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1 Chronicles6:7

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

1 Chronicles 6:7 — . 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.

7

Meraioth was the father of Amariah, Amariah was the father of Ahitub,

Berean Standard Bible · CC0

Hebrew — tap a word ↓

mə·rā·yō·wṯ hō·w·lîḏ ’eṯ- ’ă·mar·yāh wa·’ă·mar·yāh hō·w·lîḏ ’eṯ- ’ă·ḥî·ṭūḇ

Word by word8 · parsed
מְרָיוֹת֙mə·rā·yō·wṯMeraiothH4812
√ Mᵉrâyôwth — Merajoth, the name of two IsraelitesNounpropermasculine singular
Mᵉrâyôwth: Merajoth, the name of two Israelites The rarest lexeme in the verse (H4812, present in only seven verses of the canon), which is why the Verifier's links off this name are the strongest in the unit. He enters the register without introduction: no deed, no date, only a father's function. Barnes gives the whole list its purpose in one line, "The genealogy of the high priestly stem to the captivity."
הוֹלִ֣ידhō·w·lîḏwas the father ofH3205
√ yâlad — to bear youngVerbHifilPerfectthird person masculine singular
yâlad: to bear young (Hifil perfect) The causative of the verb of childbirth, used of the father: he caused a birth. K&D observes that the son "was, when he lived after his father, the heir of the high-priestly dignity," so in this chapter the verb is doing double work, biological and official at once. K&D also grants that הוליד here "may express mediate procreation," which is his honest way of saying the chain may be shorter than the number of men it covers.
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
Object marker, untranslated; it fixes Amariah as what the verb produced.
אֲמַרְיָ֔ה’ă·mar·yāhAmariahH568
√ ʼĂmaryâh — Amarjah, the name of nine IsraelitesNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂmaryâh: Amarjah, the name of nine Israelites Nine men in Scripture bear this name (H568, present in fourteen verses), so the name alone never identifies a man; only the chain does. The theophoric ending -yāh is visible in the form itself, though the brief's lexicon supplies no etymology, and none is asserted here.
וַאֲמַרְיָ֖הwa·’ă·mar·yāhAmariahH568
√ ʼĂmaryâh — Amarjah, the name of nine IsraelitesConjunctive wawNounpropermasculine singular
Conjunctive waw + ʼĂmaryâh The same name, now as subject. The waw is the joint of the register: what was received is immediately transmitted. Nothing is said of Amariah except that he was given and that he gave. The Verifier finds H568 scattered across the later record (1 Chronicles 24:23, 2 Chronicles 19:11, 2 Chronicles 31:15, Ezra 10:42, Nehemiah 10:3, Nehemiah 11:4, Nehemiah 12:2, Zephaniah 1:1), so the name outlasts this man by centuries while this man survives only as a waw.
הוֹלִ֥ידhō·w·lîḏwas the father ofH3205
√ yâlad — to bear youngVerbHifilPerfectthird person masculine singular
yâlad: to bear young (Hifil perfect) The identical form to word 1, unchanged. The repetition is deliberate and the whole force of the list lies in its sameness: twenty-two times in this chapter, by K&D's count, the same verb carries the same office one step further toward Jehozadak and the exile.
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
אֲחִיטֽוּב׃’ă·ḥî·ṭūḇAhitubH285
√ ʼĂchîyṭûwb — Achitub, the name of several priestsNounpropermasculine singular
ʼĂchîyṭûwb: Achitub, the name of several priests The verse ends on him, and the lexicon's "several priests" is a warning: an Ahitub stands in Eleazar's line here and another Ahitub, by K&D's list, stands in Eli's line of Ithamar (1 Samuel 14:3). A reader who tracks the high priesthood by name alone will cross from one family into the other without noticing.

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, twice, and nothing else — 1 Chronicles 6:7

Strip the verse to its bones and almost nothing remains: two names, one name repeated, and הוֹלִ֣יד (hō·w·lîḏ) standing twice in the identical form. K&D puts his finger on exactly this, that in 1 Chronicles 6:4-15 "the descendants of Eleazar are enumerated in twenty-two generations; the word הוליד, 'he begat,' being repeated with every name." The verb is the Hifil of yâlad, whose ground meaning the lexicon gives as "to bear young": the mother's word, turned causative and given to the father. ⚙ So the register's only action is a caused birth, and its only argument is that the causing never stopped. K&D draws the conclusion the older commentators drew before him, that the purpose of the enumeration was "to communicate the succession of high priests from Eleazar" down to Jehozadak, and he is honest enough to add that הוליד "may express mediate procreation," that is, a grandfather may be credited with a grandson. The list is a line of office as much as a line of blood, and K&D says so.

