Hey, it's me, Matt Whitman, the person who does the podcast that you're listening to right now. Want to give you a heads up on the front end that if you listen to this with kids, we're gonna get into some subject matter here that is very bible-y, but that might force you to have conversations with them you don't want to have yet. So maybe listen to this one first and then decide. Hello, I'm Matt Whitman. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and this one is for the ladies. Okay, to be truthful, this one's actually for everybody because every episode is actually for everybody, but there are a lot of ladies in this one because we're going to look at the five women who appear in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1, verses 1 through 17. The crazy thing about this, no, no, there are a lot of crazy things about this. Let me start with this one. One, it's crazy to put women in a genealogy of Jewish people in the first century AD. That was not done. This defied convention right off the bat. Now we can go into how misogynistic everything used to be, and yep, it was pretty bad. But the reality is that this is an incredibly bold move that is making a theological statement about outsiders and about how much topsy-turvy stuff went into this enormous theological story that the genealogy of Jesus encapsulates. So, right off the bat, just having women in here is weird and throws down a gauntlet on one level. Next, a pretty good case could be made that all of these women are Gentiles. Having even one Gentile in a genealogy of a Jewish man in the first century A.D. would be weird. Having Forby in there is weirder. Having Forby in there who are all women is weirder. And again, we're getting this book end thematic thing that's going on with this seemingly innocuous genealogy, where Matthew opens with a concept and then later closes that concept. Last time we looked at how Matthew opens with Abraham and Isaac, conjuring memories of the story of a father willing to sacrifice his son, and we end the genealogy with Jesus, a son who is ultimately sacrificed by his father. But by opening with stories about women and Gentiles, outsiders in every regard that you could imagine, we're getting this hint at the beginning of Matthew that this Jesus thing is for more than people who look and sound like you, that this Jesus thing is for everybody. And indeed, Matthew ends with Jesus saying, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you, and surely I'll be with you always to the very end of the age. The end. That's it. So this is the take-home message of Matthew, or at least it's the one that is ringing in your ears as you walk away from Matthew. And I think it is no accident that Matthew ends there with this whole thing being bigger than just the Jewish people and Jesus being for everyone, and that it opens with these shocking inclusions that point toward a similar thing. Well, let's look who's actually in here. Okay, first of all, we have Tamar in verse 3. Judah, the father of Perez and Zera, whose mother was Tamar, Peres the father of Hezron. This is a tricky weird story because Tamar was married to one of Judah's sons, but he died. And then, well, the way it ultimately works out is she was supposed to be married to the last of Judah's sons, but Judah was kind of finicky about it. And so what's Tamar supposed to do? She's basically left for dead without a child or an heir or anybody to provide for her. It looks like she's being kicked to the curb by the people who took responsibility for her and supposed to be her family. So cleverly, she does what any enterprising person would do: dresses up like a prostitute and trades her body for a goat and a staff and a ring with her father-in-law Judah. Now I know it's shocking, but hey, it's Bible, and Bible is what Bible is. So that happens. She becomes pregnant, she goes back to Judah as Judah finds out she's pregnant. It's like, what? That's a disgrace. We need to kill that lady. She's like, hold on, I'm pregnant by the person who owns these items. And then Judah's like, oh, that's that's my stuff, isn't it? Oh, oh boy. And so what ultimately ends up happening is that the line of Judah is preserved through Tamar's resourcefulness and tenacity. Now, look, I'm not saying that all the youngsters should go out and be prostitutes. And if you think that's what I'm saying, then we don't know each other very well. I'm totally against you becoming prostitutes. What I am saying is that in this impossible situation, this is what this woman did, and it was clumsy and fumbling and weird and really falls outside the boundaries of what is ideal, and yet somehow it was absolutely instrumental in the moving forward of God's redemptive plan. Okay, so she's a Gentile, and there's some weird sex stuff associated with her. That's lady number one. Lady number two is Rahab. And even though the timeline is a little bit tricky in verse five in terms of how old everybody had to be for the Rahab thing to work, it does work, and we've got Rahab with Salman. Now, Rahab, if you recall, she was from Jericho, and she was a prostitute, maybe a madam even. Who knows exactly what her role was? I mean, she was wealthy enough to have a