And Eliud begat Eleazar; and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob;
The verse records the succession from Eliud to Eleazar to Matthan to Jacob, tracing fathers and sons in the line that continues through Jacob's son Joseph toward Jesus. It belongs to the genealogy that follows the male line from Abraham through David and Solomon and the kings to Joseph, the reputed and legal father of Jesus under Jewish law. This is the royal legal line through Joseph, distinct from Jesus' literal blood and fleshly descent through Mary. Through Joseph as legal father, Jesus legally received the kingship and is presented as Son of David, Son of Abraham, king, and rightful heir to David's throne and to the promises and inheritance given to Abraham and David. The genealogy thus establishes His identity as the promised Messiah descended from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and David, shows He truly became a member of the human race by birth to share its sorrows and temptations while remaining without sin, and assures believers that Abraham's promises belong to His spiritual seed by faith as joint heirs with Christ.
Names, Wording, and Setting
Matthew 1:15 records the succession from Eliud to Eleazar to Matthan to Jacob, traced from father to son as part of the human genealogy from Abraham to the birth of Jesus. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob stand in the genealogy traced through Joseph, following the male line from David through Solomon to Joseph, the legal and reputed father of Jesus. The line continues in the next verse through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband, toward Jesus, presenting Jesus as heir to the kingdom in His descent through David's male descendants. Together these verses belong to Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations presenting Jesus' descent through the line of David, a record that was not openly challenged by His enemies seeking to deny His Messiahship. This genealogy presents the royal line and legal heirship through Joseph, Jesus' legal father, and is not the account of His literal blood descent through Mary.
The Jacob named here is the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, living just before Christ, not the patriarch Jacob of Genesis who lived 1,750 years before Christ. He is likewise not connected with the Joseph who was sold into Egypt, for Jacob and Joseph were common names among the Jews, with names running through families then the same as now. The term begat describes a man's generating or fathering a child, illustrating that the word for begetting and giving birth can describe men as well as women. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob were real progenitors in Jesus' literal line of descent, just as Joseph and Mary were real people, so that the history connected with them was literal history.
The verse is one of the four verses in Matthew's genealogy that cover the four centuries between the Old and New Testaments. It records the family line leading to Jesus for the purpose of establishing His royal lineage, without characterizing the events of those centuries.
Legal Royal Line Through Joseph
Matthew 1:15 stands in the genealogy that follows the male line from Abraham through David and then through Solomon and the kings down to Joseph, the reputed and legal father of Jesus under Jewish law. This is the royal reigning house traced through the father, presenting Jesus as son of David and son of Abraham, distinct from Luke's genealogy which traces the line from David through Nathan on Mary's side back to Adam as son of man. The royal line is traced through men, and Joseph is named as Jesus' legal father, with Jacob as Joseph's father in Matthew's line. In the course of time the two lines from David onward meet in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in both Joseph and Mary.
Matthew's genealogy is the royal legal side through Joseph, while Luke's genealogy gives literal blood and fleshly descent according to the flesh from Adam through Mary. In law Jesus was Joseph's child, so Matthew gives His throne-right and legal connection to the royal line of David through Joseph, whereas Luke reckons Him under her husband Joseph's name as son of Heli, with Heli as Mary's father and Joseph's father by marriage or father-in-law. The line runs back through David to Abraham, the father of the faithful, and therefore Jesus was legally a Son of David and heir to the kingdom, while also being naturally part of David's royal family through Mary. This genealogy records part of the legal pedigree of Jesus through Joseph, distinct from Luke's genealogy of Mary through Heli which traces the male line back to the promise of the seed of the woman in the beginning.
Through Joseph as reputed father and legal father, Jesus legally received the kingship and is presented as king and heir to the kingdom. The genealogy traces His royal lineage and legal descent through Joseph's male line from Abraham and the royal family of David, beginning with Abraham and arranged in three groups of fourteen generations, establishing His legal claim and right to rulership and to David's throne. It establishes His identity as the promised Messiah and shows His family relationship to Joseph, giving Him a claim through Joseph to the inheritance promised to Abraham and David. That legitimacy of succession and claim to Abraham's inheritance includes the promised territory and the whole world, connecting God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Jesus.
