A Beginning That Nobody Reads
To know a person, it is not necessary to know their grandmothers. It is true that our ancestors have influence on us. But will a handful of women, many generations apart and distant by several centuries help us to understand the meaning of life? To claim this would be an exaggeration.
But in the case of Jesus, it is not. He had grandmothers, that is to say, ancestresses who are very much particular, and to know helps us to understand his person better, his mission and his glory of being the Son of God.
Matthew begins his Gospel in a strange form. He started with a long list of names, called “genealogy,” of all the ancestors of Jesus (Mt 1:1-17).
To be faced at the beginning of the reading with the same extensive and tedious list of names of persons seems an option not like to make readers enjoy Matthew. There is the possibility that none of us has ever read this passage of the Gospel, or that we find it boring and apparently without vital meaning. But if we analyze it, we see that this is not the case. For within this chain of 42 masculine names, the presence of four women, the four sole ancestresses of Jesus that are named, projecting one of the most touching messages of the New Testament.
The importance of having grandparents
In antiquity, the genealogies were very important. There was all the register of the family history. Even today, among us, there are people who research and conserve with pride their genealogical tree.
But for the Jews, it was given more importance, because between them, it became indispensable to demonstrate the purity of the race. To admit a mixture of strange blood, is to say, to have one who is not a Jew among his ancestors, merited to losing one’s rights as a member of the people of God.
For example, if somebody wanted to be a priest, he had to show that his genealogical lineage descended directly from the priesthood of Aaron, brother of Moses. If somebody wanted to become a king, he had to prove that he belonged to the family of King David. When somebody wanted to wed, he had to document the racial purity of his future wife from at least five generations.
We know that even Herod the Great, who governed the country in the time of Jesus, was always despised by the people due to the fact that he had inherited from his ancestors the blood of the Edomite people. This fact came to annoy so him much so that he ordered to destroy all the archives of official registers of the country so that nobody could demonstrate that they possessed a line of ancestors purer than that of himself.
Three life stages
Matthew who wrote his Gospel for the Jews, wants to present Jesus as the awaited Messiah, and for this, thinks that it is best to begin with a genealogy. For this, he carefully elaborated carefully a list, regulated, mediated, and thought with much detail.
In the first place he divided all the ancestors of Jesus in three groups, according to three important stages of Jewish history.
The first group goes from Abraham until the King David (Mt 1:2-6). The second group is from David until the exile of the people in Babylon (Mt 1:6-11). And the third group of names is from the exile until the coming of Jesus Christ (Mt 1:12-16).
In these three sections of names, the sacred writer wanted to represent the three stages of life of all persons.
The lessons of history
The first stage was meant to show that all people are born for greatness. For this, it culminates with King David, the greatest king of Israel, and the man that brought the Hebrew people to their maximum splendor and converted Israel to a worldwide power. According to Matthew, then, all people are born essentially to become king.
With the second section, he wanted to teach that all people lose their greatness when they sin, and that they will always end up enslaved by their evil acts. For this, this group concludes with the slavery of Babylon. It is the stage of shame, the disaster and the tragedy of the Hebrew nation.
The third section shows that the human recovers their great graces in the Son of God. For this, the chain ends in Jesus Christ, the person who liberated the people from their slavery. According to our evangelist, then, God does not permit that the end of history will be tragic. In Jesus Christ all disgrace can be converted to triumph.
The hidden Messiah
Matthew utilizes a second play of numbers in his genealogy. If we count the names that go from Abraham to David, from David to the slavery, and from the slavery up to Jesus Christ, in all cases he gives the number 14. He himself says it in the end: “The total generations are: from Abraham to David 14 generations; from David until the exile 14 generations; from the exile until Christ 14 generations” (Mt 1:17).
This is not historically possible. Matthew had to disregard various names in order to obtain this number. Between Perez and Nahshon, for example, it cannot be only three persons to cover the 430 years that according to the book of Exodus the slavery from Egypt lasted. Neither can it be only two generations to fill the three centuries that go from Solomon to Jesse.