property, so it makes me think that she was like a cagey veteran prostitute. But whatever the case, she figures out who the true God is, gets on board with that, and is regarded as a woman of faith. And ultimately, despite once again her being a Gentile and this being a little bit fumbling and a little bit weird, and there's some sex stuff involved, but once again, she represents a crucial inflection point in this whole elaborate story of salvation and redemption that leads us up to Jesus. Then you got Ruth. Some people want to make a case that Ruth's whole snuggle up next to Boaz while he's sleeping and uncover his feet thing is some kind of weird ancient metaphor for sexy time. I don't think there's actually a very good case for that. I think it's probably a really good metaphor for uncovered his feet and then his feet got cold and he was like, What the heck? And she's like, I took your blanket or whatever, we should get married. I really do think that's probably what happened there, and I am not one to shy away from pointing out biblical euphemisms about sexy time, because I think they're both fun and important. So Ruth, pretty virtuous, pretty awesome, again, a Gentile woman who, just in case the original audience forgot, uh, once again, without her, you don't get David, so she's kind of a big deal. Then we see Matthew's distaste for Bathsheba on display in verse 6. Now you'll hear some people talk about Bathsheba, the eventual wife of David, who was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. You'll hear some people talk about her as the victim of rape on the part of David. Maybe. The details are not crystal clear that way, but what we do know is that David's Jerusalem was not a big town. And culturally, it would have been very weird to bathe in such a way that other people would see you. I wonder if Matthew is one of the people who would look at the story of David and Bathsheba and say, no, that's not rape. That was her trying to improve her circumstances and David in a vile way playing along. I don't know. Either way, I think it's odd that Matthew doesn't even utter her name, but instead says, whose mother had been Uriah's wife. There are a lot of digs in that story, both at David and at Bathsheba. Here's the deal: no matter what you make of that story, the two main characters don't come off very well. David especially doesn't come off very well because he's the one in a position of authority. He does awful things and ultimately he facilitates the murder of a loyal subject who is the husband of someone he's not married to who he got pregnant. I think I got that all right. Ick. So whatever you make of the particular brand of yuck you think occurred here, you've got a Gentile married to a Hittite, so probably Hittite herself. You've got a woman, those don't happen in these genealogies very often, and you got some weird sex stuff going on. Again, something very, very clumsy produces, well, Solomon, the wisest guy in the history of this narrative. Bizarro. And so as we get to the end of this narrative and we get to Mary and Jesus, we got all the stories of all these ladies rattling around in the back of our head, and we're reminded of how important they were in the unfolding of this story. We're also reminded of their resourcefulness, whether you find it admirable or not admirable, depending on the story. We also see what it looks like to be virtuous and obedient, and all of those best qualities and characteristics are summarized in Mary. Attached to the story of these women, though, there might be one more tiny, subtle little thing that Matthew is doing, and that is reminding us of the notion of a leverate marriage, including Judah and Tamar and his kids and that whole mess. The idea there is that if uh brother dies and the widow is left alone, that the surviving unmarried brother is supposed to marry that widow and pick up where the brother left off. Well, Joseph might have been the product of just such a familial relationship. Heli is described as being his father in Luke chapter 3 and Matthew 1. It's Jacob. Some very smart people, much, much smarter than me, theorize that the discrepancies between the Luke account and the Matthew account are the discrepancies between a genealogy that makes a kingly claim on the lineage of Jesus versus a genetic claim on the lineage of Jesus. And if that's the case, Jacob and Heli might have been a brother situation where one effectively raised Joseph, but the other was Joseph's actual father, who perhaps died, and then a leverett marriage situation occurred. I don't know. What I do know is this. I believe the original audience would have picked up all of these little details. They would have been agitated in all of the right ways, and all of this would have painted a picture of Jesus as the fulfillment, the completion, the but da Jesus completion of all of the story arcs and themes of the Old Testament that are completed and fulfilled in him. And I don't think I'm stretching that. I do think I'm stretching my time again. This is very difficult for me. These things are so interesting. I'm gonna wrap it up there. Let's do it again tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Catch you soon, hey.