Swindoll's Living Insights Commentary Matthew 1a - Flipbook - Page 29
The Genesis of Jesus | Matthew 1:1-17
women are named in the genealogy, it’s clear that the man was considered the ancestral source through normal p
rocreation—for example,
“Boaz brought forth Obed by Ruth” (1:5, my translation). However,
Matthew describes the origin of Jesus in a way that disconnects His
physical generation from Joseph and instead links it to Mary. In 1:16,
Matthew says that Joseph was the husband of Mary, from whom (Mary)
Jesus was brought forth (still using the term gennaō). The tiny Greek
phrase ek hēs [1537 + 3739], “from whom,” uses the singular feminine
relative pronoun, making Mary the sole source of Jesus’ physical origin.
However, Joseph is called Mary’s anēr [435] (“husband”), making Jesus
the legal (though not physical) son of Joseph . . . and thus the heir of
the Davidic throne!
— 1:17 —
Matthew ends his stylized rendition of the Messiah’s genealogy from
Abraham with a summary statement noting that he intentionally limited each of the three movements to fourteen generations. In its most
technical sense, the Greek term rendered “generation” ( genea [1074])
can mean an actual physical descent from one person to another—the
generation from a father to a son. However, it can also refer to “a period
of time,”7 just as we might say, “Back in my parents’ generation, things
were simpler.” This appears to be the way Matthew is using the term in
1:17 when he says that fourteen generations passed from Abraham to
David, from David to the deportation to Babylon, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah. To arrive at the number fourteen for
each era, Matthew appears to have counted David’s pivotal reign itself
as both the end of the first era and the beginning of the second.8
The division of these three clusters into fourteen “ages” or “eras”
was entirely Matthew’s doing. It isn’t found in the Old Testament, nor
do the genealogical lists immediately lend themselves to such a division. So why would Matthew go out of his way to present the legal
ancestry of Jesus in three groups of fourteen? It has everything to do
with Matthew’s presentation of the genealogy in a style that would
appeal to his original Jewish audience. Stan Toussaint explains one
appealing possibility: “This was a common rabbinic device. Matthew
may have derived the number fourteen from the Hebrew spelling of
David’s name. In the Hebrew language the letters of the alphabet have
numerical value. . . . These three letters [making up David’s name in
Hebrew] have the numerical value of four, six, four, respectively, their
total being fourteen.”9
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