with וּבְנֵי (ū·ḇə·nê, H1121), “and-sons-of,” and that small conjunction is the whole architecture. K&D, working through the Chronicler's divergences from Genesis 10, notices that the sections here “are connected, as in Genesis 10:2-7, by וּבני,” and that the linking verb changes to yālaḏ from v. 10 onward precisely as it does in Genesis 10:8. The Chronicler is not composing; he is copying, and he copies the joints as well as the names. JFB explains why he bothers: the three sons of Noah are enumerated “partly because they were the founders of the new world, and partly because the fulfilment of Noah's prophecy (Ge 9:25-27) could not otherwise appear to have been verified.” A list is evidence. ⚙ Our own observation is smaller and grammatical: an English reader meets a complete sentence, “The sons of Gomer,” where the Hebrew reader meets a continuation, a line that cannot stand alone because it was never meant to.

ii. Diphath, or Riphath: the tradition shows its work — 1 Chronicles 1:6

The middle name is spelled וְדִיפַת in the Hebrew of Chronicles and Riphath in Genesis 10:3, and the commentators do not paper over it. Poole: the two Hebrew letters answering to our D and R, “being very like, are oft confounded and exchanged.” Cambridge notes that the Revised Version prints Diphath with the Hebrew while the LXX and Vulgate read Riphath, and concedes that “Nothing certain is known of either Riphath or Diphath.” K&D files the variant among divergences due to transcription and refuses to adjudicate, saying it cannot with certainty be determined which form is original. ⚙ Three independent witnesses, none of whom could see a modern apparatus, all report the uncertainty rather than smoothing it. That is worth more to a reader than a confident footnote would be. The text of Scripture is transmitted by hands, and the hands are visible here.

iii. Names at the edge of the map — 1 Chronicles 1:6

Ashkenaz (H813, three verses), Riphath or Diphath (H7384, two verses) and Togarmah (H8425, four verses) are among the rarest words in the Hebrew Bible, and all three are foreign. Cambridge places Ashkenaz north or east of Cappadocia, near Armenia, and reports that in Jeremiah 51:27 “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz” are summoned against Babylon; Togarmah sells horses to Tyre in Ezekiel 27:14 and rides with Gomer out of “the uttermost parts of the north” in Ezekiel 38:6. Matthew Henry, surveying the whole chapter, draws the conclusion the Chronicler's own community needed: the origin of the Jewish nation is traced from the first man God created, and “God has created of one blood all nations of men; they are all descended from one Adam, one Noah.” ⚙ The Chronicler writes for a shrunken post-exilic Jerusalem, and he begins not with Abraham but with the Japhethites of the far north. Before the book narrows to a temple and a single tribe, it insists on the width of the human family. The narrowing means nothing unless the width was real first.

Read under Sola Scriptura — this tool’s own fallible reading (⚙)

⚙ This is the tool's own fallible reading, offered to be tested. One verse, five words, four proper names, and nothing that looks like doctrine. Yet the shape of the sentence is an argument. The Chronicler begins his people's record by writing down the names of nations who will never worship at his temple, who trade horses with Tyre and march against Babylon and live at the uttermost parts of the north, and he writes them as family. Ashkenaz is a cousin. Togarmah is a cousin. Even the name he cannot spell with certainty, Diphath or Riphath, whose people have left no trace that Cambridge can identify, keeps its place in the list. Scripture will not let the covenant people forget that they are a branch and not the tree. Henry says it from Malachi 2:10: have we not all one father? Gill says the register runs Japheth, then Ham, then Shem last, so that the line may narrow toward Abraham and the Messiah, and he is right about the shape, but the shape only means what it means because the wide part came first. God did not choose one family because the others did not count; He recorded the others by name, then chose one family for their sake. The line set beside this unit is ours and not Scripture: a genealogy that begins with strangers is already preaching.

A register that begins with strangers is already preaching.

⚙

Canonical Threads — out to the whole of Scripture

cross-refs · verify

AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.

