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1 Chronicles4:6

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

1 Chronicles 4:6 — . 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

Naarah bore to him Ahuzzam, Hepher, Temeni, and Haahashtari. These were the descendants of Naarah.

Berean Standard Bible · CC0

Hebrew — tap a word ↓

na·‘ă·rāh ’eṯ- wat·tê·leḏ lōw ’ă·ḥuz·zām wə·’eṯ- ḥê·p̄er wə·’eṯ- tê·mə·nî wə·’eṯ- hā·’ă·ḥaš·tā·rî ’êl·leh bə·nê na·‘ă·rāh

Word by word14 · parsed
נַעֲרָה֙na·‘ă·rāhNaarahH5292
√ Naʻărâh — Naarah, the name of an Israelitess, and of a place in PalestineNounproperfeminine singular
Naʻărâh: Naarah, the name of an Israelitess, and of a place in Palestine A rare lexeme, H5292, standing in only three verses of the canon. Here she is the second of Ashhur's two wives (Gill: "the second wife of Ashur"; K&D: "Ashur had two wives, Helah and Naarah"), and her name frames the verse at both ends. The same three-verse lexeme also names a town on the Ephraimite border at Joshua 16:7, a different referent entirely, which is why the cross-link below is tiered structural and not verbal.
אֶת־’eṯ-H853
√ ʼêth — properly, self (but generally used to point out more definitely the object of a verb or preposition, even or namely)Direct object marker
ʼêth: the direct object marker Untranslatable; it simply points to what the verb acts on. The interlinear gives it no gloss at all.
וַתֵּ֨לֶדwat·tê·leḏboreH3205
√ yâlad — to bear youngConjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person feminine singular
yâlad: to bear young (Qal consecutive imperfect, 3fs) The one finite verb in the verse, and the engine of the whole genealogical form. Qal consecutive imperfect is the standard narrative chain form: it does not merely report that a birth happened, it continues a sequence already running, so v. 6 is grammatically welded to v. 5. Every name that follows exists in this verse only as the object of this verb; the Chronicler's line advances because a woman bore, and the text says so in the ordinary vocabulary of animal and human birth rather than in any elevated register.
ל֤וֹlōwto him
Prepositionthird person masculine singular
lōw: to him (preposition with 3ms suffix) The suffix has no antecedent inside this verse. "Him" is Ashhur, reached only by reading back into v. 5, which is itself a small proof that the verse is a link and not a unit.
אֲחֻזָּ֣ם’ă·ḥuz·zāmAhuzzamH275
√ ʼĂchuzzâm — Achuzzam, an IsraeliteNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂchuzzâm: Achuzzam, an Israelite The lexicon supplied here gives nothing beyond the personal identification, and no other canonical occurrence is offered. K&D say it plainly: "Ahuzam, of whom nothing further is known." That silence is itself sourced data, and this commentary will not fill it with etymological guesswork.
וְאֶת־wə·’eṯ-H853
√ ʼêth — properly, self (but generally used to point out more definitely the object of a verb or preposition, even or namely)Conjunctive wawDirect object marker
ʼêth: direct object marker with conjunctive waw The second of four; each son is marked separately.
חֵ֔פֶרḥê·p̄erHepherH2660
√ Chêpher — Chepher, a place in PalestineNounpropermasculine singular
Chêpher: Chepher, a place in Palestine H2660, present in nine verses, and the only name here with real canonical traffic: a Manassite ancestor whose son Zelophehad left five daughters (Numbers 26:32-33; 27:1; Joshua 17:2-3), a king's city taken by Joshua (Joshua 12:17), a Solomonic district (1 Kings 4:10). The lexicon's own gloss treats it as a place name. K&D expressly refuse to merge this Judahite Hepher with those, calling the land-of-Hepher conjecture "not very well supported," and the thread below keeps that caution by flagging rather than confirming the link.
וְאֶת־wə·’eṯ-H853
√ ʼêth — properly, self (but generally used to point out more definitely the object of a verb or preposition, even or namely)Conjunctive wawDirect object marker
ʼêth: direct object marker with conjunctive waw Third of four.
תֵּימְנִ֖יtê·mə·nîTemeniH8488
√ Têymᵉnîy — Temeni, an IsraeliteNounpropermasculine singular
Têymᵉnîy: Temeni, an Israelite K&D gloss the name "man of the south" and then weigh the two readings honestly: it "may be simply the name of a person, but it is probably, like the following, the name of a family." If K&D are right, the verse is already sliding from persons to clans midway through its own list, which is how Judah's genealogy works throughout this chapter.
וְאֶת־wə·’eṯ-andH853
√ ʼêth — properly, self (but generally used to point out more definitely the object of a verb or preposition, even or namely)Conjunctive wawDirect object marker
ʼêth: direct object marker with conjunctive waw The fourth and last; the interlinear glosses this one "and," carrying the English series comma.
הָאֲחַשְׁתָּרִ֑יhā·’ă·ḥaš·tā·rîHaahashtariH326
√ ʼăchashtârîy — an achastarite (iArticleNounpropermasculine singular
ʼăchashtârîy: an achastarite Carries the definite article in Hebrew, so the surface form reads "the Ahashtarite," a clan designation rather than a given name. K&D: "descended from Ahashtar, is quite unknown." Of the four sons, three are recorded here and nowhere else.
אֵ֖לֶּה’êl·lehTheseH428
√ ʼêl-leh — these or thosePronouncommon plural
ʼêl-leh: these or those Common plural demonstrative, opening the Chronicler's standard closing formula. It gathers the four names just listed and hands them back to the mother, sealing the unit.
בְּנֵ֥יbə·nêwere the descendantsH1121
√ 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, etcNounmasculine plural construct
bên: a son (as a builder of the family name) Masculine plural construct. The lexicon's parenthesis is the theology of the whole book in six words: a son is not simply offspring but the one by whom the house gets built. JFB, commenting on the same construct earlier in this chapter, insists it regularly means "the descendants," since "with the exception of Pharez, none of those here mentioned were his immediate sons." Read that way, the closing formula is a clan roster, not a birth certificate.
נַעֲרָֽה׃na·‘ă·rāhof NaarahH5292
√ Naʻărâh — Naarah, the name of an Israelitess, and of a place in PalestineNounproperfeminine singular
Naʻărâh: Naarah The verse ends where it began. Naarah opens the list as the one who bore and closes it as the one whose sons these are, an inclusio around four names in a single verse.

