Covenantal Carpentery: God's Plan for Broken Lines Text: 1 Chronicles 23:21-23
Introduction: The World's Hatred of Begats
We live in an age that despises history, detests lineage, and holds all forms of obligation in contempt. Our generation is a generation of chronological snobs, who believe that wisdom was born with them, and will certainly die with them. And so, when the modern reader stumbles across a passage like this one, tucked away in the back corridors of 1 Chronicles, his eyes glaze over. Mahli, Mushi, Eleazar, Kish. It sounds like a random assortment of ancient names, a dusty and irrelevant accounting of people long dead. Why would God put this in the Bible? Why must we wade through these endless "begats?"
The answer is that God is building something. He is the master architect of history, and genealogies are the load-bearing walls of His redemptive structure. Our secular, egalitarian age wants a world of disconnected individuals, a world of autonomous atoms floating in a meaningless void, each one his own god, making it up as he goes along. But the Bible presents us with a world that is woven together, a world of fathers and sons, of households and tribes, of covenants and obligations that stretch across generations. These lists are not boring; they are the blueprint of God's faithfulness. They are a declaration that history is not random. It is a story, and God is its author.
The modern world sees a problem like the one presented in our text, a man dying without sons, and its only solution is a shrug. "Too bad for him. His line is over. His name is forgotten." The individual is extinguished, and that is the end of it. But God is a God of life, a God of covenant, a God who remembers His promises. He has built into His law and into the very fabric of His people a way to mend what is broken, to continue what was cut off, and to ensure that a man's name is not blotted out from Israel.
This short passage is a beautiful, miniature portrait of what we might call covenantal carpentry. It shows us God's appointed means for repairing a breach in the wall. It is a practical, earthy outworking of a profound theological reality: God is jealous for the preservation of His people, and He has made provision for their continuance. This is not just about the Levites; it is about the gospel. For if God is this concerned with the household of a lesser-known Levite, how much more is He concerned with the household of His own Son?
The Text
The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi. The sons of Mahli were Eleazar and Kish.
And Eleazar died and had no sons, but daughters only, so their brothers, the sons of Kish, took them up as wives.
The sons of Mushi: Mahli, Eder, and Jeremoth, three.
(1 Chronicles 23:21-23 LSB)
The Levitical Ledger (v. 21)
We begin with the simple accounting of verse 21:
"The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi. The sons of Mahli were Eleazar and Kish." (1 Chronicles 23:21)
The Chronicler is laying out the divisions of the Levites, whom David is organizing for the service of the Temple that Solomon will build. The Levites were the tribe set apart for the service of God's house. They were not given a territorial inheritance like the other tribes, because, as God told them, "I am your portion and your inheritance" (Numbers 18:20). Their entire existence was to be oriented around the worship of Yahweh.
Here, we are focused on the third son of Levi, Merari. His descendants were given the weighty task of carrying the structural components of the Tabernacle, the frames, the pillars, the bases, the pegs. They carried the skeleton of God's house. It was heavy, foundational work. And so it is fitting that in the genealogy of this family, we see God's concern for the foundational structures of family and inheritance.
The lineage is straightforward. Merari has two sons, Mahli and Mushi. The line of Mahli is then traced to his two sons, Eleazar and Kish. These are not just names. These are men in covenant with the living God, men with a designated role in the central drama of the world, which is the worship of God. To our ears, it sounds like a list. To God, it sounds like a roll call of His servants. He knows their names. He ordained their lives. And He is concerned with the continuation of their households.
A Problem and a Provision (v. 22)
Verse 22 presents us with a crisis, a dead end in the genealogical line, and then immediately provides the God-ordained solution.
"And Eleazar died and had no sons, but daughters only, so their brothers, the sons of Kish, took them up as wives." (1 Chronicles 23:22 LSB)
Here is the issue: "Eleazar died and had no sons." In the patriarchal economy of Israel, this was a significant problem. A man's name, his inheritance, and his lineage were carried on through his sons. To die without a son was to have your name "blotted out." It was a personal and a corporate tragedy. Eleazar had built his house, but there was no one to carry on the name over the door. He had daughters, and these daughters were precious and valuable, but they could not, by themselves, perpetuate their father's line.