The line the Chronicler is copying: Genesis 10:3 verbal / quotation: confirmed

This verse is not merely similar to Genesis 10:3; it is that line transcribed, with one letter changed. The Verifier records all three names shared, two of them rare, and K&D states the conclusion outright: the register “has been taken from Genesis 10,” placed beyond doubt by the correspondence of the names and by the fact that “the plan and form of both registers is quite the same.” The single divergence, דּיפת here for ריפת in Genesis, K&D assigns to transcription, declining to say which form is original. ⚙ The link is as strong as a link between two Hebrew texts can be without an explicit citation formula, which the Chronicler never uses because he is not quoting a source, he is continuing one.

Genesis 10:3

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H7384 Rîyphath (in 2 vv), H813 ʼAshkᵉnaz (in 3 vv), H1586 Gômer (in 6 vv). Two of the three are among the rarest names in the Hebrew Bible and all three stand in the same order in both verses; K&D independently identifies Genesis 10 as the source register.

Ashkenaz conscripted: Jeremiah 51:27 structural / thematic: confirmed

Ashkenaz (H813) stands in only three verses. One is here, a grandson of Japheth in a list; another is Jeremiah's summons, where Cambridge reports that “the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz” are called up against Babylon. ⚙ The genealogy files a name; the prophet drafts it. We decline the verbal tier deliberately: the shared word is a rare proper name, not a quoted phrase, and Jeremiah is not citing Chronicles. What is confirmed is that the same remote northern people appears in both, and that the Chronicler's flat list contains nations the LORD later uses as instruments against the empire that destroyed Jerusalem.

Jeremiah 51:27

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H813 ʼAshkᵉnaz (in 3 vv), a rare lexeme. Downgraded from verbal because a shared proper name is not a quotation and no citation formula or shared clause exists; the confirmed link is the recurrence of one people in genealogy and in prophetic summons.

Gomer and Togarmah again, north of everything: Ezekiel 27:14 and 38:6 structural / thematic: confirmed

Cambridge supplies both Ezekiel passages on this verse: Togarmah trading with Tyre “in horses, war-horses and mules” (Ezekiel 27:14), and “the house of Togarmah in the uttermost parts of the north, and all his hordes” marching in company with “Gomer and all his hordes” (Ezekiel 38:6). The Verifier confirms the lexical overlap in both directions. ⚙ What recurs is not a phrase but a pairing and a location: father and son, Gomer and Togarmah, always at the northern rim. The genealogy fixes the relationship; Ezekiel assumes it two centuries of literature later and builds a prophecy on it.

Ezekiel 38:6 · Ezekiel 27:14

basis: Verifier: Ezekiel 38:6 shares H1586 Gômer (in 6 vv) and H8425 Tôwgarmâh (in 4 vv); Ezekiel 27:14 shares H8425 Tôwgarmâh (in 4 vv). Shared rare names in a persistent father-son pairing and a consistent northern geography, with no quotation claimed.

A warning about the other Gomer: Hosea 1:3 flagged: verify source

The Verifier's candidate list includes Hosea 1:3 on the strength of H1586, and the match is real at the level of the lexeme and worthless at the level of meaning. Hosea's Gomer is a woman, the daughter of Diblaim, whom the prophet is commanded to marry; she has no relation to Japheth's son whatever. ⚙ We record the candidate rather than quietly dropping it, because a reader running the same lexical search will hit it too, and because it shows exactly how a concordance link can be mechanically sound and interpretively empty. No commentator in this brief connects the two, and neither do we.

Hosea 1:3

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H1586 Gômer (in 6 vv). Flagged as a homonym collision: Strong's assigns one number to both the Japhethite ancestor and Hosea's wife, so the shared lexeme records identical spelling only, not a shared referent, motif or citation. No thread should be built on it.

The northern hordes in the last book: Ezekiel 38:6 and Revelation 20:8 typological

Revelation 20:8 gathers “Gog and Magog” from the four corners of the earth for a final assault, borrowing the names Ezekiel uses for the coalition in which Gomer and Togarmah ride (Ezekiel 38:6). ⚙ That is a figural reading, and it cannot be verified the way the Hebrew links above can: John writes in Greek, so no shared Strong's lexeme exists between Chronicles and Revelation, and Revelation never names Gomer or Togarmah at all. The connection runs through Ezekiel, not directly. We offer it as typology and nothing more: the names a genealogist wrote down as cousins become, in the prophets, a northern army, and in the Apocalypse a figure for every hostile nation, which is finally answered not by counter-attack but by fire from heaven and a city whose gates never shut.