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. One verb, and the chain it belongs to — 1 Chronicles 4:6

⚙ The verse has exactly one finite verb: וַתֵּ֨לֶד (wat·tê·leḏ, H3205 yâlad), parsed Qal consecutive imperfect, third person feminine singular. Everything else is a name, an article, a demonstrative, or one of the four direct object markers. That grammatical fact sets the reading: v. 6 is not a sentence standing on its own but a link welded to what precedes, since the consecutive imperfect exists to continue a running sequence. The pronoun confirms it, because "to him" (lōw, index 3) has no antecedent anywhere in this verse. K&D supply the missing referent from outside the line: Ashhur, father of Tekoa, who "had two wives, Helah and Naarah." Gill names her the same way, "the second wife of Ashur." Neither commentator is guessing; both are reading v. 6 back into 1 Chronicles 4:5 and 2:24, which is what the grammar itself demands.

ii. Four names, and the honesty of the commentators about three of them — 1 Chronicles 4:6

✦ The striking feature of the received commentary on this verse is how much of it is an admission of ignorance. Gill, on the whole list: "Of whom we have no account elsewhere." K&D, name by name: Ahuzzam, "of whom nothing further is known"; Haahashtari, "quite unknown." ⚙ Only Hepher has canonical traffic at all, H2660 standing in nine verses, and there K&D actively resist the easy harmonization, distinguishing this Hepher from the Gileadite of the same name and judging the conjecture that ties him to the land of Hepher (1 Kings 4:10; Joshua 12:17) "not very well supported." On Temeni they weigh two options and decline to force one: the name, glossed "man of the south," "may be simply the name of a person, but it is probably, like the following, the name of a family." ⚙ That last sentence matters for how the verse should be read, because if K&D are right, the list slides from persons to clans partway through, and the Hebrew supports them: הָאֲחַשְׁתָּרִ֑י carries the definite article, so the fourth "son" is literally the Ahashtarite, a group label wearing a name's clothing.

iii. The inclusio: these were the sons of Naarah — 1 Chronicles 4:6

⚙ The verse opens with Naarah and closes with Naarah (indices 0 and 13, the same rare lexeme H5292, found in only three verses of the whole canon), wrapping the four names in her name. The closing formula runs אֵ֖לֶּה בְּנֵ֥י נַעֲרָֽה, "these are the sons of Naarah," and its central word is the construct bᵉnê, whose lexicon gloss is worth the whole verse: a son "as a builder of the family name." JFB, writing on 4:1, insist that in this chapter the phrase regularly means "the descendants," since "with the exception of Pharez, none of those here mentioned were his immediate sons." BSB has followed that judgment here and rendered "descendants" rather than "sons," which is an interpretive choice worth seeing as a choice. ✦ Henry, whose note covers the whole chapter at once, sets the scale: here is "a further account of Judah, the most numerous and most famous of all the tribes." ⚙ The most famous tribe in Israel is being counted, and the counting includes four men of whom the record preserves nothing but their names and their mother's.

