Fourteen

Tuesday 9^th December

Read Matthew 1:17

“Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.” (NIVUK)

David and Abraham. Amongst the key features Matthew crafts his genealogy to focus our minds on are David and Abraham. The most obvious way he seeks to do this is by crafting it such that there are 14 generations in each of his ‘brackets’.

Now, astute readers will note that there are not in fact 14 generations between any of these ‘brackets’ in real life. The genealogy has not been crafted because the literal names themselves are critical to appreciating who Jesus is. This can easily be seen by comparing Chronicles genealogy with Matthew’s (which we are supposed to do). It can even be seen by comparing Luke’s with Matthew’s!

So why does he emphasise 14 so much, and shape his genealogy to fit? In Hebrew, the letters of the alphabet also have a numerical value. The letters that make up the name ‘David’ (dalit, waw, dalit) happen to have the numerical value of ‘4, 6, 4’… We can all do the maths. In Hebrew, this practice was called ‘gematria’ and was quite common. Matthew has structured his genealogy so that we all see that David is at the heart of Jesus’ genealogy. His name is also ‘14^th’ in the list!

Today we are probably concerned that Matthew doctored the genealogy. We are concerned about the implications for the inerrancy of Scripture. In stressing about that we actually miss what Matthew himself is stressing – Jesus is David’s son. Jesus is the true King.