Lecture

A genealogy is a portrait of a person. At least that’s how they thought of it in the ancient world. Knowing a person’s heritage told you almost all you needed to know about that individual. But like a work of art, we often need an interpreter to understand the nuances of the piece. And so too with Matthew’s genealogy. Matthew does a very curious thing. He includes women’s names in the patrilineal genealogy. Typically, genealogies follow the fathers, not the mothers, but Matthew includes women’s names, and that deserves explanation.

What do these five women—Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, the wife of Uriah—the Hittite, and Mary—the mother of Jesus—what do they share? Well, they’re all moms, which is not typically talked about, but it is actually crucial. They contribute to the Messiah’s line. Being a mom meant getting pregnant, and so, sex is obviously foregrounded in the story, and in our story, which after all is a genealogy. Some commentators make the connection that the four women mentioned first are Gentiles, and we know that of Rahab and Ruth, and Tamar is assumed to be Canaanite. Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, she might be an Israelite, but she’s connected with her husband as a Hittite. So this works for the first four women mentioned, but Mary is clearly Jewish, so she gets left out if we use this categorization. And that’s why I think so many interpreters go with sexual sin as the link for all five women. Now again, for Mary, it’s only perceived sexual sin and alleged only by Joseph and only for a little bit in the story.

Here are the charges. Tamar acts as a prostitute to Judah, her father-in-law. Rahab is a prostitute, an innkeeper. Ruth visits Boaz in the night at his threshing floor. Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, is bathing and King David sees her and then uses her sexually. Because the charge of sexual sin is so pervasive, I’d like to take a look at each of the four women and offer another way of understanding her. A closer look at each woman will show that they demonstrate discipleship qualities of faithfulness and righteousness that Matthew praises throughout this gospel. They’re models of faithful living and a great resource for going deeper is E. Anne Clements’s book, Mothers on the Margin?

First, listed by Matthew is Tamar, the mother of Perez and Zerah, whose father was Judah. You can find this story in Genesis 38. The story includes customs of levirate marriage, and the climax includes Judah pronouncing Tamar, his daughter-in-law, more righteous than he, because she proactively followed the customs of Israel when he did not.

The customs of the day gave men control of wives and daughters, control of marriage practices that naturally favored them and women worked within this system, the system of patriarchy, and within the system of primogeniture that focuses on the firstborn son. And for Jewish families, there’s also levirate marriage, where the brother takes his dead sibling’s wife so as to create a son for his brother. But instead of caring for his siblings, Judah instigates the sale of Joseph, his brother, in what we would call today human trafficking. And then Judah goes into Canaan and he marries a Canaanite woman and they have three sons. He marries his eldest son to a Canaanite woman, Tamar. What is Tamar’s duty to her husband, named Er? Well, to bear him children. But he dies and so she’s married to his brother to fulfill her hope of having a son with Er. But the brother, Onan, also dies and now Judah thinks Tamar might be bad luck. And so, he lies to her. He lies to her about allowing her to fulfill her marriage promise to Er. She’s not going to be married to the third son.

Now, Tamar seems to be the only one in the family who cares for Er’s legacy and who is willing to sacrifice for the family honor. So she decides to act and to produce a child for the family of Er. She dresses as a prostitute and when her father-in-law, Judah, passes by, he treats her as a prostitute. Later, Judah is told that Tamar is pregnant and that is a violation of the family honor. She should be put to death. When charged with prostitution, she is exonerated.

The Bible is specific here. It is Judah who thinks she’s a prostitute. It is the villagers who label her as such. She is, in fact, not a prostitute but one who seeks to produce a child based on her marriage vows. And Judah in the end recognizes this. She holds up a mirror to his own lack of righteousness. The Hebrew text reads with the verb “she is righteous.” And then the word min, which serves as a comparative adjective meaning “from.” It’s the idea of comparison by separation. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible follows the Hebrew closely, giving the verb and the particle, he. She is more righteous than me.

