Catholic Commentary
The Sons of Naphtali
13The sons of Naphtali: Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, Shallum, and the sons of Bilhah.
1 Chronicles 7:13 lists the four sons of Naphtali—Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum—and concludes by identifying them as "the sons of Bilhah," Naphtali's mother through Jacob's handmaid. This genealogical notice links the post-exilic community to ancient Israel's patriarchal and exodus heritage while affirming that Naphtali's covenantal status derives from faithful inclusion rather than bloodline purity.
God's genealogy includes no footnotes: the sons of a handmaid stand as full covenant heirs, claiming the dignity that exile and obscurity cannot erase.
In the moral sense, Bilhah's story — and Rachel's — speaks to how God works through human limitation, through barrenness and vulnerability, to fulfill His purposes. The sons of Bilhah are not lesser sons; they are covenant sons. This resonates with the Catholic understanding that God's grace operates precisely in weakness (2 Cor 12:9).
Catholic tradition illuminates this brief verse in several distinctive ways.
The Integrity of the Whole People of God. The Chronicler's insistence on including all twelve tribes — even in the most compressed form — reflects what the Catechism calls the "unity of the divine plan" (CCC §128). The Church Fathers, particularly Origen of Alexandria (Homilies on Numbers, Hom. 28), saw the twelve tribes as a type of the universal Church: just as no tribe could be omitted from the reconstituted Israel, so no member of the Body of Christ is without a place in the divine economy. St. Augustine (City of God, Book XVII) similarly reads the tribal genealogies as witnesses to the unbroken providential thread connecting creation to the City of God.
Bilhah and the Theology of Adoption. The sons of Bilhah, legally adopted into full tribal dignity through Rachel, are a type of adoptive divine sonship. The Catechism teaches that through Baptism "we really become children of God, partakers of the divine nature" (CCC §1265). St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on Johannine adoption language, drew on precisely this Old Testament legal background: those born through handmaids were no less true heirs. Catholics adopted into the Body of Christ through Baptism are no less truly sons and daughters of the Father.
Memory as Theological Act. The Pontifical Biblical Commission (The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures, 2001) notes that genealogies in Chronicles serve a theological anamnesis — a sacred remembrance that constitutes identity. For the Church, the canon of saints, the commemoration of the faithful departed, and the Eucharistic anamnesis all participate in this same logic: to name is to claim a living bond that death and exile cannot sever.
At first glance, 1 Chronicles 7:13 appears to offer little to a contemporary Catholic reader — it is a list, a footnote, a name buried in genealogy. But its very terseness carries a message. In a culture that prizes the prominent and forgets the unremarkable, the Chronicler insists on naming Naphtali. No tribe, no person, no baptized soul is a footnote in God's book.
Practically, this verse invites Catholics to take seriously the practice of naming — naming the dead in prayer, naming the forgotten in advocacy, keeping the memory of the marginalized alive. The Church's practice of praying for the faithful departed by name, of maintaining parish memorial books and the observance of All Souls' Day, is a living continuation of the Chronicler's theological impulse.
Furthermore, the reference to Bilhah challenges any tendency to regard those who come to the faith through unconventional paths — converts, those brought to baptism late, those from broken or irregular backgrounds — as somehow lesser members. In God's genealogy, the sons of the handmaid stand alongside the sons of the free. Every baptized Catholic carries full dignity as a child of God, regardless of the circumstances of their coming to faith.
Commentary
1 Chronicles 7:13 — Literal Sense and Narrative Function
First Chronicles 7:13 consists of a single, tightly compressed genealogical notice: "The sons of Naphtali: Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, Shallum, and the sons of Bilhah." Its brevity is itself notable. In the broader context of 1 Chronicles 2–9, the Chronicler (writing in the post-exilic period, most likely the fifth or fourth century BC) is constructing a comprehensive portrait of all Israel rooted in its ancestral identity. Naphtali receives one of the shortest entries — far shorter than Judah (chapters 2–4) or Benjamin (chapter 8) — yet its inclusion is not incidental. Every tribe must be accounted for if the people returning from Babylon are to reconstitute themselves as the whole Israel of God.
The Four Sons
The names Jahziel (also rendered "Jahzeel" in Genesis 46:24 and Numbers 26:48), Guni, Jezer, and Shallum correspond closely to the names given in Genesis 46:24, the account of Jacob's descent into Egypt. Numbers 26:48–50 repeats the same four names in the context of the wilderness census. The Chronicler is therefore doing more than compiling a list; he is deliberately linking his post-exilic community to the most ancient strata of Israel's remembered history, from the patriarchal era (Egypt) through the wilderness generation (the census) and now into the restored community. This three-point anchoring — patriarchs, exodus, restoration — is a hallmark of Chronicler theology.
"The Sons of Bilhah"
The closing phrase — "the sons of Bilhah" — is the theologically charged element of the verse. Bilhah was the handmaid (Hebrew: šiphḥāh) of Rachel (Genesis 29:29), given to Jacob as a secondary wife when Rachel perceived herself as barren. Bilhah bore Dan and Naphtali (Genesis 30:3–8). Rachel's act of offering Bilhah was an exercise of the legal custom of surrogate motherhood in the ancient Near East, by which the child born to the handmaid was reckoned the child of the mistress. Crucially, the sons of Bilhah — Dan and Naphtali — held full tribal standing within Israel. There was no second-class status. The Chronicler's explicit mention of Bilhah here (unusual in genealogical shorthand) reinforces this: the covenant tribe of Naphtali owes its very existence to an act of desperate faith by a barren woman and the providential fruitfulness of her handmaid.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological sense, Naphtali points forward to the ministry of Christ. Isaiah 9:1–2 singles out "the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali" as the region where the people walking in darkness would see a great light — a prophecy Matthew (4:13–16) explicitly applies to Jesus' Galilean ministry. Thus the very tribe recorded so tersely here becomes the geographic cradle of the proclamation of the Gospel. The genealogical obscurity of Naphtali in Chronicles stands in ironic contrast to its eschatological luminosity in prophecy: the forgotten tribe becomes the tribe of the dawning light.