The Fallible Study Bible

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1 Chronicles6:11

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

1 Chronicles 6:11 — . 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.

11

Azariah was the father of Amariah, Amariah was the father of Ahitub,

Berean Standard Bible · CC0

Hebrew — tap a word ↓

‘ă·zar·yāh ’eṯ- way·yō·w·leḏ ’ă·mar·yāh wa·’ă·mar·yāh hō·w·lîḏ ’eṯ- ’ă·ḥî·ṭūḇ

Word by word8 · parsed
עֲזַרְיָ֖ה‘ă·zar·yāhAzariahH5838
√ ʻĂzaryâh — Azarjah, the name of nineteen IsraelitesNounpropermasculine singular
ʻĂzaryâh: Azariah, the name of nineteen Israelites The lexicon itself records the difficulty of this verse: nineteen different Israelites bear this name. JFB, commenting on v. 10, admits “It is doubtful whether the person in favor of whom this testimony is borne be Johanan or Azariah.” The Chronicler's line runs through names so common that identification, not transmission, is the hard part.
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: object marker Untranslatable; it fixes the following name as the definite object.
וַיּ֥וֹלֶדway·yō·w·leḏwas the father ofH3205
√ yâlad — to bear youngConjunctive wawVerbHifilConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine singular
yâlad: to bear young (Hifil, consecutive imperfect) The Hifil is causative: the father does not bear, he causes to be borne. The consecutive imperfect is narrative form, so the line reads as a chain of events rather than a table of relations. K&D draw the office out of exactly this verb: “The son so begotten was, when he lived after his father, the heir of the high-priestly dignity.” Begetting here is succession to an altar, not merely paternity.
אֲמַרְיָ֑ה’ă·mar·yāhAmariahH568
√ ʼĂmaryâh — Amarjah, the name of nine IsraelitesNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂmaryâh: Amarjah, the name of nine Israelites Cambridge identifies this Amariah as “apparently the contemporary of Jehoshaphat,” and Pulpit is firmer, calling him “High priest in the reign of Jehoshaphat,” citing 2 Chronicles 19:11 and Smith's Bible Dictionary. Pulpit then states the value of such an identification: a fixed point “helps to keep the line and chronology steady amid surrounding obscurity.” Note that this is commentators' reconstruction, not something the verse says.
וַאֲמַרְיָ֖הwa·’ă·mar·yāhAmariahH568
√ ʼĂmaryâh — Amarjah, the name of nine IsraelitesConjunctive wawNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂmaryâh: Amarjah (with conjunctive waw) The same name that stood at index 3 as the marked object of אֶת־ returns here parsed Conjunctive waw · Noun proper masculine singular, with no object marker in front of it: received in one clause, subject of the verb in the next. That grammatical flip is the register's engine, and it is why K&D can say the enumeration exists to communicate a succession rather than a family tree. What crosses the seam is not blood alone but the office.
הוֹלִ֥ידhō·w·lîḏwas the father ofH3205
√ yâlad — to bear youngVerbHifilPerfectthird person masculine singular
yâlad: to bear young (Hifil, perfect) Same root and stem as index 2, but perfect rather than consecutive imperfect. K&D note that hôlîd in genealogical lists “may express mediate procreation, and the grandson may be introduced as begotten by the grandfather.” That single grammatical concession is what allows a twenty-two generation list to cover, on their reckoning, some 863 years: “he begat” need not mean the next body, only the next link.
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: object marker The second marker, pointing at Ahitub.
אֲחִיטֽוּב׃’ă·ḥî·ṭūḇAhitubH285
√ ʼĂchîyṭûwb — Achitub, the name of several priestsNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂchîyṭûwb: Achitub, the name of several priests The lexicon's own gloss, “the name of several priests,” is the warning. Barnes reads this very stretch as abridged: “Between Amariah and Hilkiah 1 Chronicles 6:13 this genealogy is most certainly defective.” K&D independently trace a second Ahitub in the rival line of Eli, of the family of Ithamar (1 Samuel 14:3). One name, at least two priestly houses, and a list that does not pause to distinguish them.

