The Names Nobody Reads

You skip it.

Be honest. You’ve done it. You’re reading along, David finally has the throne, Jerusalem falls, the story is moving — and then the text drops forty verses of names on you. Jashobeam. Eleazar. Sibbecai the Hushathite. Ilai the Ahohite. Maharai of Netophah. Heled the son of Baanah of Netophah, which is apparently a different guy from Netophah.

And your eyes glaze and you scroll.

I want to tell you what I think is actually happening in those verses, because I don’t think it’s filler. I think it’s the whole point, and I think the Chronicler put it exactly where he put it on purpose.

Here’s the thing that got me. In 2 Samuel, this list of mighty men shows up at the end — chapter 23, near the close of David’s reign, the way a retired general’s memoir has an appendix of the men who served under him. Chronicles takes that same list and moves it to the beginning. Right there at the coronation. Before anything has been accomplished.

Gary Knoppers puts the effect of the move about as clearly as it can be put: the Chronicler “presents these soldiers not as a group of military personnel whom David gathered over the course of his career, but as a group of military personnel who presented themselves to David early in his royal career.”¹

Not a record of what David built.

A picture of who showed up.

And once I saw that, I couldn’t stop seeing something else — that the picture in these two chapters lines up, almost point for point, with the four things we say we’re about as a church. Not because I went looking for it. Because it’s there, and it’s been there for about three thousand years, sitting in the part of the Bible everybody scrolls past.

So let’s actually read the list.

One. He knows who he is, and he knows who it’s for

Start just before the roster, in the verse the whole chapter hangs on.

12 And David knew that the LORD had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel. (2 Samuel 5:12)

Two halves. Both matter, and the second one is the one nobody quotes.

The first half is the establishing. David knew — not suspected, not hoped, not finally felt confident after seven and a half years of civil war and a decade before that of running for his life. He knew. The kingship isn’t something he seized and then had to keep justifying to himself at three in the morning. It was given. It was declared over him by God before he had a throne, a capital, or a single soldier who’d admit to knowing him in public.

That’s identity. It’s ours too — that we’re made in the image of God, that we’re God’s children by declaration and not by performance. It’s the first of the four values we build on here at EMC, and I’ll name it plainly: Identity. We are all made in the imago Dei, and the whole project of the Christian life is discovering the design you were already given, not manufacturing one you can defend.

But watch the second half of the verse, because this is where royal identity in the ancient world usually goes off the rails.

For the sake of his people Israel.

Every king in the ancient Near East had a story about why he was on the throne. The gods chose him. The gods loved him. The gods gave him the land. And in almost every one of those stories, the exaltation terminates on the king. That’s the whole shape of it — the god exalts the king, the king builds the god a house, everyone else pays for both.

Here the exaltation runs through David to somebody else. The throne is real, the anointing is real, and the reason for it is a people David does not own. God had already told him the job title back in verse 2, and it isn’t commander. It’s shepherd — of “my people Israel.” Not David’s people. God’s people, handed to David to keep.

So: an identity you didn’t earn, that terminates on somebody other than you.

Hold that, because everything else in the list is downstream of it.

Two. They come to him, and it costs them something

Now the roster proper, and its opening rubric.

10 Now these are the chiefs of David’s mighty men, who gave him strong support in his kingdom, together with all Israel, to make him king, according to the word of the LORD concerning Israel. (1 Chronicles 11:10)

Gave him strong support is doing a lot of quiet work in English. The Hebrew is stronger and stranger than that.

Strong support — חָזַק (Hithpael) — hitḥazzēq — to strengthen oneself, to hold firmly, to take courage with someone (BDB).

It’s reflexive. They strengthened themselves with David. This isn’t a list of men who were conscripted or purchased or impressed into service. It’s a list of men who threw their own weight behind a fugitive and made themselves stronger in the act of doing it. Knoppers reads the whole sequence that way — “the voluntary endorsement by troops from various tribes, ‘along with all Israel,’ progressively strengthens David and establishes his kingship.”²

And Boda catches the tail of the verse, which is the part that keeps this from being a story about charisma:³ according to the word of the LORD concerning Israel. Not concerning David. The rubric over the whole roster reminds you that David’s appointment was never ultimately about David.