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

⚙ Under Sola Scriptura, offered to be tested and not to be believed on our say-so: this verse is a test case for whether we think Scripture wastes words. It contains one act (a woman bore), four names, and a summary that repeats her name. Three of the four men leave no other trace in the canon, and the oldest commentators available to us say so frankly rather than inventing significance for them. The honest reading is that the Chronicler, writing to a returned and diminished people who needed to know they were still the same people, recorded a house by name because a house is what the covenant runs through, and because the LORD's promises to Judah were not made to a famous remnant but to an entire lineage, most of whom no one would ever hear of again. The four object markers, one for each son, are the smallest possible textual argument that this is so: the Hebrew could have bundled them and did not. We hold this loosely. Nothing in the verse states a doctrine, and any reader who says the passage teaches only that Ashhur's second wife had four sons has not misread it. But we would rather be corrected for finding covenant memory in a name list than be safe by treating three verses of a chapter as filler. The pullquote below is our own line, not Scripture.

Four names, three of them strangers to us, and not one of them lost.

⚙

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.

Naarah, named twice in two verses verbal / quotation: confirmed

⚙ The wife introduced in 1 Chronicles 4:5 as the second of Ashhur's two is the same Naarah who opens and closes v. 6. The Verifier records the shared lexeme H5292 Naʻărâh, a genuinely rare word present in only three verses of the canon, and here the referent is identical, which is as strong as an intra-Hebrew verbal link gets. ✦ K&D make the same connection from the commentary side: "Ashur had two wives, Helah and Naarah," and Gill calls her "the second wife of Ashur." ⚙ The link matters because v. 6's pronoun "to him" is unfilled without it.

1 Chronicles 4:5

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H5292 Naʻărâh (in 3 vv), a rare lexeme, with identical referent across the adjoining verses; no quotation is claimed, only a confirmed verbal identity within one Hebrew pericope

The same rare name on the Ephraimite border structural / thematic: confirmed

⚙ The third of the three canonical occurrences of H5292 is not a person at all. At Joshua 16:7 Naarah is a point on the boundary line of the Ephraimite inheritance. The Verifier records the shared lexeme honestly, but a shared lexeme is not a shared referent: one is a Judahite woman, the other a town in another tribe's allotment. We therefore do not tier this verbal. What survives is a structural observation that runs through the whole of Chronicles and Joshua alike, that in Israel's records personal names and place names are the same stock of words, and that a clan and the ground it holds are named alike. K&D's reading of Temeni and Haahashtari as probable family names in this very verse is the same phenomenon seen from the inside.

Joshua 16:7

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H5292 Naʻărâh (in 3 vv); the lexeme is rare but the referents differ (a Judahite woman here, an Ephraimite border town in Joshua), so the confirmed link is the shared naming pattern, not a quotation or a common subject

Hepher, a name that travels, and the commentator who refuses to let it flagged: verify source

⚙ H2660 Chêpher stands in nine verses, and most of them belong elsewhere: the ancestor whose son Zelophehad left five daughters and forced a ruling on inheritance (Numbers 26:32-33; Numbers 27:1; Joshua 17:2-3), a royal city in Joshua's conquest list (Joshua 12:17), a Solomonic administrative district (1 Kings 4:10), and a name in David's warrior roll (1 Chronicles 11:36). The Verifier records the shared lexeme and nothing more. ✦ K&D see the same data and refuse the merger: this Hepher is "to be distinguished" from the Gileadite of the same name, and the conjecture connecting him to the land of Hepher "is not very well supported." ⚙ We record the link because the lexeme is real and because readers will meet it, and we flag it because the one nineteenth-century authority in our sources who examined it concluded it does not hold. Nothing here should be built on.

Numbers 26:32 · Numbers 27:1 · Joshua 17:3 · Joshua 12:17 · 1 Kings 4:10 · 1 Chronicles 11:36

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H2660 Chêpher (in 9 vv), a moderately common name; flagged because K&D explicitly distinguish the Judahite Hepher of this verse from the Gileadite Hepher and call the land-of-Hepher identification "not very well supported," so the identity behind the shared lexeme is contested in our own sources

A chain of names carrying a promise into the Gospels structural / thematic: confirmed

⚙ Chronicles opens with nine chapters of names and this verse sits deep inside the longest of them, Judah's. The Gospel writers begin their books the same way, with a Judahite name-chain in which most links are carried on nothing but the record itself (Matthew 1:3; Luke 3:33). The formal resemblance is exact: a verb of begetting or bearing, a list, a summary formula, and a majority of names about whom the canon says nothing else. ⚙ This is a structural link and it must be tiered as one. The two texts are in different languages, so no shared Strong's lexeme is possible and none is claimed, and neither Gospel quotes this verse. What is shared is the form and its purpose, a line preserved by name because the promise attaches to the line.

