William Johnstone (Chronicles and Exodus) offers an explanation for the nearly verbatim repetition a portion of the genealogy of Benjamin in 1 Chronicles 8:29-38 and 9:35-44. The repeated portion “concerns, on the one hand, the population of Jerusalem, and, on the other, the family of Saul.” Both are Benjamite: Jerusalem is a Benjamite city (cf. Joshua 18:11-28) and Saul a Benjamite king. The two lists—of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and of the family of Saul—fit into the general Benjamite genealogy of chapter 8 (112-3).
Yet “both receive a supra-Benjamite significance. In the immediately ensuing chapter (1 Chron. 10), in which the Chronicler begins his historical narrative proper, tracing the theme of guilt and atonement, it is Saul, the Benjamite, who provides the Chronicler with his first example of ma’al.” Yet this first breakdown is associated with Jerusalem, “the place where the new centralized atonement cult will be introduced.” The message is: “where Israel falls into guilt, there God provides the means of atonement. The reason that Benjamin appears last in the tribal genealogies is, therefore, not merely that Benjamin, as one of the last survivors, constitutes an enclosing bracket around the more vulnerable northern tribes; rather, it is that Benjamin provides the Chronicler with the double link of both guilt and atonement forward into this account of Israel’s history” (113).