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 root, two forms: the verb that carries the office — 6:11

The verse is eight words long and two of them are the same root. וַיּ֥וֹלֶד (yâlad, H3205, Hifil consecutive imperfect) and הוֹלִ֥יד (same root, Hifil perfect) are flattened alike in English to “was the father of.” K&D, surveying the block, note that the word “he begat” is “repeated with every name,” and they refuse to let the repetition stay merely stylistic: “The son so begotten was, when he lived after his father, the heir of the high-priestly dignity.” On their reading the recital exists “to communicate the succession of high priests from Eleazar,” which is why each birth is stated as an act rather than a relation. The Hifil stem sharpens this further: the causative says the father caused the son to be born, and in a priestly register that causing is also an installing. ⚙ The two direct-object markers אֶת־ (H853), which vanish entirely in translation, do the quiet work of insisting that each recipient is a definite person, not a rounded number.

ii. The gap the Chronicler does not mention — 6:11

Barnes will not let this passage read as a seamless chain. Of exactly this stretch he writes that “this genealogy is most certainly defective,” because three generations are asked to cover a period for which the kings of Judah supply nine, and which “cannot be estimated as much short of 200 years.” His proposed solution is that the list is “not a list of high priests, but the genealogy of Jozadak or Jehozadak,” abridged, he suspects, so that the total from Phinehas would come out “a multiple of seven.” K&D reach the difficulty from the opposite side, calculating 863 years against twenty-two generations, and defend the list by loosening the verb: hôlîd, they say, “may express mediate procreation, and the grandson may be introduced as begotten by the grandfather.” They also press the harder problem, that a second high-priestly line beginning with Eli, “of the family of Ithamar,” ran alongside this one. ⚙ Two learned readers, one calling the record defective and one calling it compressed, agree on the underlying fact: the Chronicler has selected, and has not told us where.

iii. A name you can stand on — 6:11

Against that obscurity, Cambridge and Pulpit both reach for the same anchor. Cambridge is cautious: this Amariah is “apparently the contemporary of Jehoshaphat.” Pulpit commits, naming him “High priest in the reign of Jehoshaphat” on the evidence of 2 Chronicles 19:11, and then says plainly why such a datum matters: it “helps to keep the line and chronology steady amid surrounding obscurity.” Gill, working the same chapter, supplies the far end of the line: “Jehozadak is the same with Josedech,” the priest carried young into Babylon whose son Joshua came out of it. Henry stands back from the detail to the reason any of it was preserved: “The priests and Levites were more concerned than any other Israelites, to preserve their descent clear, and to be able to prove it; because all the honours and privileges of their office depended upon their descent.” ⚙ The list is a title deed. Its gaps are therefore not careless; they are the wear on a document that had to keep being produced.

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

⚙ This is the tool's own fallible reading, offered to be tested. A verse that says nothing but three names and one repeated verb is doing something the rest of Scripture assumes: it is keeping a receipt. Henry's point is legal before it is devotional, that the priest's “honours and privileges of their office depended upon their descent,” so the line had to be provable, and was. Yet Barnes shows the receipt has holes in it, and K&D show that the very verb “he begat” is elastic enough to hide them. Hold both. The record is real and the record is partial. What the partiality exposes is that a priesthood transmitted by yâlad is a priesthood transmitted by death: each name in this verse is in the list because the one before him stopped. Azariah gives way to Amariah, Amariah to Ahitub, and the chain will eventually give way to Babylon. ⚙ Read this way, the defect Barnes found is not a scandal but a signature. A succession that depends on bodies will leave gaps, because bodies leave. That is the condition Hebrews 7:23 names when it says the former priests were many because death prevented them from continuing, and it is the condition this eight word verse quietly documents twice.

Not a verse, a reading offered for testing: every name in this list is here because the one before him died.