Matthew 1:3 · Luke 3:33

basis: Cross-Testament (Hebrew to Greek): a shared Strong's lexeme is impossible across the language boundary and the Verifier offers no basis here; the recorded basis is the shared literary form, a Judahite genealogical chain whose members are mostly attested nowhere else, with no quotation claimed in either direction

⚙Christ in the Unittypology · verify

AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.

Counting the tribe from which the Lord sprang ancient/widely-held

✦ Henry frames the chapter as "a further account of Judah, the most numerous and most famous of all the tribes," and the Chronicler's own priorities agree: Judah is counted first and at greatest length. ⚙ The reason the reader is asked to walk through Ashhur's second wife and her four sons is that this tribe is the one under promise. Jacob's blessing set the scepter in Judah until Shiloh come (Genesis 49:10); the writer to the Hebrews states the fulfillment as a plain historical claim, that it is evident our Lord sprang out of Judah (Hebrews 7:14); Matthew and Luke both route the Messiah's descent through Judah and Perez (Matthew 1:3; Luke 3:33). This is the ancient and widely held reading of why Judah's genealogy is given the space it is given, and this verse, obscure as it is, is one paragraph of that argument.

Genesis 49:10 · Hebrews 7:14 · Matthew 1:3 · Luke 3:33

Four object markers, and a Savior who does not lose names novel

⚙ This is our own reading and we mark it as such. The Hebrew of this verse gives each of the four sons his own אֶת־ (H853), though the grammar would have permitted one marker for the compound object. The text individuates men who, in the judgment of Gill ("Of whom we have no account elsewhere") and K&D ("of whom nothing further is known," "quite unknown"), contributed nothing further that the canon chose to record. ⚙ We take that as a small formal witness to a habit of God that the Gospels make explicit and personal: the Shepherd who counts the flock one by one and loses none of what the Father gives him (John 10:3, where he calls his own sheep by name; John 6:39). We are not claiming that Ahuzzam, Hepher, Temeni and the Ahashtarite are types of anything, and we are not claiming any writer quoted or alluded to this verse. We are claiming that the grammar of a forgotten list and the shape of the gospel point the same direction, and we offer that to be tested.

John 10:3 · John 6:39

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:

  • Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory (1871)
  • John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible (1746–63)
  • Keil & Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (1860s)
  • Matthew Henry, Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706)

Text: Berean Standard Bible (CC0) with the Berean interlinear and Strong's numbering. The note keys 0 to 13 are the interlinear's own word indices; that index order is English-facing, so Naarah is listed at index 0 while the verb וַתֵּ֨לֶד at index 2 is the clause-initial waw-consecutive that the Hebrew syntax requires to stand first. Our literal rendering follows the grammar rather than the index order, and the placement of "to him" relative to the subject follows the ordinary Hebrew clause pattern; readers checking a Hebrew text should expect the verb first.

Sources: of the seven commentators available for this unit, Poole has no note on this verse at all, and the Geneva entry in our source consists only of the verse text plus a section header, with no marginal gloss, so neither is quoted. Henry's note is a single block covering 4:1-43 and is dominated by Jabez in vv. 9-10; it is cited here only for its chapter-level judgment about Judah. JFB's note belongs to 4:1 and is cited only for its rule about the construct "sons of" meaning descendants. Barnes' note on this passage in our source concerns "the father of Etam" and 2 Chronicles 11:6 rather than Naarah's sons, and is not quoted. K&D and Gill are the only two witnesses speaking directly to v. 6.

What is uncertain: the identity of three of the four sons is unrecoverable, and our sources say so rather than filling the gap. Whether Temeni and Haahashtari are persons or clans is left open by K&D themselves, though the definite article on Haahashtari and the gentilic shape of both names favor clans. The relation of this Hepher to the Manassite Hepher, to the land of Hepher and to the Solomonic district is recorded as a lexeme match and flagged, not affirmed; K&D reject it. The cross-Testament thread carries no lexical basis and claims none. No Scripture and no commentator's words in this unit were composed, paraphrased or reordered by the machine layer; every quotation is a contiguous span of the public-domain source.

✦ = 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)