Sermon Tone Analysis

What is a Genealogy?

Let’s be honest: This is the passage everyone reading the Bible skips.

You get through the Old Testament and all of its long lists of kings, laws, and how many goats and cows Abraham owned, and you think, “Finally, now we’re getting to the good stuff!”

Then, right off the bat, Matthew hits you with yet another list!

So, much like you did with the whole of Leviticus, you skip a bit.

I get it, though.

This is not an exciting passage to read.

It’s long, repititive, and dull.

Perhaps we should pay it closer attention, however.

There has to be a reason that Matthew chose to open up his book with a Genealogy.

There has to be a reason that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, when putting together the cannon of scripture, decided to open the New testament with a long list of names and “begatting”.

Genealogies, in the ancient world, were important.

They meant something.

They told you about who a person was.

So there was really no better way to open up a book about Jesus than to start with his family tree.

Because where a person comes from might just tell us about who he is and where he is going as well.

We shouldn’t be thinking of this genealogy as an Ancestry.com

family tree though.

It’s not that, it’s something a bit different.

This has been a conundrum for biblical interpreters for ages.

We come to this passage and expect Matthew to be doing family history like we do family history.

When we make that assumption, however, we run into problems.

First off, we might note that this genealogy of Jesus is quite different from the genealogy of Jesus found in Luke.

They just don’t match up! Could the biblical authors just not get their facts straight?

More than that, if we actually take the time to look up these people in Jesus’s family tree, we will quickly discover that Matthew has skipped over quite a few people!

These are hints that we have been trying to read this genealogy all wrong.

Genealogies are very prominent in both the Old Testament as well as the Ancient Near East in general.

They are meant to tell us about who a person is by pointing back to where they come from.

So we should think of these less as a modern Ancestry.com

report, and more like a hallway full of family photos.

When I was growing up, my granddad’s hallway was lined with protraits of our ancestors.

Each picture had a story behind it, which I was reminded of each time I walked down that hallway (whether I wanted to hear it or not!).

These portraits were handpicked in order to represent what it meant to be a member of the Westcott family.

As I grew older, however, I learned that there were certain members of our family who were not included in the hallway of portraits.

Their stories were ones that my grandad did not want to remember, and they were people who were antithetical to what it meant to be a Westcott.

They were the black sheep of the family that no one wanted to associate with, and thus were not included in the hallway of portraits.

This is a better way of thinking of ancient genealogies, such as the one we find in Matthew.

Matthew is taking us down a metaphorical hallway, pointing out notable people to give us an idea of who Jesus was.

Some people are more noteworhty than others.

The portraits Matthew chooses to hang up in this hallway are important in that they provide a larger portrait of who Jesus is, and what it means to be a member of this family.

Looking at Structure

So how has Matthew organized his hallway of photos?

Matthew has, notably, surrounded this genealogy with a literary device known as Chiasm.

Chiasm is a rhetorical device employed in ancient literature to draw attention to a specific theme of pattern in a text.

It is an invese pattern so that the text forms an “A-B-C-B-A” shape (or some variation thereof).

Matthew uses a Chiasm to “bracket” his genealogy (thus combining it with another literary technique called “inclusio”, which further emphasizes the importance of this passage and provides a schema for reading and interpreting it in light of the “brackets”).

The Chiasm isn’t that hard to see if you know what to look for:

(v. 1) An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah [A], the son of David [B], the son of Abraham [C]....

(v.

17) So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations [C]; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations [B]; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations [C]

Do you see the pattern?

Verse 1 is: “Jesus->David->Abraham”, whereas verse 17 is “Abraham->David->Jesus”.

The body of this passage (i.e.

v. 2-16) also follows this basic pattern of “Abraham->David->Jesus”.

Why is Matthew structuring his genealogy of Jesus in this way?

As stated before, his use of Chiasm and inclusio is meant to draw attention to something, and that something is Jesus.

Jesus the Messiah is at the beginnng and end of this genealogy.

But what does Matthew want us to understand about Jesus specifically?

To answer this, we must understand a little bit more about how Ancient Genealogies, and specifically Jewish genealogies, work.

If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you’ll know that it is jam-packed with all kinds of genealogies.

Every genealogy in the Old Testament begins very similarly to Matthew’s, e.g.

“This is the genealogy of Abraham: Abraham had a son, who had a son, who had a son....” The person named at the beginning, the forefather of everyone else, is usually considered the most important person there.

They are the one who gives significance to everythign else.

If it weren’t for Abraham, then Ishmael and Isaac could never have been.

Even more than that, it is the life and actions and deeds of Abraham that will ultimately shape the life, actions, and deeds of Ishmael and Isaac.

It’s easy to follow the logic here: Abraham came first, Abraham is the “father” of everyone else in the list, and so Abraham is the one who gives significance to everyone else in the list.

This Genealogy, however, is somewhat different.

The Genealogy begins with Abraham, but it is titled as teh genealogy of Jesus.

The empahsis throuhout the genealogy is not on its progenitor, Abraham, but on its end in Jesus!

By framing the genealogy in this way, Matthew is trying to tell us that it is Jesus, not Abraham, who gives significance to all of Israel’s history.

It is Jesus who gives significance to Abrham, to David, and to the Babylonian exile.

It is in Jesus the Messiah that all of these things are held together and find their meaning.

What a bold claim to make!

Who Stands Out?

As I walked down my grandad’s hallway of portraits, there were always some that stood out.

Most of the pictures hung there were smiling family photos.

One, however, was a single man dressed in military garb.

This was my grandad’s dad, who I called Pappy.

This picture was hung there to recall a specific story: about my Pappy’s service in World War II, and how the Westcott family was saved by a ham sandwhich.

As we walk down the hallway of portraits that Matthew has hung up for Jesus, we will also notice some people that just seem different or out of place.

Matthew tries to grab out attention in certain places by breaking his repetitive “x begat y” formula.

Matthew does this eight times in this genealogy.

Of those eight times, five of them are drawing attention to women.

This is especially significant because women were generally left out of genealogies.

The Jewish culture traced lineage patristically, i.e. through the father, and so women weren’t generally mentioned at all.

The five women mentioned are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, ‘the wife of Uriah’, and Mary.

These women all have something in common as well: They have rather scandalous stories surrounding them!

These women are the black sheep of the Jewish family tree whose pictures would typically not be displayed so prominently in the hallway of portraits.

Tamar was the daughter-in law of Judah, the namesake of the tribe of Judah.

She ended up marrying two of Judah’s three sons, both of whom died before they could have sons with Tamar.

According to the Law and Israelite social expectations, Tamar should have been given Judah’s third son as a husband in order to provide children for her and for Judah’s other sons who had passed away.

Judah, however, refused to let Tamar wed his youngest son, for fear that he, too, would die.

Tamar, faced with harsh poverty, came up with a plan.

She disguised herself as a prostitute and tricked her father-in-law Judah to sleep with her.

The scheme was soon found out by the whole community.

This seems bizarre and even offensive to modern ears, but in her own context, Tamar was hailed as a hero.

Without a husband or sons, Tamar would have been forced into extreme poverty.

Judah had greatly wronged her by denying her his youngest son in marriage.

He had doomed her to a life of poverty, but she was wise, and came up with a plan to make Judah provide the security he owed her.

Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute who lived in Jericho.