All these were the children of Asher, heads of their father's house, choice and mighty men of valour, chief of the princes. And the number throughout the genealogy of them that were apt to the war and to battle was twenty and six thousand men.
All these were the children of Asher, heads of their father's house, choice and mighty men of valour. They were an active, courageous, and enterprising tribe; and when the census was taken at Sinai, it was numerically stronger than Ephraim, Manasseh, or Benjamin (Numbers 1:32-41). But the natural richness of its allotted possession fostered a love of ease and luxury, and consequently led to habits of inertness which were severely censured (Judges 5:17-18), and it gradually sank into insignificance, until its name was omitted from the list of tribes that furnished the princes or chief rulers (1 Chronicles 27:16-22). It is observable that the tribes of Dan and Zebulun are omitted in the genealogies recorded in this chapter.