Then chapter 12 does something you almost never catch a biblical narrator doing at this scale. It rewinds. It goes back before the coronation and shows you the coming, in waves, in the years when following David was a bad career move:

The Benjaminites at Ziklag (12:1–7) — Saul’s own tribe, defecting to the man Saul is hunting. Payne’s read is the obvious one and it still lands: even Saul’s own kinsmen recognized who God had actually appointed.⁴

The Gadites at the wilderness stronghold (12:8–15), described in one of the great sentences in Chronicles — “whose faces were like the faces of lions and who were swift as gazelles upon the mountains” — who crossed a flooded Jordan in the first month to get to him.

And then, the scene I can’t get past. Men of Benjamin and Judah come to the stronghold, and David goes out to meet them and says, essentially, I don’t know which of you this is:

17 “If you have come to me in friendship to help me, my heart will be joined to you; but if to betray me to my adversaries, although there is no wrong in my hands, then may the God of our fathers see and rebuke you.”

That’s a man who has been sold out before. And the answer he gets is not a treaty or a negotiation. It’s an oracle:

18 Then the Spirit clothed Amasai, chief of the thirty, and he said, “We are yours, O David, and with you, O son of Jesse! Peace, peace to you, and peace to your helpers! For your God helps you.” Then David received them and made them officers of his troops.

Clothed. That’s the actual verb.

Clothed — לָבַשׁ — lābaš — to put on, to be clothed with; used of the Spirit of God clothing Himself with a person as with a garment (BDB/HALOT).

Same idiom as Gideon in Judges 6:34. The Spirit doesn’t come upon Amasai. The Spirit puts Amasai on. And what the Spirit says through him is not a prophecy about the future of the monarchy. It’s four words of belonging. We are yours.

That’s the second value, and I’ll name it too: Community. We can’t be who God made us to be, or do what God made us to do, alone — and the imago Dei shows up most fully in a life of loving interdependence. Notice it isn’t only that the people need a king. It’s that the king needs the people, and the text says so out loud: they strengthened him. Progressively. Over years. In the wilderness, before there was anything in it for them.

And it ends in a party. Chapter 12 closes with the muster at Hebron and then three days of eating and drinking, relatives hauling food from as far as Naphtali on donkeys and camels and mules and oxen — flour, fig cakes, raisins, wine, oil, oxen, sheep — “for there was joy in Israel.”

A coronation that ends in a potluck. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t funny. I’m also not going to pretend it isn’t exactly right.

Three. He still asks

Here’s where a list of warriors turns into something I did not expect it to be.

Right in the middle of the roster, in the account of the three, is this:

17 And David said longingly, “Oh that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!” 18 Then the three mighty men broke through the camp of the Philistines and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate and took it and brought it to David. But David would not drink it. He poured it out to the LORD 19 and said, “Far be it from me before my God that I should do this. Shall I drink the lifeblood of these men? For at the risk of their lives they brought it.” (1 Chronicles 11:17–19)

He wanted it. He said so out loud. Three men nearly died getting it. And he poured it into the dirt.

Read that again as a leadership text, because that’s what it is. The most dangerous thing about being given something is how quickly given starts to feel like owed. David catches himself at the exact moment the gift arrives, and he refuses to consume what people spent themselves for. He treats their risk as belonging to God rather than to him.

And that instinct doesn’t stop with the water. Go back to 2 Samuel 5, after the fortress falls, after the palace goes up, after “David knew that the LORD had established him.” The Philistines come. And the newly established king, sitting in his new capital with the finest army in the region camped around him, does this:

19 And David inquired of the LORD, “Shall I go up against the Philistines? Will you give them into my hand?”

Fine. Good. Now they come back — same enemy, same valley, same king. And here’s the part I want you to sit with:

23 And when David inquired of the LORD, he said, “You shall not go up; go around to their rear, and come against them opposite the balsam trees.”

He asks again. Same situation. And the answer is different.

Which means the asking was never a formality. If David had run the second battle on the transcript of the first one — and why wouldn’t he, it worked, it’s the same enemy in the same valley — he’d have marched straight up into a battle plan God had already changed.

That’s the third value: Humility. Our sin broke us from what God designed us for, Jesus came to restore it, and so we live as apprentices in His school rather than as our own experts. And apprentices ask. Not because they’re timid. Because yesterday’s answer isn’t automatically today’s, and the only way to know the difference is to keep asking a God who is still speaking.