ii. Why a bare list was worth keeping — 1 Chronicles 6:7

Barnes reduces the whole passage to its function: "The genealogy of the high priestly stem to the captivity." Henry supplies the motive, that "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." ⚙ Read together, those two sentences explain the flatness of 6:7: a man who could not produce this line could not serve, so the line had to be producible, and a producible line is dull by design. Yet the very generations the list presents as unbroken are the ones JFB and Gill say were not. JFB, on Uzzi in v. 5, reports that "in his days, the high priesthood was, for unrecorded reasons, transferred from Eleazar's family to Ithamar's," and Gill names the tradition's sources, "Josephus (e), and other Jewish writers (f)," for the same transfer and for its eventual return, "when it was restored to Zadok, of the line of Eleazar." K&D calls this the "less serious" of two difficulties raised against reading the list as an unbroken succession. ⚙ We record the tension rather than resolve it: Meraioth, Amariah and Ahitub may be three men who held the office, or three men who carried the descent while another house held the office. Chronicles does not say, and none of our voices claims it does.

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

⚙ Fallible, offered to be tested. This verse is the least quotable kind of Scripture: no promise, no command, no story, just a man giving a name to a man who gives it on. And that is precisely its witness. Everything Israel's worship depended on, the one man who could enter with blood on the Day of Atonement, hung on a chain of ordinary fathers who are remembered for nothing but that they did not fail to hand it on. Henry saw that the descent had to be provable, and K&D that the same verb had to be written twenty-two times for the record to hold. ⚙ Our reading is that the monotony is the point: faithfulness across generations looks, from inside, like nothing happening. But the register also carries its own defeat. Each הוֹלִ֣יד is an admission that the last man died, and every verse of this chapter marches toward the Babylonian captivity where K&D ends it, with Jehozadak carried away. A priesthood that must be begotten again is a priesthood that keeps being interrupted, and Chronicles was written by people who had watched it stop. The line below is ours, not Scripture, and it is not a verse: read it as commentary and test it against the text.

Two names and one verb, twice: this is what faithfulness looks like from the inside, where nothing appears to be happening.

⚙

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 three names, again in the same chapter verbal / quotation: confirmed

All three proper names of this verse, מְרָיוֹת֙ (H4812), אֲמַרְיָ֔ה (H568) and אֲחִיטֽוּב׃ (H285), recur together at 1 Chronicles 6:52, inside the Kohathite descent that runs toward Zadok. ⚙ The same three-link sequence therefore appears twice in one chapter, once in the Eleazar register K&D describes and once in the list that follows, which is one reason the chapter's two priestly descents are so easily confused by readers who track names rather than lists.

1 Chronicles 6:52

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H4812 Mᵉrâyôwth (rare, in 7 vv), H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv), H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv). The rarity of H4812 plus the co-occurrence of all three names of the verse is the recorded basis; the link is lexical identity within Hebrew, not a quotation of one text by another.

Ezra claims this chain as his own pedigree verbal / quotation: confirmed

Ezra 7:3 carries אֲמַרְיָ֔ה and מְרָיוֹת֙ in Ezra's own line of descent, the pedigree he produces before going up from Babylon. ⚙ The names of this verse are, in other words, the credential a post-exilic priest offered for his right to act, exactly the use Henry says the priestly genealogies were preserved for: their office "depended upon their descent." Ezra's list is visibly shorter than Chronicles', which is the practical form of what K&D concedes about הוליד, that it "may express mediate procreation."

Ezra 7:3

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H4812 Mᵉrâyôwth (rare, in 7 vv) and H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv). The rare lexeme carries the tier. The added observation that Ezra's chain is abridged is ⚙ ours, supported by K&D's note on mediate procreation, not by the Verifier.

The names that survive the exile and enter the registers again structural / thematic: confirmed

Meraioth and Ahitub both stand in the post-exilic priestly registers at 1 Chronicles 9:11 and Nehemiah 11:11, in the notice of the man "in charge of the house of God" among the returned. ⚙ What we claim here is a pattern rather than a quotation: the same abbreviated chain of names is used, after the captivity, to do the work Henry describes, proving that the men serving in the second house belonged to the first. K&D's register ends with Jehozadak carried to Babylon; these verses are where the same names surface on the other side of it.

1 Chronicles 9:11 · Nehemiah 11:11

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H4812 Mᵉrâyôwth (in 7 vv) and H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv) at both refs. Although the shared lexeme is rare, the claim made here is about the function of post-exilic registers, a shared pattern, so we record it at the structural tier rather than the verbal one.

