Attributed commentary excerpt
Keil & Delitzsch on 1 Chronicles 4:13
A historical reference excerpt for this verse. Read it alongside the biblical text and other available sources.
Commentary on the Old Testament
C. F. Keil & F. Delitzsch · 19th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
Descendants of Kenaz. - קנז is a descendant of Hezron the son of Pharez, as may be inferred from the fact that Caleb the son of Jephunneh, a descendant of Hezron's son Caleb, is called in Num 32:12 and Jos 14:6 קנזּי, and consequently was also a descendant of Kenaz. Othniel and Seraiah, introduced here as קנז בּני, are not sons (in the narrower sense of the word), but more distant descendants of Kenaz; for Othniel and Caleb the son of Jephunneh were, according to Jos 15:17 and Jdg 1:13, brothers. (Note: The words used in Jdg 1:13, cf. Jos 15:17, of the relationship of Othniel and Caleb, הקּטון כלב אחי בּן־קנז, may be, it is true, taken in different senses, either as signifying filius Kenasi fratris Caleb, according to which, not Othniel, but Kenaz, was a younger brother of Caleb; or in this way, filius Kenasi, frater Calebi minor, as we have interpreted them in the text, and also in the commentary on Jos 15:17. This interpretation we still hold to be certainly the correct one, notwithstanding what Bachmann (Buch der Richter, on Ch1 1:13) has brought forward against it and in favour of the other interpretation, and cannot see that his chief reasons are decisive. The assertion that we must predicate of Othniel, if he be a younger brother of Caleb, an unsuitably advanced age, is not convincing. Caleb was eighty-five years of age at the division of the land of Canaan ( Jos 14:10). Now if we suppose that his younger or youngest brother Othniel was from twenty-five to thirty years younger, as often happens, Othniel would be from sixty to sixty-one or fifty-five to fifty-six years of age at the conquest of Debir, - an age at which he might well win a wife as the reward of valour. Ten years later came the invasion of the land by Cushan Rishathaim, which lasted eight years, till Othniel had conquered Cushan R., and there were judges in Israel. This victory he would thus gain at the age of seventy-eight or seventy-three; and even if he filled the office of judge for forty years-which, however, Jdg 3:11 does not state - he would have reached no greater age than 118 or 113 years, only three or eight years older than Joshua had been. If we consider what Caleb said of himself in his eighty-fifth year, Jos 14:11, "I am still strong as in the day that Moses sent me (i.e., forty years before); as my strength was then, even so is my strength now for war, both to go out and to come in," we cannot think that Othniel, in the seventy-third or seventy-eighth years of his age, was too old to be a military leader. But the other reason: "that Caleb is always called son of Jephunneh, Othniel always son of Kenaz, should cause us to hesitate before we take Othniel to be the proper brother of Caleb," loses all its weight when we find that Caleb also is called in Num 32:12 and Jos 14:6 קנזי = בּן־קנז, and it is seen that Caleb therefore, as well as Othniel, was a son of Kenaz. Now if the Kenazite Caleb the son of Jephunneh were a brother of Kenaz, the father of Othniel, we must suppose an older Kenaz, the grandfather or great-grandfather of Caleb, and a younger Kenaz, the father of Othniel. This supposition is certainly feasible, for, according to Ch1 4:15 of our chapter, a grandson of Caleb again was called Kenaz; but if it be probable is another question. For the answering of this question in the affirmative, Bachmann adduces that, according to Ch1 4:13, Othniel is undoubtedly the son of Kenaz in the proper sense of the word; but it might perhaps be difficult to…
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