Our feminized, egalitarian culture reads this and immediately bristles. It sees injustice. It sees women treated as second-class. But this is to read our own rebellion and confusion back into a world that operated on a different, and far saner, set of principles. The Bible does not denigrate these daughters; it protects them and provides for them in a way that also honors and preserves the created order of headship and inheritance. The solution is not to pretend that daughters are sons, but to provide a righteous way for the line to continue through them.
And what is that solution? "So their brothers, the sons of Kish, took them up as wives." Now, the text says "their brothers," but Eleazar and Kish were brothers, which makes the sons of Kish the cousins of Eleazar's daughters. This is a form of what is often called a Levirate marriage, prescribed in Deuteronomy 25. The principle is that when a man dies without a son, his brother is to take his widow as a wife, and the first son born to them would be counted as the heir of the deceased brother, so that "his name will not be blotted out from Israel."
Here the situation is slightly different, it is not a widow, but daughters who have an inheritance but no brother. The principle, however, is the same: the family, the clan, has a corporate responsibility to see that a brother's line does not fail. The sons of Kish, the cousins of these women, step up. They marry their kinswomen. Why? So that the inheritance of Eleazar, his portion among the Levites, would remain within his clan. The children born to these unions would be the grandchildren of Eleazar, and his name and household would continue. This was not a sentimental suggestion. This was covenantal duty. This was faithfulness. The sons of Kish were being their brother's keeper, even after he was gone.
Order and Completion (v. 23)
The chapter then rounds out the list, showing the completion of the family line.
"The sons of Mushi: Mahli, Eder, and Jeremoth, three." (1 Chronicles 23:23 LSB)
After detailing the problem and the solution in the line of Mahli, the Chronicler simply lists the sons of the other brother, Mushi. There is no drama here. The line continues. The roll call is completed. This verse serves to highlight the exceptional nature of what happened in verse 22. It shows us that God's ordinary pattern is for fathers to have sons and for the line to continue simply. But it also shows us that when God's ordinary pattern is disrupted by death, He has an extraordinary, but lawful, provision to ensure His purposes are not thwarted.
God's accounting is meticulous. He notes that there were "three" sons. Every man is counted. Every family line is important. This is the God who numbers the hairs on our heads and the stars in the sky. He is most certainly concerned with the families of those who serve in His house. This entire chapter is about putting the house of God in order, and we see here that the foundation of that order is the well-ordered family, preserved and protected by God's covenantal laws.
The Gospel in the Genealogies
So what does this ancient Levitical ledger have to do with us? Everything. This passage is a small picture of the great problem that all humanity faced, and the glorious provision God made in the gospel.
Like Eleazar, the first Adam died, and he had no sons who could carry on his name in righteousness. All of Adam's sons were born into his sin, his corruption, his condemnation. The line of humanity was a dead end. We were all born into a house destined for demolition. We were spiritual orphans, with no inheritance and no future. The name of Adam, in his fallenness, was destined to be blotted out under the judgment of God.
But God, in His infinite wisdom, had a provision. He sent a kinsman-redeemer. He sent a "brother" to rescue the line. The Lord Jesus Christ, the second Adam, became our brother. He took on our flesh and blood "so that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death" (Hebrews 2:14). He is the ultimate son of Kish, the greater Boaz, who came to the house of a dead man, Adam, and took a bride for Himself, the Church, so that He might raise up sons for God.
Through our union with Christ, we who were daughters of a fallen house, with no name and no inheritance, are brought into a new family. We are adopted as sons. "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons" (Galatians 4:4-5). The line was broken, but Christ, our covenant-keeping brother, mended it.
He did this so that the name of God would not be blotted out from the earth. He raises up spiritual offspring, a holy priesthood, to serve in the true Temple, which is His body. And just as the sons of Kish acted out of covenantal obligation, so Christ acted out of His covenantal faithfulness to the Father. He came to do the will of Him who sent Him, which was to lose none of those the Father had given Him, but to raise them up at the last day.
Therefore, do not despise the genealogies. Do not scorn these lists of names. In them, you see the careful, steady, sovereign hand of God, working through all the tragedies and dead ends of human history to preserve a line, to keep a covenant, and to pave the way for the coming of our great Kinsman-Redeemer. He is the one who finds us in our fatherless state and takes us up as His own, so that His name, and ours in Him, might endure forever.