Hey, I'm Matt, and this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Super glad you're here. We're taking a little bit of time every weekday to process through, game out books of the Bible. Right now we're working on Matthew, and we're in Matthew chapter one, which the first 17 verses are just a genealogy. It's a list of names. It's the genealogy of Jesus Christ, who Matthew describes as the son of David, the son of Abraham. And we're trying to cut through the noise here to figure out what this is supposed to accomplish instead of just glossing over and being like, there's a lot of dead people and then Jesus and Jesus is the point. So let's skip all of that stuff. We're not gonna wrap our brain around what Matthew's going for with this whole book if we start cutting corners like that. So let's dig in a little bit deeper. I want to start by looking at some of the nuts and bolts here. One of the first things that you see when you actually get into the genealogy, which is really verse two through verse 16, is that it's divided into three chunks. So if you were to just open this up and start reading through it, you would get to the end of the three chunks, and maybe you'd be like, why are there three chunks? Why not just have an uninterrupted list? And Matthew speaks to that. So after all of the list of names that ends with Jesus, who is called the Christ, in verse 16, verse 17 says, 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 Christ. That tells me that there are three chunks here, and it gives me the chronological parameters for what those chunks are, but why not again just give us the list? And why 14? Why not 13 or 25 or whatever? And there are a couple of theories as to exactly what Matthew is going for here. I will say this much. Whatever the accurate read on this is would have been obvious to the original audience, or Matthew would not have done it this way. This was a man on a mission. This was a dude who had been called from his tax collector booth by Jesus. He dropped his stuff, he followed Jesus, he gave his life to this thing. He'd watched people who also followed Jesus get killed for it by this point. He was all in. He believed that he had watched Jesus walk up to a tomb where a guy had died and just called him out of the tomb and back to life. He believed that he had seen Jesus say to a guy whose arm was all shriveled up and withered and basically gone that that arm should come back and it just physically came back, matter out of non-matter, in front of tons of witnesses. Matthew believed that Jesus was the completion of the entire story of the world and the Old Testament, and that all hope was in him for the future, and that that Jesus went to the cross and died and then came back to life and hung out with him and ate fish and went camping and stuff. Matthew was sold on this, and he was going to dedicate his life, no matter how much it hurt him, to trying to convince people that Jesus was the king and the promised Messiah. My point in all of that? There is no way this guy would have botched the opening chapter or wasted a bunch of time or risked alienating his audience or blowing them off. Whatever the point of these three chunks of 14 is, his original audience would have been on the same page and they would have tracked. So theory number one is that it's just symmetrical. I mean, the number of God in the Bible is seven, you know, seven this, seven that, and double seven, I guess, is fourteen. And so maybe Matthew saw a pattern and an order to this and was just trying to point his audience toward some kind of providential structure. The second theory that you'll hear floating around as to what's going on here is that the name David was somehow numerologically associated with the number 14. And we know that this was a popular thought process in the period between the Old Testament and the New Testament to somehow assign number values to different Hebrew characters and find meaning and order in numbers. People still grapple with this stuff today and uh believe that they see codes here, there, or whatever. I'm not really sold on it, but at the same time, I'm not an expert in this, so I just have to take the word of people who are way smarter than me and seem reliable. Apparently, David's name adds up to 14, and everybody apparently knew that. Well, 14, David? Three chunks of fourteen? What? As crazy as that sounds to my 21st century brain, it might have moved the needle for the original audience. Maybe Matthew is trying to embed a second layer of meaning, not that we can only access centuries later through the use of computers and analyzing secrets that are hidden in the Bible, but that would have been really, frankly, just upfront, overt, and evident to the original audience. Maybe. But the trick is the fourteens are not as simple as you might like to imagine, because the first batch only adds up to fourteen if you count Abraham as his own generation. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah, and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Peres the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Aminadab, Aminadab the father of Nashon, Nashon the father of Salmon, Salomon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David. If you do count David and you do count Abraham, you get to 14 on that one. The second chunk gets a little bit tricky, depending on where you start and where you end. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, Solomon the father of Rehobam, Rehobam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat, the father of Joram, Joram the father of Uziah, Uziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile in Babylon. If you don't count David in the second chunk and go Solomon to Jeconiah, the final name in that list, you get fourteen. But the tricky part about that is that you definitely have to count Jeconiah to get to fourteen in the final chunk of the genealogy, starting in verse 12. After the exile to Babylon, Jeconiah, who we just mentioned at the end of chunk two, was the father of Sheelteel, Sheelteel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Eliud, Eliud the father of Eliazar, Elizer the father of Mathan, Mathan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. So, how exactly do we divide it up at the bridges between the two chunks? Because you need all the names in chunk one just to get to fourteen, but you got wiggle room in the second one. Well, maybe verse 17 that describes what we just read gives us a hint. There are fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David. Okay, if you count Abraham and David, that gets to fourteen. Fourteen from David to the exile in Babylon. Okay. So if you start with Solomon and go to Jeconiah, you get to fourteen there. But then it says, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ. But you have to count Jeconiah again to make that last chunk work out at fourteen. So it is possible that what Matthew is doing here, and again, I believe Matthew was capable of counting to fourteen accurately every single time he tried it because of his prowess as a tax collector and an accountant. I think what he's doing here is saying that the first and second groups are divided on the character of David. So David only gets counted once. Whereas the division between group two and group three is happening on the exile to Babylon. So the character who was in power on both sides of the exile would be counted on David's side in chunk two and on the run-up to Jesus in chunk three. I am sure there are other proposed solutions to this, but this kind of points me toward where I want to land the plane for the moment before our next conversation where we go and get into the actual names here and what they mean and what was being communicated. What Matthew is doing here is a historical, theological look at this genealogy. And look, I know there are some people who want to subject ancient literature to the standards of how we do history and genealogy and social stuff now. And for them, this is going to be really problematic. And some of those people are going to be critics of Christian faith and the Bible, and some of those people are going to be Christians themselves. Either way, I'm just telling you, this genealogy is not going to pass muster under that kind of scrutiny, nor is it trying to. It's trying to accomplish something different. Again, all the way back to the primary point. Jesus is the Christ, he's the Messiah, he's the King, He ticks all the boxes he needs to, and we'll get into what those boxes are more in a future conversation. And he is worthy of being rightly regarded by the person who reads through this story, sees who Jesus was, what he said, what he did, especially in the cross and the resurrection. And there's going to be enough there to say this is the completion of what God was doing in his chosen people and in the world in the past. There's enough there for us to throw our weight behind Jesus and acknowledge him as the king of the true kingdom of which we are now a part. If that's a little bit overwhelming, well, it's because it is an enormous claim on our lives and an enormous historical claim. Thankfully, we got a whole bunch more time to think about that. We're going to compare the genealogy in Matthew to the genealogy in Luke tomorrow and wrestle through some of those questions. And we're also going to talk tomorrow about why we bother to wrestle through the hard stuff at all. Why am I not just ducking it and avoiding it to make us feel better? I think that's going to be a blast. I like getting into that kind of stuff. Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. We're going to wrap it up right there. Look forward to catching you tomorrow.