The King's Bloodline: Matthew 1:1-17

A record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Matthew begins not with a manger but with a list. Names cascading through centuries like water through rock, carving the channel through which salvation would flow.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers...

The names march forward—patriarchs and kings, sinners and saints. But look closer. Notice who Matthew includes.

Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.

Tamar. A Canaanite woman who disguised herself as a prostitute to secure justice from her father-in-law. Scandal in the bloodline.

Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

Rahab. The prostitute of Jericho who hid the spies and hung a scarlet cord from her window. A pagan woman, grafted into Israel.

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.

Ruth. A Moabite widow who clung to her mother-in-law and gleaned in foreign fields. Another outsider, another woman, another surprise.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.

Uriah's wife. Matthew will not even name her directly in this context—Bathsheba, taken by David in adultery, her husband murdered to cover the sin. The great king's greatest shame, written into the Messiah's ancestry.

Four women named in a Jewish genealogy—extraordinary in itself. But these four? A seductress, a prostitute, a foreigner, and an adulteress. The Messiah's family tree was not sanitized for public consumption.

The list continues through exile and obscurity:

After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel...

The royal line, stripped of throne and crown, surviving in Babylon, returning to a ruined land, waiting through silent centuries.

And Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.

Notice the shift. The pattern breaks. Not "Joseph the father of Jesus" but "Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus." The genealogy traces Joseph's line—legal ancestry, royal claim—but acknowledges that Jesus' origin was different.

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.

Three sets of fourteen. Some see numerical patterns, others literary structure. What matters is the sweep: from promise to kingdom, from kingdom to exile, from exile to fulfillment.

Two thousand years of history. Forty-two generations of waiting. Scandals and triumphs, faithfulness and failure, exile and return. All of it leading to one name:

Jesus, who is called the Messiah.

The son of David. The son of Abraham. The heir of promises made to a wandering patriarch and a shepherd king. The culmination of everything Israel had hoped for.

The genealogy is not just a list. It is a claim. This child, born in obscurity, is the rightful King. His bloodline proves it.

And the God who worked through Tamar's deception and Rahab's faith and Ruth's loyalty and Bathsheba's tragedy—this God was still working, still weaving broken threads into redemption's tapestry.