For what reason then, does Matthew artificially utilize the number 14? In order to understand this, there is a need to explain a characteristic of the Hebrew language. While in English, we write the numbers with their true symbols (1, 2, 3), and the letters with different symbols (a, b, c), in Hebrew the letters are themselves employed to write the numbers. 1 is itself the letter “a”; 2, the letter “b”, etc. In this way, if we sum up the letters of any Hebrew word, a number can always be obtained called “geometric.”
According to these calculations, much known and well spread among the Jews, the geometrical number of King David was exactly 14, because in the letters of his name: D (=4) + V (=6) + D (=4) = 14.
Grouping the names in 14, Matthew encountered an elegant and ingenious manner of saying to the Jews that Jesus was a descendant of David, and therefore, the true Messiah. More still, putting them together in 3 lists of 14, as 3 symbolically signifies “totality,” the evangelist wanted to say that Jesus is the “triple David,” and therefore the total Messiah, the authentic and true descendant of David.
Not Applicable for women
But the really astonishing thing about this genealogy is that Matthew included the names of four women.
In the list of ancestors of great persons never did it include the mothers. The woman in the times of Jesus did not exercise legal rights, nor could a woman serve to testify in any record. She was not considered a person but a “thing,” property of her father, or of her husband, and lacked importance in society, where she did not count for anything. We see this, for example, when in the story of the multiplication of the loaves by Jesus, the Gospel says that he was before a real crowd, composed of “ five thousand men, not counting the women and the children” (Mt 14: 21).
Such was the disregard for the feminine sex in antiquity, that all good Jews arise every morning giving thanks to God for three things: for not having been born a pagan, for not having been born a slave, and for not having been born a woman.
In the genealogical lists of the Bible, it was very rare that women appeared. This is why the presence of the feminine names in that of Jesus is a surprising and revolutionary fact. If we look carefully who these women were, their appearance leaves us even more amazed. They were: Tamar, the incestuous (v. 3); Rahab, the prostitute (v. 5); Ruth the excommunicated (v. 5); and Betsheba, the adulteress (v. 6).
Grandmother Tamar
The first ancestress of Jesus that Matthew mentions is Tamar. Her story appears in Genesis 38. She got married very young with Er, and was widowed a short time after without having children. According to a law of that time called levirate, her brother-in-law had to have relations with her to give her a child that she should have had from her deceased husband. This way, it will not leave them without a descendant; that would have been a worse disgrace, for a man to die without children.
Her brother-in-law Onan got married, then, with Tamar, but he went to her and avoided having children. Finally he also died, and Tamar, twice widowed, continued without children.
Judah, the father of the two men, suspected that she was an ominous woman, refused to let his third son be her husband. He did not want to lose the last son left to him.
So Tamar planned a strategy. One day, she disguised herself as a prostitute, sat beside a crossroad near where her father-in-law passed. Confused by her, he promised a young goat in exchange for her favors. And as a pledge he left her his staff, his cord and his seal of identification. When later he sent the young goat as payment, she was no longer there, and nobody had seen nor heard of any prostitute in that place.
But from this union she was made pregnant. When Judah came to know that his daughter-in-law was awaiting a child, he was infuriated, and in shame exclaimed: “Bring her out of the house and let her be burned alive.” Tamar, then, instigated the second part of her plan. She sent a message to her father-in-law: “The owner of this staff, this cord and this seal is the father of the child that I await in my womb.”
In this way the child of Tamar, the incestuous, was conceived. And in this way her life was spared. Is she a perverse or astute woman, or simply a woman? The truth is that Matthew chose to include the scandalous name of Tamar among the ancestors of Jesus.
Grandmother Rahab
The second woman mentioned is Rahab, whose profession was that of a prostitute. Her story is a story of military espionage, during the time of the conquest (Jos 2).
When Joshua, leader of the army of Israel, arrived at the doors of the Promised Land, he found the city of Jericho. In order to know if it was possible to take it or not, he sent some spies to explore the place. They lodged in the home of Rahab, a prostitute of the city.
Discovered by the local police, the woman hid them and helped them to escape, letting them down with some cords through the window of the walls. But before this, she asked them that the Hebrew army would spare her life and that of her family when they take the city. They accepted, and ordered her to tie a red cord at the windowsill so that her house would be identified.