⚙

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 same pair, twice more in the same chapter verbal / quotation: confirmed

The exact pair אֲמַרְיָה (H568) and אֲחִיטוּב (H285) that this verse joins also stands together at 1 Chronicles 6:7 and 1 Chronicles 6:52, inside the Chronicler's own register. The Verifier computes both lexemes as shared, and both are uncommon: Amariah occurs in 14 verses of the canon, Ahitub in 15. ⚙ This is repetition within one document rather than citation of another, so it reads as the Chronicler recycling a fixed name sequence through parallel lists (the Eleazar succession and the later Levitical roll), which is precisely the kind of doubling that makes Barnes suspect abridgement elsewhere in the same chapter.

1 Chronicles 6:7 · 1 Chronicles 6:52

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv) and H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv), both rare, occurring as the same ordered pair. Hebrew to Hebrew, within the same book; a verbatim recurrence of the sequence, not a quotation of an outside source.

The line reappears in the returned community structural / thematic: confirmed

The same names surface after the exile. Ezra 7:3 places אֲמַרְיָה (H568) and עֲזַרְיָה (H5838) in Ezra's own priestly ancestry, and 1 Chronicles 9:11 sets אֲחִיטוּב (H285) beside Azariah in the roll of those who resettled Jerusalem. ⚙ The link is lexical and real, but Azariah is a common name (44 verses), so this is a shared line and shared motif, not proof that any one man is the same man. Gill's note on Jehozadak, “who went young into Babylon, and whose son Joshua, born in the captivity, came out of it,” is the historical bridge these lists presuppose.

Ezra 7:3 · 1 Chronicles 9:11

basis: Verifier: Ezra 7:3 shares H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv) and H5838 ʻĂzaryâh (in 44 vv); 1 Chronicles 9:11 shares H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv) and H5838 ʻĂzaryâh (in 44 vv). Real Hebrew lexical overlap, but H5838 is common, so the confirmed claim is a shared priestly-register pattern, not an identification of persons.

Amariah under Jehoshaphat: an identification, not a statement flagged: verify source

Cambridge calls this Amariah “apparently the contemporary of Jehoshaphat,” and Pulpit names him “High priest in the reign of Jehoshaphat,” pointing to 2 Chronicles 19:11 and to Smith's Bible Dictionary. ⚙ The shared lexeme H568 is genuine and the name is uncommon (14 verses), but the equation of the Amariah of this genealogy with the chief priest of Jehoshaphat's court is a reconstruction by commentators, resting on a nineteenth century reference work and on the chronology Barnes has just called defective. The link is flagged so the reader can weigh it rather than inherit it.

2 Chronicles 19:11

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv). The lexical basis is confirmed; the personal identification is Cambridge's (“apparently”) and Pulpit's, the latter citing Smith's Bible Dictionary, and it sits inside the chronology Barnes calls “most certainly defective.” Provenance of the identification, not of the text, is what is flagged.

The other Ahitub: a rival priestly house wearing the same name structural / thematic: confirmed

אֲחִיטוּב (H285) is not the property of this line. K&D set out the competing succession beginning with Eli, which “according to 1 Chronicles 24:5, and Joseph. Ant. v. 11. 5, belonged to the family of Ithamar,” and which includes “his son Ahitub (1 Samuel 14:3).” 1 Samuel 22:20 then carries that Ahitub's grandson Abiathar out of the massacre at Nob to David. ⚙ Strong's own gloss for H285 concedes the ambiguity: “the name of several priests.” The Chronicler's flat “Amariah begat Ahitub” therefore sits beside a second Ahitub whose house Solomon would remove.

1 Samuel 22:20

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv), a rare name. The lexical link is confirmed Hebrew to Hebrew; the claim made is a shared motif of two priestly houses bearing one name, explicitly not an identification of the two men, since K&D place the Samuel Ahitub in the Ithamar line and this one in Eleazar's.

