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 at the Jordan, 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. Primeval history covers Genesis 1–11, from the first family to the scattering at Babel. The patriarchal chapters, Genesis 12–50, narrow 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 summarizes 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 armourers and the thirty-seven men listed in 2 Samuel 23. The kingdom divides at 1 Kings 12, and for the next four centuries the record runs in two columns — the kings of Judah in Jerusalem 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 and Esther are set in the same empire, one at the Babylonian and Persian courts, the other at 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 witch of Endor, the 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. Twenty-nine men are called Zechariah, thirteen are called Jonathan, and several Jeroboams, Josephs and Zedekiahs stand in different centuries. Each profile below is a single person, fixed by father, era and first reference, so that the Jeroboam who split the kingdom in 1 Kings 12 is never merged with the Jeroboam who reigned in 2 Kings 14.

Every era, list and lineage on this page is drawn from the text itself, with references given so any claim can be checked against the chapter it comes from.