1 Chronicles 1

Chronicles opens not with a story but with a family tree that reaches back to the beginning: Adam, and the line through Seth to Noah and his sons, from whom the nations spread. It narrows quickly to the line of promise — Shem to Abraham, then Abraham’s sons, with Ishmael and the sons of Keturah and the descendants of Esau noted before the account settles on Israel. The message is that all of history has been moving along a single, God-kept line.