Context & Key Themes
1 Chronicles 20 closes the Ammonite war and then briefly records three encounters with Philistine giants. The chapter is notably compact — the siege and capture of Rabbah takes three verses, and the three giant encounters take five. The Chronicler is not interested in lingering here. The military work is being done, enemies are being subdued, and the chapter functions as confirmation that the covenant victories of chapters 18 and 19 continue. What is absent from this chapter is as significant as what is present: in 2 Samuel, the Rabbah campaign is the context for David and Bathsheba, Uriah’s death, Nathan’s confrontation, and the subsequent catastrophes. The Chronicler moves past all of it to arrive at the crown on David’s head and the giants falling in the Philistine fields.
Key Verse
“And there was again war with the Philistines, and Elhanan the son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite.”
— 1 Chronicles 20:5
Summary
In the spring, the time when kings go out to battle, Joab leads out the army and ravages the country of the Ammonites and besieges Rabbah. David remains in Jerusalem. Joab strikes Rabbah and overthrows it. David takes the crown of Milcom from his head — it weighs a talent of gold and has a precious stone in it, which is set on David’s head. He also brings out a great amount of spoil from the city. The people in it he brings out and sets them to labor with saws, iron picks, and axes. David does the same to all the cities of the Ammonites. Then three encounters with Philistine giants: at Gezer, Sibbecai the Hushathite kills Sippai, who was one of the descendants of the giants. At another battle, Elhanan son of Jair kills Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, whose spear shaft was like a weaver’s beam. At Gath, a man of great stature with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot kills, twenty-four in number, who was also a descendant of the giants. He taunts Israel. Jonathan the son of Shimea, David’s brother, kills him. These fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.
Reflection
The giants in the closing verses are the last remnants of the kind of enemy that once terrified the spies Moses sent into Canaan. The descendants of the Anakim, the Rephaim, the men of great stature who made Israel feel like grasshoppers — they are still here, still fighting, still taunting. But they are falling now, one by one, to David’s servants. What once paralyzed a generation of Israelites is being cleaned up in a few verses by men whose names are worth knowing: Sibbecai the Hushathite, Elhanan son of Jair, Jonathan son of Shimea. The ordinary men of David’s army are finishing what the spies’ generation could not begin. That is the fruit of having a king who seeks the Lord and an army that goes out in his strength.
The Chronicler’s placement of this chapter is deliberate. He wants the reader to see David’s reign as a reign of consistent outward expansion and victory, the fulfillment of what God promised. The shadow material — the moral failures, the family catastrophes, the rebellions — is not denied. It is simply not the story the Chronicler is telling. He is writing for people who need to see what faithful kingship produces and what God’s covenant faithfulness looks like when it is honored, so they know what to rebuild toward.