The assault on the city was tremendous. The soldiers of Joshua destroyed and ransacked Jericho, and all its inhabitants were assassinated. But Rahab saved her life and her family as she had agreed with the spies. A little later, Rahab the prostitute came to be among the ancestresses of Jesus. Matthew did not forget to include her name in the genealogy.
Grandmother Ruth
She was a Moabite woman, that is to say, of the country of Moab (Ru 1-4). She knew of love since she was very young. But she also knew of pain and loneliness, for she was a widow without having children.
Out of this therefore, she was an example of fidelity to her mother-in-law Naomi, whom she always accompanied in order to help her. She was a hard-working woman, sacrificing herself to earn a living. Much later she once again encountered love in the person of Boaz. She lived, therefore, a second idyll in the fields of Bethlehem. And she finally found happiness, as a reward for her labor, her abnegation and her fidelity.
But even if her moral was unquestionable, she had to be an embarrassment for any Jew: She was a stranger. Worse, she belonged to the Moabites, one of those peoples most hated by the Jews. Such contemptible they were that in the Jewish law itself, they had been excommunicated for always, and they were not even permitted to form a part of the faith of Israel. The book of Deuteronomy itself, commanded: “The Moabites would not be admitted in the assembly of Yahweh nor even in the tenth generation. They would never ever be admitted” (Dt 23:4).
This woman, excommunicated and contemptible in the eyes of the Jews, was chosen by Matthew to appear among the predecessors of Jesus.
Grandmother Bathsheba
She was a Hittite woman, wife of Uriah, an officer of King David (2 Sam 11). She lived with her husband in Jerusalem, near the palace of the king. She was very beautiful, so beautiful that King David fell madly in love with her. Taking the advantage that Uriah had gone to battle, the king ordered that she be called to the palace, and in complicity, he possessed her.
She, then, became pregnant. To avoid the scandal, David asked Uriah to come back from the battle front and gave him some days of vacation in his house, in order that he could lie with his wife within a reasonable time to cover the deceptions. But Uriah opposed this privilege, knowing that his soldiers were in the middle of the battle.
Because of this, the king ordered him again to go to the most dangerous battle zone. Because of this, Uriah died, and David could now live with Bathsheba.
Some time later, by way of a moving parable, a prophet, enabled David to see his crime and his grievous sin. David, humbled, recognized his sin, repented and asked for pardon.
Bathsheba provided much love to David. But she also gave him many intrigues, jealousy, tears and pain. Matthew ascribed this adulterous woman as the fourth ancestress of Jesus.
The poor relatives
These are the four unique grandmothers of Jesus who appeared in his genealogy; four women of different centuries, in the midst of the masculine chain. If Matthew had looked with major diligence in all of the Old Testament, he could not have found four personages more unworthy to be the ancestors of the Lord.
It was truly astonishing to include them in this place. A genealogy was, for the ancients, their object of pride, the reason of their honor and renown. Here, nevertheless, such women were the cause of shame.
The purpose of genealogy demonstrates where the important and famous people of the past come from. Here Matthew shows us that Jesus originates also from human misery, from the worst of Israel, its lowest situations and painful history.
By the genealogy, one comprehends the greatness of a person, his illustrious past, and his ancestry. Here we only see the censure that went along the kinfolk of Jesus.
Nonetheless, there is an expression of great delicateness in the mention of these women by Matthew. It is a question of an intentional remembering. It is as if from the start, he wanted to make the mission of Jesus and his program of life clear. Beyond his personal history, these grandmothers of Jesus have a symbolical reality that transcends them. In love and in pain, in sin and in joy, in pardoning each other, we are related to the history of the pilgrim and suffering of humanity, sinful and hopeful, the great family formed by God.
The evangelist wanted to show that his relatives did not put Jesus to shame; he did not mean to indicate that within his family were great sinners. He accepted them as they were. And to all of them, Jesus stretched out an eternal embrace, unique and meaningful, not wanting ever to release them. And Matthew has taken the initiative to record this in his genealogy, forever.