Amariah and Ahitub, four verses later flagged: verify source

The pair Amariah and Ahitub appears again at 1 Chronicles 6:11, further down the same Eleazar register. ⚙ Whether that is a second, later pair of men bearing ancestral names (common enough in priestly families), or a repetition introduced in transmission, we cannot decide, and no voice in this unit's sources decides it: K&D discusses difficulties in the list but the portion of his entry available to us addresses the Eli line and the chronology, not this duplication. We record the link and flag it rather than explain it.

1 Chronicles 6:11

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H568 ʼĂmaryâh (in 14 vv) and H285 ʼĂchîyṭûwb (in 15 vv). The lexical link is computed and certain; what is contested is its cause (repeated family naming versus scribal duplication), and the brief supplies no source that settles it, so the thread is flagged.

Why there had to be so many of them structural / thematic: confirmed

Hebrews argues about the levitical priesthood from precisely the feature this verse displays: that the priests were many in number, because death kept preventing any of them from continuing. ⚙ This verse is one joint of that argument's evidence, the twenty-two generation succession K&D traces from Eleazar, "who died shortly after Joshua," to Jehozadak. No verbal link is claimed or possible here, since the two texts stand in different languages and share no Strong's number; what is shared is the structure of an office that must be re-begotten in every generation.

Hebrews 7:23-24 · Joshua 24:33

basis: Cross-Testament (Greek to Hebrew), so no shared Strong's lexeme is possible and no verbal tier may be used. The recorded basis is structural: the repeated Hifil of yâlad (H3205) that constitutes this register is the same succession-by-death that Hebrews 7 reasons from. Joshua 24:33 is cited inside K&D's own entry for Eleazar's death.

⚙Christ in the Unittypology · verify

AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.

A priesthood that has to be begotten again ancient/widely-held

⚙ Read the verb honestly and it is an obituary as much as a birth notice: Meraioth had to beget Amariah because Meraioth would not last, and Amariah had to beget Ahitub for the same reason. K&D traces the chain from Eleazar, "who died shortly after Joshua ( Joshua 24:33 ), to Jehozadak, whom Nebuchadnezzar caused to be carried away into Babylon," which is a succession bounded at one end by a grave and at the other by an exile. Hebrews reasons from exactly this: the levitical priests were many because death would not let them continue. Henry, on this very chapter, draws the line to its end: "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, and Henry states it without novelty.

Hebrews 7:23-24 · Joshua 24:33

An office that could be moved from one house to another novel

JFB reports that in Uzzi's days, two verses above this one, "the high priesthood was, for unrecorded reasons, transferred from Eleazar's family to Ithamar's, in which it continued for several generations," and Gill names the tradition's sources: "According to Josephus (e), and other Jewish writers (f), in the times of Uzzi ... the priesthood was translated into the family of Ithamar, of which Eli was the first high priest; where it continued to the times of Solomon, when it was restored to Zadok, of the line of Eleazar." ⚙ Our reading: the office in this chapter is portable, and Scripture itself records it being taken from one house and given to another (1 Kings 2:35), with a faithful priest promised who would not be displaced (1 Samuel 2:35). A priesthood that can be moved is a priesthood held on terms. The messianic reading of 1 Samuel 2:35 is ancient; the particular route we take to it, through the Eleazar-to-Ithamar transfer that JFB and Gill report as tradition rather than as text, is our own construction and should be tested as such.

1 Samuel 2:35 · 1 Kings 2:35

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)

This unit is a single verse, 1 Chronicles 6:7, with eight interlinear words and no clause of its own beyond two repetitions of the same verb; the commentary available for it is almost entirely written at chapter scale, and we have said so at each voice rather than letting a chapter note pose as a verse note. Poole has no text on this verse. The Geneva entry in our source carries only the verse rendering and an editorial heading, with no gloss, so Geneva is cited nowhere here. The K&D entry is capped in our brief (16,202 further characters exist in the full entry), so our excerpt and our summary of his argument come from the visible portion only; in particular he names two difficulties with reading the list as an unbroken succession and our text sees his treatment of the first.

Three further honesty notes. First, the transfer of the high priesthood from Eleazar's line to Ithamar's is reported by JFB and by Gill as Jewish tradition (Josephus, Antiquities v.11.5, and the Juchasin, per Gill's own citations); we have not verified those citations, and JFB himself calls the reasons "unrecorded." Second, the brief's lexicon glosses the three proper names only as names ("the name of nine Israelites," "the name of several priests"), so no etymology is asserted for Meraioth, Amariah or Ahitub; the theophoric ending visible in Amariah's form is noted as a form, not as a meaning. Third, every cross-reference basis above is the Verifier's computed shared-lexeme output; where we have added an interpretation on top of that basis, the addition is marked ⚙ and the tier is set to what the evidence alone supports.

✦ = 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)