“And Shem begat Arp-, Arp-hax—.” The third grader struggled with his reading. The names defeated him — consonants stacked on consonants, syllables that refused to connect.
It’s all right, the teacher told him. “Whatever you can’t pronounce, just skip it and keep going.” Moments later, she heard him reading, “And Skip-it begat Skip-it, the son of Skip-it, who begat Skip-it.”
Most of us do exactly that. We may pronounce the names — Enoch, Jared, Methuselah — but we skip them all the same. At best, we endure them. After all, they’re just a list of names, most of which occur only in those genealogies. It’s hard to imagine why we should care.
We bring that expectation to Scripture. We assume a biblical genealogy works like a pedigree, or a family tree, as a list to be checked rather than a story to be read. But watch what happens when two different authors hand you the same genealogy.
Matthew opens his gospel with one: the genealogy of Jesus, Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham. He tells you exactly what he’s doing — he doesn’t make you guess. He wants you to see that Jesus qualifies to be the Messiah: he’s a Hebrew, descended from Abraham, and a member of the House of David.
But then he does something no Hebrew genealogy does. He names four women, and what a group they are.
- Tamar, who dressed as a prostitute to conceive a child by her father-in-law.
- Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho.
- Ruth, from Moab, a nation God had forbidden Israelites to marry into.
- And the fourth Matthew designates her identity so carefully he only says — “her that had been the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Bathsheba.
Four women. Four scandals.
Matthew didn’t have to include a single one. Ancient genealogies didn’t include women at all, let alone women like these. He chose to include them, which means they are important to the story he is telling with this genealogy— and that the genealogy is a story.
Luke also provides a genealogy of Jesus. But Luke doesn’t stop at Abraham. He runs it all the way back to Adam, “the son of God.” Luke, writing for Gentiles as much as Jews, uses his genealogy to tell a slightly different story. His genealogy tells us Jesus doesn’t just belong to Israel. He belongs to everyone descended from Adam — which is everyone. An encouraging message for Gentiles, don’t you think?
Both Matthew and Luke provide genealogies of the same man, yet they exhibit significant differences. Why? Clearly, Matthew and Luke aren’t recording data. They’re each telling you something important about Jesus, and they use the genealogy to tell you.
We could spend more time on this, but for now, I just want you to see that a genealogy in the Bible isn’t a pedigree. It isn’t there to be checked against a list. It’s a story, compressed into names and numbers, waiting for someone willing to read past “begat.”
The real controversy dwells elsewhere — in two older genealogies, in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, where the names come with ages attached, and where generations of readers have tried to use those ages to answer a question the author never intended to answer. We’ll go there next.