Now, it’s not a claim that Judah thinks himself righteous per se, but rather that in this situation everyone has pointed a finger at her, and now he has turned and pointed to himself as guilty. He’s a changed man from this time on. He’s going to pledge his own life to save his brother Benjamin’s life, and all for the sake of his father. Tamar stops Judah’s death spiral of sin, but we don’t see that if we are preoccupied with these false charges of prostitution against her.

Rahab is listed second, as the mother of Boaz, the husband of Ruth, the third woman named. Now, the Canaanite Rahab lived in Jericho and was a prostitute. She hid and protected the Israelites spies. She prophesied, declaring that God will give Israel the land. Lissa Wray Beal, in her Story of God commentary on Joshua reminds us that this pronouncement of faith, her pronouncement of faith, is the second longest in the book behind Joshua’s speech in chapter 24. In other words, Rahab sided with Israel as they conquered her town, and Rahab saw the power of the God of the Israelites and testified to that. She saved her family, and she opened the gate for God’s people to come into their promised land.

Yet the theme of prostitution, which we saw with Tamar, continues here because Rahab is identified as a porne, which is often translated as “prostitute.” And yet, as early as the first century AD, the Jewish historian, Josephus, explained that she was an innkeeper. Now, the Hebrew for prostitute is related to the verb zun, which means “to nourish.” So likely these ancient inns offered food, they offered a room and the possibility of sex.

While Rahab’s identity as a prostitute is often promoted, the question of why the Israelite spies visited such an establishment is glossed over. Commentators exonerate the Israelite spies by saying, Oh they went into the inn to look for local information and nothing more. Well, that could be true, but it is an argument from silence. We know from Matthew that Rahab marries, and so whatever her past, it did not prevent a man from marrying her.

The two unnamed men, the spies, they go back to Joshua and they declare, “Truly the Lord has given all the land into our hands; moreover, all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before us” (Joshua 2:24 NRSV). But these are Rahab’s words. She spoke them over the spies when they were hiding under flax on her roof, hiding from the king’s troops. We might say they borrowed her faith and confidence, thinking it was their own. But the reader of the text knows of their deliverance at Rahab’s hand.

I’d like to suggest that the focus here in Matthew’s genealogy is on faithfulness, expressed prophetically, and Matthew grants her the highest cultural honor; she’s married. So whatever her past, the community saw her worthy of marriage. I’m not worried that we only know about her husband from Matthew. There’s often only a single attestation to an historical event. What is harder to square is the relationship to Ruth, who lives about two hundred years in the future. But if we remember that Matthew’s genealogy is a portrait of Jesus, the Son of God, then we need not be concerned about a few generations being dropped out of the genealogy. I mean, we’re not doing a “find my ancestor” DNA search. The genealogy is a character description.

Well, what is Rahab’s character? She demonstrates faithfulness, righteousness, the ability to see God’s plan and participate in it. Certainly, this faithfulness is heightened because she’s a Gentile and Matthew takes pains to show how their faith often exceeds Israel’s in his day. Anne Clements argues that we see loyalty here, a value important to Matthew. Loyalty. Mercy. This characteristic moves us forward to look at Ruth.

Ruth, the Moabite, marries a son of Naomi, but he dies within a few years and also his brother and also Naomi’s husband. And so, Ruth and Naomi return to Bethlehem, Naomi’s hometown, and there she marries Boaz, a member of Naomi’s larger family network. Ruth’s words of love and loyalty to Naomi have inspired many through the ages and yet some view her behavior at the threshing floor at night with Boaz as disreputable, that she sought to manipulate Boaz.

Well, to make sense of this situation we need to know the wider culture, which again includes levirate marriage. We saw this factor in Tamar’s situation too. The Hebrew culture included a backup plan. If there were no brothers to help a widow, the male relative could act as a ga’al. And that is what Naomi wants Boaz to do.

