“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt 1:1).
If someone wants to start reading the Bible, I recommend starting with Matthew. He summarizes the entire Old Testament in 17 verses (Matthew 1:1-17). The Greek word for genealogy in verse 1 is Geneseos (Genesis) and the word for book is Biblos (Bible), so the New Testament starts, “The Bible of the Genesis of Jesus Christ.” At some point you should read the whole Bible, but Matthew will do for now.
Most people skip over the genealogies in the Bible. It’s understandable, but once you know what you’re looking for, each genealogy is a treasure hunt. Jesus’ genealogy is the granddaddy of them all. I could spend all day talking about the genealogy Matthew presents, so let’s just consider a couple things: the structure and the women.
The Structure
The first name of the genealogy is Jesus Christ (v 1). The last name of the genealogy is Jesus, who is called Christ (v 16). The New Testament starts out with Jesus as the Alpha and Omega! It also ends with Jesus saying it (Rev 22:13).
It gets even better when you understand how genealogies work in Genesis. Genesis is structured with 10 Toledots (Hebrew word meaning generations). Each section starts with something like, “These are the generations of…” Genesis 5:1 will illustrate our point well. “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” Then, a genealogy is given, starting with Adam and ending with Noah. The thing to notice is that the name at the beginning of the genealogy is the source of the genealogy. The same thing happens in Genesis 10:1 - “These are the generations of the sons of Noah…” Then we get the Table of Nations (70 nations! Pro tip - when you run into the number 70 in the Bible, it’s representative of the whole world, i.e. Jesus sending out 70 disciples in Luke 10). Noah’s sons are the source of the genealogy. Genealogies in Genesis start with the ancestor, not the offspring.
So when Matthew says, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (Matt 1:1), he’s saying that Jesus is the source of this genealogy. He’s the ancestor, not the offspring! Jesus is the source of all human life. It’s for this reason that Isaiah calls Him “Everlasting Father” (Isa 9:6). Of course Jesus is the offspring of this genealogy, too. He’s the source of it, and He’s the end of it. He’s the One who is and was and is to come. I must thank Peter Leithart for pointing this out in his wonderful 2 volume commentary on Matthew.
Much has been said about the 14x3 at the end of the genealogy (v 17), but I’d be really missing something on the structure of the genealogy if I didn’t at least mention it. If you don’t think that numbers are important in the Bible, Matthew proves that they are very important. He wouldn’t have bothered to point it out if numbers weren’t important. 14 is 7x2 - God’s number (God rests on the 7th day, it’s also the number of the Trinity plus the 4 corners of the earth) repeated. When God repeats something, He really means it and won’t change His mind. Joseph (from Genesis, oh, and sometime we should consider the parallels between the Genesis Joseph and the Matthew Joseph, and I mean New Testament Joseph, not Matthieu Joseph who plays winger for the St. Louis Blues) says this concerning Pharaoh’s dreams - “And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about” (Gen 41:32). The details of the dreams are relevant here - how many cows in the first dream? 7x2 (Gen 41:2-4). How many ears of grain in the second dream? 7x2 (Gen 41:5-6). This genealogy was divinely guided, even though Satan did his best to throw it off, which leads us to…
The Women
Women are not typically mentioned in Biblical genealogies. The line goes through the man because we are looking for a male seed. Obviously women are important, for it would be the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). Modern Jews do trace Judaism through the mother, and some will claim that this happened since Sinai (see this Wikipedia article with a grain of salt), but history shows that genealogies trace through the mother only when masses of people don’t know who the father is, like when a society is getting raped and plundered (like Jerusalem after 70 AD). It is relevant to our discussion since women who aren’t Jews are mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy; that doesn’t make Jesus any less Jewish.
Matthew doesn’t need to point out the women in his genealogy, so he does so for a point. And all the women mentioned have a scandal attached to them. You’ve got Tamar (v 3), Rahab (v 5), Ruth (v 5), and the wife of Uriah (v 6). These women are attached to a scandal, but usually they prove to be the righteous ones in the story.
You can read Tamar’s story in Genesis 38. After her husband died, she married his brother, who also died. Then she married the next brother, and he also died. So, Judah, her father-in-law, didn’t want to give her another son, even though that would’ve been the right thing to do. Tamar takes things into her own hands, dresses like a prostitute, and gets a son through her father-in-law.
Tamar was a fake prostitute, but Rahab was a real one. She had faith in the true God while her land was being conquered by the Israelites, and so she hid the Israelite spies as the Canaanites looked for them (Jsh 2). She’s the model for Jesus’ saying that prostitutes enter the kingdom of heaven before the chief priests and elders (Matt 21:31). Jesus also mentions tax collectors in that verse, and Matthew (and Zacchaeus!) are the model for that profession.
Ruth was a Moabite. You can read the Moabite story in Genesis 19. Just like Tamar and Judah, daughters seduce their father Lot, and Ammon and Moab were born.
The real clincher is the wife of Uriah. We know her name. It’s Bathsheba. But Matthew doesn’t call her that, instead referring to her as Uriah’s wife. David stole her and killed Uriah.
Matthew points out these women and their stories for multiple reasons. First, if he’s primarily writing to Jews, he’s showing them that their history is one marked by unfaithfulness, even by the heroes. They, along with the Gentile world, desperately needed a new hero, a Messiah, who would fulfill the whole Law. Second, Jesus came to save His people from their sins (Matt 1:21). That’s what Jesus means. This genealogy is extremely comforting. Look at the mess we’ve made, and look at how God cleanses it with His Son’s blood.
Of course there’s one more woman mentioned in the genealogy - Mary (v 16). She has her own scandalous story. She was engaged and was pregnant. Of course she was a virgin, but who would believe her? Joseph didn’t at first. He wanted a divorce. It took divine intervention to save this marriage, as God had to send an angel to convince Joseph that Mary was telling the truth.
That’s what Christmas is all about - God making us His family and saving us as His family through His Son. The genealogy of the family is important, and it starts and ends with God’s Son.
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