Letters to Angels: the genealogy of Jesus

Ah, the observation about Jesus & his 'bloodline'. Brilliant. Not too many people catch this &, while it seems like a minor detail it has huge ramifications to the overall story.

OK, so here's the scoop (from my perspective):

If you want to start way back, you go all the way back to Genesis 49 where Jacob/Israel is blessing his sons. His blessing/prophesy over Judah is this (see verses 8-12):

"Judah, thou [art he] whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand [shall be] in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down before thee. Judah [is] a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him [shall] the gathering of the people [be]. Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes: His eyes [shall be] red with wine, and his teeth white with milk. "

So right from the beginning, it's the plan that the kingly line (i.e. the sceptre - the symbol of ruling authority) in Israel comes from the tribe of Judah . Wrapped up in this promise is the idea of an everlasting kingship - that the sceptre/kingship won't depart from Judah until "Shiloh" (which I think means "Peace", or "Peace bringer" or "the one who is peace") comes.

This begins to be fulfilled through David when he takes the throne. In the middle of David's reign he wants to build God a temple & God makes the promise with him that, while David won't build God a temple, God will give him a son that will build him a temple & promises that He will give David a perpetual kingdom, that there will always be a son of David ruling on the throne. ( see 2 Samuel 7:1-17; 1 Chronicles 17:1-15).

This covenant, this promise, gets repeated & re-emphasized in a lot of places. Examples of this are as follows:


1Kings 8:25; 2 Chronicles 6:16: Therefore now, LORD God of Israel, keep with thy servant David my father that thou promisedst him, saying, There shall not fail thee a man in my sight to sit on the throne of Israel; so that thy children take heed to their way, that they walk before me as thou hast walked before me.

1 Kings 9:5; 2 Chronicles 7:18: Then I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever, as I promised to David thy father, saying, There shall not fail thee a man upon the throne of Israel.

Psalms 89:3&4, 132:11

Jeremiah 33:17; 20, 21: For thus saith the LORD; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; ......Thus saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; [Then] may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers.


and there's a number of places where the idea of idea of this everlasting kingdom, that the son of David will rule forever, is prophesied to be fulfilled by the Messiah (e.g. Isaiah 9:7, Micah 5:2, Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15; Zechariah 3:8, 6:12 (The BRANCH). Isaiah 11:10; Revelations 5:5, 22:16 (the Root)) & this is seen in that in Jesus' time, the Jews are expecting the Messiah to be the son of David, the next in the ruling line (see John 7: 40-43)

But, & here's where it get's interesting. There's a bit of a glitch in the program. If you're going through the genealogy in Matthew, you hit verse 11 where it mentions this guy "Jechoniah" who is the last king on the throne before Judah is taken into captivity by the Babylonians.

Little known fact about this guy: the dude was really bad, really wicked - beyond all the wickedness of the other kings before him & so somewhere along the way, God is completely fed up with this guy & speaks a curse over him through the prophet Jeremiah

Jeremiah 22:28-30: [Is] this man Coniah a despised broken idol? [is he] a vessel wherein [is] no pleasure? wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not? O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man [that] shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

"Coniah" is a shortened form of Jechoniah (just for clarity). But God basically says that none of this man's descendants will ever sit on the throne of David.

& so you have a problem here. God's promised to David that there will always be a direct descendant of David sitting on the throne. Now with Jeconiah, God's saying that no one from this guy's descendants will ever sit on the throne. So God's made this huge everlasting covenant with David, but seems to break it with Jechoniah. And there are all these promises about the Messiah being the 'seed of David' & it looks like those prophesies are at risk, too.

Hence this is why Jesus gets two genealogy (three if you count John 1: 1&2) tracing his heritage. In Matthew 1, Matthew, being a Jew & very concerned about writing of Jesus as the Lion (Ezekiel 1:10, 10:14, Rev 4:7), the king of Israel, he documents the kingly line through David, through Solomon, through Jeconiah & his children all the way down to Joseph. Now, this is the King's bloodline, the line through which is held the legal right to the throne of David. If Israel was free, was a nation ruling itself, (if Jechoniah hadn't been cursed), then Joseph would be heir to the throne of David & this title would've been passed on to Jesus as Joseph's firstborn son. Legally, even though Joseph was technically not the father of Jesus, the title of King, of "seed of David" would have gone to Jesus because Joseph was his legal father.....

But then we go to the 2nd genealogy in Luke 3. Luke is a doctor & writes about Jesus's humanity, about Jesus as a man, & he ends up tracing here, the genealogy of Mary. At first glance the genealogy here looks like it's tracing Joseph's roots & is a copy of the genealogy in Matthew 1, but it's not. If you look closely, it traces back through very different lines &, as you get to verse 31, you see that this lineage comes through "Nathan the son of David the son of Jesse" - so through Mary, Jesus is still, by birth the "seed of David", but he traces his roots through a line different than that of Solomon, different than that of the cursed line of Jechnoiah.

In Jewish culture, it's the mother's line that traces your heredity. If your father was a Jew & your mother a goyim (gentile), you wouldn't be a jew. But if your mother was Jewish & your father a gentile, youl were still considered to be a full fledged Jew. So in this case, the legal right to the throne of David comes through Jesus' surrogate father Joseph, but because Jesus is not the direct descendant of Joseph, the curse placed on Jechoniah & his seed doesn't apply. Because Jesus is born of Mary, he is fully descended from the bloodline of David & is completely a "Seed/offspring of David".

So this is the complexity of it all & why the genealogies are included in Matthew & in Luke (& the passage in John basically is where John is looking at Jesus as God, as the eagle, & so his genealogy is that Jesus was "in the beginning with God & was God"). This is one of those areas that people will often gloss over & won't catch the complexity of the whole thing & all the hoops God had to sort of jump through to fulfil these prophesies. It points out how God chose Joseph & Mary specifically to be Jesus's parents & so it points out how crucial we can be to His story (though on the flip side, if you look at Jechoniah, it can also show that God will work around people that are getting in the way of His story, too).