Yuku free message boards

Psychoboy,

Hmm; when I tried to access my reply at the link you provided, it did not appear. I hope that my earlier posts -- which included a discussion of the objection at hand -- are still accessible. In the meantime:

Matthew is providing a legal genealogy. A legal genealogy does not need to be exhaustive; its purpose is to demonstrate an individual's legitimate claim to a legacy or inheritance. In Jesus' case, Matthew is illustrating that Jesus qualifies to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies about the "Seed of Abraham" and the "Son of David." In Ezra 7, Ezra similarly abbreviates his own genealogy, hitting some highlights but not providing an exhaustive generation-by-generation list of his male ancestors. (One could make a case that the structured genealogies in Genesis are greatly abbreviated, too, but that's another post.)

Why three groups of 14 generations? Matthew wanted to convey to his readers that Jesus is the king of the Jews. Really. And to be a valid king of the Jews, a man needed to be a legal descendant of David -- a "son of David," "son" bearing the general sense of "male descendant." Now, in Hebrew (and in Greek, too, but Matthew seems to have had the Hebrew alphabet on his mind), all the letters of the alphabet have numerical values. Picture a code in which A=1, B=2, down to the number 9, and then 10, 20, 30, and then 100, 200, 300, with some special characters thrown in to make it all work. This sort of thing is called "gematria," and back then it was not a code; it was a normal way of signifying numerical amounts.

Because all the letters of the alphabet had numerical values, every word had a numerical value too (i.e., the sum of the value of its component letters). And the numerical value of the name "David," written in Hebrew, is 14 (Daleth+Waw+Daleth = 4+6+4). So the arrangement was a handy way of picturing the descent of the Son of David; the 14-fold structure narrowed the focus upon the idea that Jesus is the Son of David.

The historical number of kings of Judah from David until the Babylonian Captivity can be deduced from the lists in Chronicles.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock

Psychoboy,

Probably Matthew, if he were here to comment, would say something like what you just said: I've been misunderstood. I don't think that Matthew, who so frequently appeals to Old Testament passages to establish various points throughout his book, was attempting to convey to his readers that the scrolls of Chronicles in the local synagogue contained an erroneous number of generations from David to the Babylonian exile. When he sums things up, what he's summing up is the list he just finished providing -- a structured, thematically focused list, not a strictly historical and exhaustive list. As a comparison, picture someone rounding off the size of a crowd by rounding off individual groups to the nearest hundred: say, 100 + 300 + 500 + 100 + 200 + 100. When finished, the person says, "So, in all, that's 1,300 people." Now suppose that someone else counts every individual person, and reaches a total of 1,421 people.

Clearly the estimate is not as historically accurate as the individual-count is -- after all, it's an estimate. But if its readers understand that it is meant to be an estimate, would it be fair to say that by saying, "In all, that's 1,300 people," the estimator intended to challenge and contradict the individual-count? Isn't it pretty clear that the reference-point for the "In all" is the estimator's own list of estimates, and that it was not his intention to insist on 1,300 as a historically exact figure?

Similarly, Matthew's 14-fold genealogy, when understood to be an intentionally structured format, is not intended as a challenge of more exhaustive counts. When Matthew refers to "in all, 14 generations," he is referring back to his own presentation, not to Chronicles.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock