Text

12 After the Babylonian Exile, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel of Zerubbabel. 13 Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud, Abiud of Eliakim, and Eliakim of Azor. 14 Azor was the father of Zadok, Zadok of Achim, and Achim of Eliud. 15 Eliud was the father of Eleazar, Eleazar of Matthan, and Matthan of Jacob. 16 Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

17 So there are fourteen generations from Abraham until David, fourteen generations from David until the Babylonian Exile, and fourteen generations from the Babylonian Exile until Christ.

Comments

Mt concludes the genealogy by observing that Jesus’ ancestry from Abraham consists of three sets of fourteen generations. This is a gematria, i.e. a number that signifies a name because it is the sum of the letters in that name (Hebrew letters have numeric as well as phonetic values). David in Hebrew is spelled with the Hebrew letters dalet, vav, dalet (ℸוℸ). Dalet = 4 and vav = 6, and so the three letters add up to 14. Mt organizes the genealogy around this number to reinforce the idea that Jesus is the promised Davidic Messiah.

Such a neat pattern raises the question: Is Mt’s genealogy historically accurate? The simple answer is no. Abraham would have lived in the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 19 cent. BC). David reigned in the 10 cent. BC, and the Babylonian Exile occurred in the 6 cent. BC. Assuming an average of 25 years between each generation, fourteen generations is only about three and a half centuries. A careful comparison between this list and the accounts of 1 and 2 Kgs also shows that Mt is skipping a number of generations in the line of Judean kings. It was not Mt’s intention to provide a historically complete list of all of Jesus’ ancestors, but a selective list of the important figures from Jesus’ heritage, organized around a symbolic number. This becomes more understandable when we remember that in Hebraic culture, father can also mean ancestor.

To a modern reader, it may seem that this is all invalidated by the genealogy terminating in Joseph, who is emphatically not Jesus’ biological father (cf. Mt 1.18). However, in ancient Jewish culture, if a man accepted a child as his own, then it was considered fully his, regardless of literal paternity. If Joseph was a descended from David and accepted Jesus as his son, then Jesus was a descendant of David.