September 23 - Matthew 1:1-17

How much time do you spend looking at the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke?  If you're anything like me, the begats and begatted get a little old and you skip pretty quickly past them to the meat of the story.

My assignment for this week is to do a survey of Matthew 1:1-17.  Yup.  The genealogy.  My first thought was, "Are you kidding me?"  And then I immediately moved to, "Well, if he thinks it is important enough to assign, it probably is important enough to dig in to."  So, I did. 

Guess what ...  THIS is cool stuff!!!

Dig out your Bible and open it up to Matthew 1.  There are some really neat things happening here.

The passage breaks into three major units. 
Matthew 1:1 is the first section - the introduction.
Matthew 1:2-16 is the second section - the genealogy.
Matthew 1:17 is the third section - the summary.

Now, we will spend time just glancing through the middle section - the genealogy.  Notice how it is split into three sections?  From Abraham to David, then from David to the Babylonian exile, then from the Babylonian exile to Jesus.

Alright - that's cool.

As I read from the NRSV, there were some interesting bits of repetition.

Of course we notice that there are a lot of 'fathers.'  Notice that each time Matthew speaks of Jesus, he says "Jesus the Messiah."  He wasn't letting anything get past his readers.  He also tells us in Matthew 1:17 that there are fourteen generations.  He says it three times for each time that it occurs.  That is significant.  (I haven't discovered the why on that yet, but I can guarantee I will before the end of the semester!)

The next thing that is cool to see is that Matthew moves from the general to the specific.  Starting in Matthew 1:1 with the general idea of the genealogy, he then moves to the specific people and then back out to the general in 1:17.  But the other interesting thing is the way he moves the narrative.  It's called 'Chiasm.' 

Look at the movement in verse 1.  Jesus to David to Abraham.  Now, look at the movement in verse 17.  Abraham to David (through the exile) to Jesus.  Chiasm marks a type of narrative that moves forward and then later on moves backward to the same point.  A - B - C, then C - B - A.

We have a creative author here!!!

The last thing I spent time doing was making observation regarding the passage.  Some of these are fun - such as the use of several women in the genealogy that was more than likely by a Jew written for Jews.  A patriarchal system accepting women?  What a kick in the pants.  And not only are there women, but there are blatant sinners in there.  Rahab was a whore, Matthew mentions the fact that Solomon is David's son by Uriah's wife.  That was some serious sin!!!  We meet great kings of Israel (Uzziah and Hezekiah are two) and we meet not so great kings.  There is a Gentile with Ruth it ends up with Mary as the mother of Jesus ... not just Joseph as His father.

All of this information comes out of a genealogy - seventeen verses. 

This is why the Bible is such an incredible story!!!