GENEALOGY
769
GENEALOGY
In their case, however, it -vvas heightened bj' sereral peculiar circumstances. Tlie promise of tlie land of Canaan to tlie seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob suc- cessively, and the separation of the Israelites from the Gentile world ; the expectation of the Messiah as to spring from the tribe of Judah ; the exclusively hered- itary priesthood of Aaron with its dignit}' and emolu- ments ; the long succession of kings in the line of Da- vid ; and the whole division and occupation of the land upon genealogical principles by the tribes, families, and houses of fathers, gave a deeper importance to the sci- ence of genealogy among the Jews than perhaps in any other nation. We have alread}' noted the evidence of the existence of family memoirs even before the iiood, to which we are probably indebted for the genealogies in Gen. iv, v ; and Gen. x, xi, etc., indicate the con- tinuance of the same system in the times between the flood and Abraham. But with Jacob, the founder of the nation, the system of reckoning by genealogies ("rn^nn, or in the language of Moses, Numb, i, 18, ^I^Tn) was much further developed. In Gen. xxxv, 22-26, we have a formal account of the sons of Jacob, the patriarchs of the nation, repeated in Exod. i, 1-5. In Gen. xlvi we have an exact genealogical census of the house of Israel about the time of Jacob's demise in Egypt. The way in which the former part of this census, relating to Reuben and Simeon, is quoted in Exod. vi, where the census of the tribe of Levi is all that was wanted, seems to show that it was transcribed from an existing document. When the Israelites were in the wilderness of Sinai, in the second month of the second year of the Exodus, their number was taken by divine command, " after their fiimilie.?, by the house of their fathers," tribe by tribe, and the number of each tribe is given " by their generations, after their fami- lies, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of the names, l)y their polls" (Numb, i, iii). This census was repeated 38 years afterwards, and the names of the families added, as we find in Numb. xxvi. According to these genealogical divisions they pitched their tents, and marched, and oft'ered their gifts and offerings, and chose the spies. According to the same they cast the lots by wdiich the troubler of Israel, Achan, was discovered, as later those by which Saul was called to the throne. Above all, according to these divisions, the whole land of Canaan was parcel- led out amongst them. But now of necessit}' that took place which always has taken place with respect to such genealogical arrangements, viz. that by marriage, or servitude, or incorporation as friends and allies, per- sons not strictly belonging b}' birth to such or such a family or triljo, were jet reckoned in the census as be- longing to them, when they had acquired property within their borders, and were liable to the various services in peace or war which were performed under the heads of such tribes and fiimilies. Nobody sup- poses that all the Cornelii, or all the Campbells, sprang from one ancestor, and it is in the teeth of direct evi- dence from Scripture, as well as of probabilitv. to sup- pose tiiat the Jewish tribes contained absolutely none but such as were descended from the twelve patriarchs. (Jul. Africanus, in his £p. to A ristides, expressly men- tions that the ancient genealogical records at Jerusa- lem included those who were descended from prose- lytes and yuMpat, as well as those who sprang from the patriarchs. The registers in Ezra and Nehemiah in- clude the Nethinim, and the children of Solomon's ser- vants.) The tribe of Levi was probably tlie only one which had no admixture of foreign blootl. In many of the Scripture genealogies, as e. g. those of Caleb, Joab, Segub, and the sons of Kephaiah, etc., in 1 Chron. iii, 21, it is quite clear that birth was not the ground of their incorporation into their respective tribes. See Becher ; Calef.. However, birth was, and contin- ued to be throughout their whole national course, the foundation of all the Jewish organization, and the III.— C c c
reigns of the more active and able kings and rulers were marked by attention to genealogical operations. When David established the Temple services on the footing which continued till the time of Christ, he di- vided the priests and Levites into courses and compa- nies, each under the family chief. The singers, the porters, the trumpeters, the players on instruments, were all thus genealogically distributed. In the active stirring reign of Kehoboam, we have the work of Iddo concerning genealogies (2 Chron. xii, 15). When Hez- ekiah reopened the Temple, and restored the Temple services which had fallen into disuse, he reckoned the whole nation bj' genealogies. This appears from the fact of many of the genealogies in Chronicles terminat- ing in Hezekiah's reign, from the expression, "So all Israel were reckoned bj' genealogies" (1 Chron. ix, 1), immediately following genealogies which do so termi- nate, and from the narrative in 2 Chron. xxxi, lG-19, proving that, as regards the priests and Levites, such a complete census was taken Ity Hezekiah. It is indi- cated also in 1 Chron. iv, 41. AVe learn, too, incidental- ly from Prov. xxv, that Hezekiah had a staff of scribes, who would be equally useful in transcribing genealogi- cal registers as in copying out Proverbs. So also in the reign of Jotham, king of Judah, who, among other great works, built the higher gate of the house of the Lord (2 Kings xv, 3-5), and was an energetic as well as a good king, we find a genealogical reckoning of the Reubenites (1 Chron. v, 17), probably in connection with Jotham's wars against the Ammonites (2 Chron. xxvii, 5). When Zerubbabel brought back the cap- tivity from Babylon, one of his first cares seems to have been to take a census of those that returned, and to settle them according to their genealogies. The evidence of this is found in 1 Chron. ix, and the dupli- cate passage Neh. xi ; in 1 Chron. iii, 19 ; and yet more distinctly in Neh. vii, 5, and xii. In like manner, Ne- hemiah, as an essential part of that national restora- tion which he labored so zealousl}' to promote, gather- ed ■' together the nobles, and the rulers, and the people, that thej'' might be reckoned by genealogy" (Neh. vii, 5 ; xii, 26). The abstract of this census is preserved in Ezra ii and Neh. vii, and a portion of it in 1 Chron. iii, 21-24. That this sj'stem was continued after their times, as far at least as the priests and Levites were concerned, we learn from Neh. xii, 22 ; and we have incidental evidence of the continued cai-e of the Jews still later to preserve their genealogies in such pas- sages of the apocryphal books as 1 Mace, ii, 1-5 ; viii, 17 ; xiv, 29, and perhaps Judith viii, 1 ; Tob. i, 1, etc. Passing on to the time of the birth of Christ, we have a striking incidental proof of the continuance of the Jewish genealogical economy in the fact that when Augustus ordered the census of the empire to be taken, the Jews in the province of Sj'ria immediately went each one to his own city, i. e. (as is clear from Joseph going to Bethlehem, the city of David), to the city to which his tribe, famih", and father's house belonged. Thus the return, if completed, doubtless exhibited the form of the old censuses taken by the kings of Israel and Judah.