⚙Christ in the Unittypology · verify

AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.

Many priests, because death kept interrupting ancient/widely-held

⚙ The mechanism of this verse is mortality. הוֹלִ֥יד (H3205, Hifil) is the only engine the priesthood has, and K&D state the rule it encodes: “The son so begotten was, when he lived after his father, the heir of the high-priestly dignity.” The office moves only when the holder stops. Hebrews takes up exactly this feature of the Levitical registers, observing that the former priests were many in number because death prevented them from continuing, while the one who abides holds his priesthood permanently, and Hebrews 7:16 grounds that permanence in the power of an indestructible life rather than in any legal requirement of descent. (Both references are summarized here, not quoted.) Henry, on this chapter, already draws the conclusion: “the Spirit of God calls ministers to their work, without any limit as to the families they came from,” and “none but our great High Priest can make atonement for sin, nor can any be accepted but through his atonement.” This is the ordinary apostolic reading of the priestly genealogies, not a novelty.

Hebrews 7:16 · Hebrews 7:23-24

Where this list ends: Jehozadak, Joshua, and the Branch ancient/widely-held

⚙ The register this verse belongs to does not stop at Ahitub. K&D say its purpose runs “to Jehozadak, whom Nebuchadnezzar caused to be carried away into Babylon,” and Gill supplies the sequel: “Jehozadak is the same with Josedech, Haggai 1:1, who went young into Babylon, and whose son Joshua, born in the captivity, came out of it on the proclamation of Cyrus.” That Joshua is the high priest of Zechariah 3, stripped of filthy garments, clothed afresh, and told that he and his fellow priests are set there as a sign, because God will bring his servant the Branch (summarized, not quoted). Zechariah 6 then crowns this same priest and says the Branch will build the temple and be a priest upon his throne. ⚙ So the line that this verse advances by one unremarkable link terminates in the one place where the Old Testament sets priesthood and kingship on the same head. The Branch reading of Zechariah 3 and 6 is ancient and widely held; the specific step from 1 Chronicles 6:11 to it is the tool's own tracing along the register K&D and Gill describe, and should be tested as such.

Haggai 1:1 · Zechariah 3:8 · Zechariah 6:11-13

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:

  • Albert Barnes, Notes on the Bible (1834)
  • Keil & Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (1860s)
  • Matthew Henry, Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706)
  • The Pulpit Commentary, Spence & Exell, eds. (1880s)

Text: BSB (CC0) with the Berean interlinear and Strong's numbering as supplied in the brief. Note that the interlinear word order for this verse lists the object marker אֶת־ at index 1, before the verb at index 2; the literal rendering above follows the sense of the clause rather than that index order, and no claim is made here about the underlying manuscript word order.

Uncertainty specific to this verse is large and is acknowledged by the sources themselves. Barnes holds that “this genealogy is most certainly defective” through this stretch and that the list is really “the genealogy of Jozadak or Jehozadak”; K&D defend it instead by allowing hôlîd to “express mediate procreation.” These are incompatible explanations of the same data, and this unit does not decide between them. The identification of this Amariah with Jehoshaphat's chief priest comes from Cambridge (hedged with “apparently”) and Pulpit (citing Smith's Bible Dictionary), not from the text, and is badged “flagged: verify source” for that reason.

The K&D entry in the brief is capped, with roughly 16,000 further characters unread; conclusions drawn from it here rest only on the portion supplied. Poole has no note on this verse, and the Geneva entry consists of the verse text with a heading and carries no usable gloss, so neither is quoted. JFB's note addresses verse 10 rather than verse 11 and is used only where it bears on the Azariah of this line. No Hebrew etymology is asserted for the personal names beyond the Strong's glosses given in the brief. Verses outside this unit (Hebrews 7, Zechariah 3 and 6, Haggai 1) are described in summary and are never presented as quotations; quotation marks in this unit enclose only the verbatim commentary supplied in the brief.

✦ = 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)