Success is what makes this hard, and let’s be direct about why. Nobody stops asking because they got humiliated. People stop asking because something worked. Because they got established. Because the pattern that God gave them last time is now a pattern they own, and owning it feels an awful lot like wisdom.

The water in the dirt and the second question in the valley are the same reflex. Both of them are David refusing to be the source.

Four. Read the names again

Now go back to the list, and this time actually read it.

38 Joel the brother of Nathan, Mibhar the son of Hagri, 39 Zelek the Ammonite, Naharai of Beeroth, the armor-bearer of Joab the son of Zeruiah… (1 Chronicles 11:38–39)

46 Eliel the Mahavite, and Jeribai, and Joshaviah, the sons of Elnaam, and Ithmah the Moabite (1 Chronicles 11:46)

An Ammonite. A Moabite. Both named. Both counted.

Now open Deuteronomy.

3 “No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever.” (Deuteronomy 23:3)

Let me be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of place where a good point gets oversold. Deuteronomy 23 governs entry into the assembly — the worshiping congregation — and it isn’t a statute about military service, and its scope was debated in Israel long before it was debated by us. I’m not claiming these men were smuggled past a law. I’m pointing at something simpler and, I think, harder to explain away: the categories Deuteronomy names as the outermost boundary of belonging are the categories standing in the official roster of the men who made David king.

Two more honest notes, because this post is no good to you if it cheats.

First, Chronicles didn’t invent these foreigners. Zelek the Ammonite and Naharai of Beeroth are already there in 2 Samuel 23. What Chronicles does is relocate the whole roster to the coronation, and then extend it — and Ithmah the Moabite sits in that extension, in a stretch of verses with no parallel in Samuel at all.

There is a Moabite on the list of the men who made David king.

And David’s great-grandmother was a Moabite. Ruth. Whose son was Obed, “the father of Jesse, the father of David.” Four generations, and the woman from the excluded nation is in the king’s own blood before a single foreigner shows up in his army.

Which is the thing Israel kept forgetting about her own vocation. Because the call was never be the people God likes. It was this, at Sinai, before there was a king or a temple or a list:

5 “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:5–6)

Kingdom of priests — מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים — mamleket kōhănîm — a kingdom consisting of priests; a royal priesthood (BDB).

A priest is not a person who has God. A priest is a person who stands between God and somebody who doesn’t. The whole point of being chosen was never the choosing. It was the for — “for all the earth is mine.” Israel was elected on behalf of the nations she was surrounded by, and every time she read her election as a wall instead of a bridge she lost the plot of her own story.

And here’s what turns that from a nice observation into something with teeth. Because we know roughly when the Chronicler was writing, and we know what else was being read out loud in Jerusalem around then.

Chronicles is post-exilic. The temple’s been rebuilt — smaller. Judah is a minor province in somebody else’s empire. The community is small, poor, surrounded, and genuinely frightened about whether it’s going to exist in a hundred years. That’s the room he’s writing into.

And here’s a scene from that room:

1 On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, 2 for they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them—yet our God turned the curse into a blessing. 3 As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. (Nehemiah 13:1–3)

Same law. Same city. The same small, anxious, post-exilic world.

Now, I want to be fair to them, because it would be very easy to get cheap here and I don’t think Nehemiah is the villain of this story. That community had nearly dissolved. Assimilation had almost finished what Babylon started. When you are three generations from extinction, a boundary isn’t bigotry — it’s a tourniquet. And the law they were reading is a real law that really says that.

But hold the two pages next to each other anyway.

On one, a community reads Deuteronomy 23 aloud and separates out everyone of foreign descent, the same day.

On the other, a writer working for that same community sits down to compose the definitive picture of what the kingdom looked like when God’s word was actually being kept — and there’s an Ammonite in it, and a Moabite in it, and he doesn’t take them out.

He didn’t have to keep them. He was already rearranging. He moved the entire roster from the end of the reign to the front of it. He extended it past where Samuel’s version stops. He had every editorial opportunity a person could want.

The foreigners stayed on the list.

Two more things I can’t settle for you, and won’t pretend to.