Ezekiel 38:6 · Revelation 20:8

basis: Cross-Testament Greek to Hebrew: no shared Strong's lexeme is possible and none is claimed. The link is mediated: Verifier confirms Ezekiel 38:6 shares H1586 Gômer and H8425 Tôwgarmâh with this verse, and Revelation 20:8 takes up Ezekiel's Gog and Magog imagery. Widely held as a reading of Revelation's use of Ezekiel; the extension back to this genealogy is our own and is offered as figural, not demonstrated.

⚙Christ in the Unittypology · verify

AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.

Why a list of foreigners is a messianic document ancient/widely-held

Gill reads the order of the register as deliberate: Japheth the elder first, Ham next, and “then of Shem, whose posterity are mentioned last, because from him, in the line of Heber, sprang Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish nation, of whom the Messiah was to come, for whose sake this genealogy is given.” The observable part is the ordering, which is plain in the text. ⚙ What follows from it is that this verse, containing nothing but three foreign names, exists as the wide top of a funnel. Luke will run the same descent in reverse, back through Shem to Noah to Adam to God (Luke 3:36-38), and the width is the point there too: the genealogy of Jesus does not stop at Abraham. This is the settled reading of the tradition, held by Gill and Henry alike, Henry grounding it in the fact that all nations are “descended from one Adam, one Noah.”

Luke 3:36 · Genesis 10:3

Japheth in the tents of Shem ancient/widely-held

JFB states the reason Noah's sons are enumerated at all: “partly because the fulfilment of Noah's prophecy (Ge 9:25-27) could not otherwise appear to have been verified.” That prophecy asks God to enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem (Genesis 9:27), and this verse is the enlargement being counted out, grandson by grandson, across the northern world. ⚙ The dwelling comes later and comes in Christ: the Gentiles who were far off are brought near by the blood of the Messiah who came through Shem's line (Ephesians 2:13), which is to say that the peoples listed here as outsiders are, in the apostolic reading, the ones eventually housed. The Japheth-in-Shem's-tents reading is ancient and widely held; the specific claim that Ashkenaz, Diphath and Togarmah are named with that end in view is ours, and we mark it as inference rather than as anything the Chronicler says.

Genesis 9:27 · Ephesians 2:13

Apparatus & Provenance

The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.

Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:

  • Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, — (1880s)
  • Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory (1871)
  • John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible (1746–63)
  • Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1685)

⚙ Honesty notes for this unit. (1) Text: the Hebrew consonants here read דִיפַת (Diphath); BSB prints “Riphath,” following the LXX, the Vulgate and Genesis 10:3. Cambridge, Poole and K&D all record the variant and none resolves it; K&D says plainly that it cannot with certainty be determined which form is original. Our literal rendering keeps Diphath and our notes keep both. (2) Geography: every location in this unit is conjecture by the commentators' own admission. Cambridge says Ashkenaz is “probably” a neighbour of Armenia and that the position of Togarmah “is unknown.” We have not upgraded any of it. (3) Sources: the K&D entry in the brief is a long capped block covering the whole register, not this verse alone; we have used only what it says about vv. 5-9, the וּבני connective and the Diphath variant. Barnes offers only a cross-reference here and is not cited. Henry and K&D are engaged by name in the movements rather than quoted as voices: this unit is a single verse and the voice slots are capped at four, so the four quoted authors were chosen to cover four different kinds of evidence (textual, geographic, purposive, structural). Geneva's entry on this verse is the verse text plus a heading and contains no comment to quote, which is why no Geneva voice appears. (4) Threads: the Hosea 1:3 candidate is a Strong's homonym collision and is flagged, not used. The Revelation 20:8 thread is typological and mediated through Ezekiel; no verbal link across Testaments is claimed or possible. (5) Nothing in the New Testament cites this verse.

✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)