Old Testament

The Old Testament opens with a genealogy problem. Genesis 5 runs from Adam to Noah in ten names, Genesis 11 runs from Shem to Abram in ten more, and from there the text almost never stops counting. Tribes are numbered at Sinai, families are sorted on the plains of Moab, and the whole census apparatus of Numbers 1 and Numbers 26 exists because Scripture treats people as individuals with fathers, allotments and burial places rather than as a crowd.

The story those names carry moves in seven stages, with the years between the Testaments as an eighth. Creation to Babel covers Genesis 1–11, from the first family to the scattering at Babel. The patriarchal period, Genesis 12–50, narrows the whole record to one household: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel and the twelve sons whose names become the tribes. Exodus through Deuteronomy hold Egypt and the wilderness, where Moses, Aaron and Miriam lead a people counted twice and buried mostly in the desert. Joshua through Ruth cover the conquest and the judges, a period the text itself sums up in Judges 21:25.

From 1 Samuel 8 the monarchy begins, and with it the densest concentration of named people in the Hebrew Scriptures: Saul, David, Solomon, their officers, their scribes, their armour-bearers and the thirty-seven men listed in 2 Samuel 23. The kingdom divides at 1 Kings 12, and for the next three and a half centuries of divided monarchy the record runs in two columns — the kings of Judah and the kings of Israel in Samaria — with prophets crossing between them. Samaria falls in 2 Kings 17, Jerusalem in 2 Kings 25, and the exile begins.

Return follows. Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi belong to the Persian period, and their books preserve some of the most granular lists in the Bible: the households that came back in Ezra 2, the wall-builders assigned gate by gate in Nehemiah 3, the signatories of the covenant in Nehemiah 10. Daniel is set at the courts of Babylon and then Persia; Esther at the Persian court in Susa.

Not everyone in these books is a hero, and not everyone is named. Scripture identifies people by role when it withholds a name — Pharaoh's daughter, the medium of Endor, the wise woman of Tekoa, the Shunammite — and those records are kept here on the same terms as the named, because the text treats them as actors in the story rather than as background. Foreign figures are kept too: Hittite, Egyptian, Moabite, Aramean, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian names appear throughout, from Melchizedek in Genesis 14 to Cyrus in Ezra 1.

Names repeat, and that is where most confusion starts: more than two dozen men are called Zechariah, more than a dozen Jonathan, and several Jeroboams, Josephs and Zedekiahs stand in different centuries.