Bible Synapse
Did Jesse have eight sons or seven?
Hard question · Genealogies · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
Jesse makes seven of his sons pass before Samuel; the youngest, David, is out keeping the sheep.
Again, Jesse made seven of his sons to pass before Samuel. And Samuel said unto Jesse, The Lord hath not chosen these. And Samuel said unto Jesse, Are here all thy children? And he said, There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the sheep. And Samuel said unto Jesse, Send and fetch him: for we will not sit down till he come hither.
Jesse the Ephrathite of Bethlehem “had eight sons”, and was an old man in the days of Saul.
Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Beth–lehem–judah, whose name was Jesse; and he had eight sons: and the man went among men for an old man in the days of Saul.
Jesse begat Eliab, Abinadab, Shimma, Nethaneel, Raddai and Ozem, and “David the seventh”.
And Jesse begat his firstborn Eliab, and Abinadab the second, and Shimma the third, Nethaneel the fourth, Raddai the fifth, Ozem the sixth, David the seventh:
The objection
1 Samuel says that seven of Jesse’s sons passed before Samuel before David was fetched, and that Jesse “had eight sons”. 1 Chronicles 2:13–15 lists only seven and calls David “the seventh”. Critics say the two books cannot both be right about how many sons Jesse had.
The answer
The two books describe Jesse’s family at different times and for different purposes. Samuel tells a story set in Jesse’s house during Saul’s reign, when all eight sons were alive: seven passed before Samuel, and David was the eighth. Chronicles gives a genealogical register, compiled long afterwards, and such registers list the sons who mattered for the family line. Keil and Delitzsch, like many before them, explain the difference by supposing that one son left no descendants, perhaps because he died young, and so had no place in the register. The ordinal numbers in Chronicles then count the sons it records, so that David is “the seventh” of those listed.
The Bible’s registers often leave sons who had no descendants out of their reckoning. Er and Onan, who died childless in Canaan, are named in Genesis 46:12 but founded no clans of Judah (Numbers 26:19–20), and the clans of Benjamin in Numbers 26 include only some of his sons. Chronicles is plainly selective here too: it names the three eldest exactly as Samuel does, Eliab, Abinadab and Shimma (Shammah), and it names David’s sisters, it seems, for the sake of their famous sons, Joab, Abishai, Asahel and Amasa (1 Chronicles 2:16–17). So Samuel tells us how many sons Jesse had; Chronicles tells us which of them carried on his family.
Other answers Christians give
Elihu, the eighth son
1 Chronicles 27:18 names “Elihu, one of the brethren of David” as prince of Judah. A Jewish tradition reported by Kimchi, and cited by John Gill, made Elihu the missing son, and Gill notes that the Syriac and Arabic versions insert ‘Elihu the seventh, David the eighth’ at 1 Chronicles 2:15. But the Septuagint reads ‘Eliab’ at 1 Chronicles 27:18, and Gill himself took Elihu to be Eliab, the eldest; ‘brethren’ can also mean kinsmen.
A son by another mother
The Jewish commentators Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, as reported by Gill, suggested that the eighth son had a different mother, and that Chronicles lists only the sons of David’s own mother.
Still open
Scripture does not name the eighth son or say why he is missing from Chronicles, so which explanation is right cannot be settled.
From the classic commentators
This account, which agrees with that in 1 Samuel 16:8-12, may be reconciled with the enumeration in our verse, on the supposition that one of the sons died without posterity.C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on 1 Chronicles 2:13–17 (1866–1891)