Does Naomi ask Ruth to act in a sexually suggestive way by going to the threshing floor at night and uncovering Boaz’s feet, lying down next to them? The term uncovered can have sexual connotations. We see this in Leviticus chapter 18. Ruth is told to lie down at his feet, and again while this can imply having sexual relations, the more usual way of expressing that would be, “he knew her” or “went in to her.” Moreover, we have to imagine other people lying nearby this threshing floor, guarding their grain. Ruth and Boaz are not in the ancient equivalent of a backseat of a car parked on a deserted lane. A better analogy would be to compare Ruth with Abigail, who falls at David’s feet. Now, why does this encounter happen at night? Well, perhaps because Boaz could reject her quietly and no shame would be involved.

But let’s focus on Boaz’s response. Now he has already verbally praised Ruth. He has already given her food. And here he does not cast aspersions on her character. Instead, he makes explicit that while other women might have pursued men their own age, Ruth pursued the godly path of continuing the family in which she had married, and also remaining true to Naomi. He understood that she asks that he redeem the land of her father-in-law, Elimelech, and perpetuate the family line. It would be in character for Boaz to say yes and to support her.

Now, Ruth shows initiative, as does Rahab and Tamar, given the strictures and limitations placed on them by society. Rahab and Tamar recognize that those who are to help them are not doing so, and so, they take matters into their own hands in a way that honors God. All three women show an assertiveness that pursues godliness and Ruth signals the importance of loyalty. Just as Jesus is the ultimate instrument of God’s mercy and deliverance, Ruth foreshadows God’s merciful actions with her own loyalty to Naomi and to her people and to her God.

Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, is the fourth woman mentioned, but only by reference to her first husband, Uriah, the Hittite. And this gives us a clue about Matthew’s focus, for in 2 Samuel, she is known as Uriah, the Hittite’s wife, taken by King David. And we know that David’s sordid deed is not swept under the rug, but is confronted squarely by the prophet Nathan.

Now in 1 Kings, Bathsheba is a mature woman, married to David, acting like the queen that she is. What was Bathsheba doing when David first saw her? Generally bathing? Well, since no one knew about germs back then, she wasn’t cleaning herself in the sense that we think of today when someone takes a bath. In fact, most people would be dusty most of the time. And hence the hospitality act of washing a guest’s feet that we find so often in the New Testament. The Bible tells us that she is doing a ritual cleansing after her menstrual impurity. Later in this story, King David will wash and anoint himself after the son of Bathsheba dies, signaling that he is done mourning. Now, I mention that because I want to focus on the reality that water is a scarce resource in Jerusalem at this time, and typically biblical references to bathing concern religious rituals.

What might Bathsheba be using to bathe? Well, we might imagine something like a hip bath or something maybe half the size of a wine casket. And maybe she stood in this and poured a jug of water over her head. Bathsheba performed her purification rite in the evening, likely in an enclosed courtyard of her home. There’s no indication that she knew that King David was at home, that he was walking around his roof rather than sleeping, and that he could see into her courtyard from his roof.

Well, what was David doing when he saw Bathsheba? The Bible admonishes that he was not where he should have been. He was expected at the battle but instead he remained in his palace. King David acted on his lust, after which, Bathsheba became pregnant. The story lays all the blame for the sexual abuse and subsequent murder of Uriah at David’s feet. For Matthew, God is there, judging King David. Anne Clements notes that the genealogy places the wife of Uriah at the beginning of the second epoch of the three epochs of the genealogy—the beginning of that long slide of Israel’s infidelity to God.

In all these cases, sex is foreground. However, the text does not label these women as sinners, but as dedicated followers of God who uphold His righteous ways. And this point is underscored by the fact that several women are non-Israelites, they’re Gentiles, who followed the God of Israel. Tamar and Rahab, they’re Canaanites; Ruth, a Moabite; and Bathsheba is married to a Hittite. These women prefigure Matthew’s focus on the Gentile mission of Jesus, and they remind readers of God’s constant outreach to Gentiles.

More than that, they demonstrate moral qualities of the disciples to be righteous, to be loyal, to be merciful, to be faithful. And they demonstrate these character traits with assertive actions, bold decisions, risk taking. They are model disciples for men as well as for women. In our next session, we’ll take a look at Jesus’ disciple, Mary Magdalene.