Genealogies are usually not the most exciting parts of the Bible. The first dozen chapters of First Chronicles in the Old Testament is rather dry. Matthew starts his Gospel with one of these lists, but it's rather exciting when the reader takes a minute to see what Matthew is really trying to say.
Matthew 1:1 - "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Son of Abraham."
Rather odd verse. Neither of those are literally true statements. However, Matthew is telling us that it is really important that Jesus came from the line of David since God promised a savior would come through David's family (2 Samuel 7:16) and through Abraham since God promised a savior would come through Abraham's offspring (Genesis 12:3). God was fulfilling both this promises, and Matthew wanted people to make the connection.
Genealogies are lists which can get repetitive, but the writer is trying to get people's attention when there is a break in the list. Look for the breaks in Matthew 1 and spend some time finding out why those breaks are significant.
How many times do you see David in the first chapter of Matthew? More than you might expect! Matthew was writing to a primarily Jewish audience, and all the good Jews knew that the messiah was coming from the David's line. So where does Matthew mention David?
Matthew 1:1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham
Matthew 1:6 and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,
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 Christ.
Matthew 1:20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
Six times - pretty good, yeah? Well, it turns out that there is another place you see David, though it is hidden from us English speakers.
In the Hebrew language, the symbols for the letters were used for numbers, too. This made it easy for people to assign a number value to Hebrew words. If this would be done in English, the letter 'a' would still be the letter 'a,' but if it has a dot over the letter 'a' it would be the number '1.'
The first letters of the alphabet would be:
We could find out how much 'dad' is worth by adding the letters.
In Hebrew it looks more like this:
And the name 'David' would be:
(In Hebrew the vowels are not used, so it is just d-v-d)
David would then be equal to:
Why is that important? Because now you can see David a few more times!
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 Christ.
So why do we have the Bible? What is so important about what has been written down by a bunch of guys two to three thousand years ago? The author and apostle, John, was willing to acknowledge the fact that there were a lot of things that happened, even during his own lifetime, that were not written down and recorded for people, but he wanted to give the reason that any of it has been shared. It's not only the purpose of his book, but I believe it is the purpose of the entire Bible:
John 20:31 "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name."