First: even Deuteronomy 23 doesn’t draw its line evenly. Four verses after the one everybody quotes, it says this — “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land,” and their grandchildren may enter the assembly. The chapter that draws the hardest boundary in the Torah draws it while remembering that Israel was the foreigner once, in somebody else’s country. That’s not me softening the text. That’s the text.

Second, and this is the more honest one: I can’t tell you what the Chronicler meant by it. You can read that roster as a quiet argument aimed at his own generation — look who was standing there when the kingdom began. Or you can read it as an archivist keeping faith with a record he inherited and refusing to improve it. We can’t date the two documents against each other closely enough to know, and he never says. Anybody who tells you otherwise is filling in a blank.

But we don’t need the motive. We just need what’s on the page.

So when the Chronicler assembles his picture of what a kingdom under God’s word looks like, and puts it at the front of the reign as the definitional scene, and there’s an Ammonite in it and a Moabite in it, in a generation that was reading Deuteronomy 23 out loud —

that’s not a clerical accident.

That’s the vocation, showing up in the muster roll.

That’s the fourth value, and it’s the one we name Journey: that a Savior came to restore us to our purpose as image-bearers, and that we carry God’s own heart to restore creation and make all things new — beginning with Jesus, and then with His people, sent. Leading as God’s ambassadors. Israel’s calling was centrifugal from the start. It was always supposed to end up with outsiders on the inside of the list.

The list that no one can number

And this is where I have to tell you that David’s roster is a shadow of a better one.

Because for all the Ammonites and Moabites standing in that muster, the wall was still there. Really there. Paul, writing to Gentiles who knew exactly which side of it they’d been born on, doesn’t soften it — he makes them say it out loud first:

12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. (Ephesians 2:12)

Strangers. Alienated. No hope. That’s the honest position of every Gentile name in the Old Testament, foreign hero of the faith or not.

And then:

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. (Ephesians 2:14–16)

Create — κτίζω — ktizō — to bring something into existence which has not existed before; to create, to make (BDAG).

Not admit. Not naturalize. Not grant a waiver to. Create. The word for what God does in Genesis 1. Christ doesn’t process the outsider’s paperwork; He makes a new humanity in Himself where the old category doesn’t exist anymore — and the way He does it is in His flesh, on a cross, killing the hostility by absorbing it.

David’s roster included some foreigners. Jesus abolished foreign.

And so John, given the final vision of the throne, sees the roster completed — and the thing he can’t do with it is the thing you and I do to 1 Chronicles 11 every time we read past it:

9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands (Revelation 7:9)

He can’t count it. Nobody can count it. The list has run past the end of the page.

Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language. And it is, structurally, the same scene — warriors of every origin, gathered voluntarily, standing before a king who was given the throne rather than seizing it, at the end of a long stretch of years when following Him looked like a bad idea to everyone watching.

The mighty men strengthened themselves with David. The multitude before the throne can’t strengthen the Lamb and doesn’t need to. That’s the escalation. David’s kingdom was assembled by men who showed up; Christ’s kingdom is assembled by a King who came and got people who couldn’t.

So read the list

Here’s what I want you to do with all of this, and it isn’t complicated.

The four things we say we are — identity that’s declared over you and not manufactured by you, community you can’t be yourself without, humility that keeps asking a God who’s still speaking, a journey that sends you outward to people who aren’t in yet — those aren’t a branding exercise. They’re not four nice words somebody picked in a meeting.

They’re what the kingdom of God has looked like every single time it has actually shown up. They’re in a coronation scene from three thousand years ago that most people scroll past because it’s a list of names they can’t pronounce.

Jashobeam. Eleazar. Sibbecai the Hushathite.

Zelek the Ammonite.

Ithmah the Moabite.

Somebody wrote them down. Somebody thought it mattered that the record show who came — not what the king achieved, but who showed up, from where, at what cost, from which excluded nation.

There’s a list like that with your name on it.

Go read it out loud sometime. It’s the best part of the chapter.

Notes

Footnotes

1. Gary N. Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 10–29, Anchor Bible 12A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), on 1 Chr 11:10. ↩

2. Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 10–29, on the gathering sequence of 1 Chr 11–12. ↩

3. Mark J. Boda, 1–2 Chronicles, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2010), on 1 Chr 11:10. ↩

4. J. Barton Payne, “1, 2 Chronicles,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), on 1 Chr 12:1–7. ↩