The genealogy traces Jesus' human descent through a direct line to Abraham, establishing His descent according to Hebrew law and His place as the promised Seed. It shows that His parents were Jews and that His family was of David's line and the tribe of Judah, with Matthew 1:1-16 preserving the careful record of the tribe through which Christ came. Matthew's genealogy thus presents Christ as the perfect Jew, a descendant of Abraham through whom God used Israel, Abraham's descendants, so that the promise that all nations would be blessed in Christ could be fulfilled. The promised line was preserved and could be traced literally and legally through the generations toward David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham.
Luke's Line and Arrangement
Matthew's list gives Joseph's ancestry and Christ's legal throne-right, while Luke's list gives His literal human descent according to the flesh from Adam through Mary. Joseph was Jesus' legal father under Jewish law, so Jesus inherited the kingdom from Joseph and the kingdom belonged to Him according to law, showing His right to the throne of Israel through the royal family from David through Solomon, Rehoboam and the kings. By contrast His fleshly descent came through Mary, and Luke's line reckons that descent under her husband Joseph's name as son of Heli, with Heli as Mary's father and Joseph's father by marriage or father-in-law, Mary being treated as daughter of Joseph's father because she was Joseph's wife. Thus Matthew presents Christ's legal connection to the royal line of David through Joseph down through David to Abraham, making Him legally a Son of David and heir to the kingdom, while Luke is understood as Mary's ancestry tracing the male line back through David's seed and Nathan to Adam and to the promise of the seed of the woman in the beginning, making Christ naturally part of David's royal family as well.
The two lines from David onward run one through Solomon to Joseph, his legal father, and one through Nathan on Mary's side. In the course of time they meet in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in both Joseph and Mary. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan and Jacob stand in Matthew's Joseph line, while Mary's father is called Joseph's father because Joseph was Mary's husband. The longer line through Mary accounts for the difference between the numbers of generations in Matthew and Luke.
The genealogy in Matthew 1 is to be considered alongside the genealogy in Luke 3 as one of two genealogical tables that have been viewed as different or contradictory. It does not name every generation, but selects ancestors and groups them into three sets of fourteen to show the major stages of Hebrew history and Jesus' kingly descent as rightful heir of Abraham. A stated father-and-son link can therefore skip intermediate generations, a grandfather may be called a father, and the royal inheritance descending from David to Joseph is presented rather than necessarily recording an immediate father-to-son link at every step. Its purpose is to trace the royal line through men and its place in God's purposes, with Joseph named as Jesus' legal father through whom Jesus legally received the kingship, not to provide a complete family record or an unbroken chronology. One account describes the first-chapter genealogy as tracing Mary's line from Abraham to Christ's birth while likewise omitting generations to form three sections of fourteen generations each.
Matthew 1 places Matthan, Eleazar and Eliud in the line leading toward Jesus, continued in the next verse through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband, as one link in Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ, each traced from father to son. The time covered by its successive groups of generations varies, averaging about forty or more years to a generation, a figure some use to fix the length of a generation, but no dependable length can be drawn from it. No definite time is allotted to a generation, for no definition of a generation has been given and that time was not designed to be fixed for the last generation. Generation sometimes means race, people, nation, and sometimes means the people living upon the earth at one time, and the time would be longer in the days of the antediluvian patriarchs than at the present time. Even across six thousand years from creation the father-to-son count would be fewer than two hundred, so a thousand generations represents a span far beyond ordinary human history.
Messiahship and Promise Fulfilled
Matthew 1:15 stands in the genealogy that traces Jesus' ancestry through Joseph, His reputed father, from Abraham through David to His birth. That royal line runs through David and Solomon and gives Jesus through Joseph a claim to the inheritance promised to Abraham and David. It shows His descent from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah and thus fulfills the stated descent of the Messiah. In this way it establishes His identity as the promised Messiah and true Son of David.
The genealogical record preserves the lineage leading to Jesus and connects God's promises to Abraham with His birth. That birth is a landmark in the fulfillment of the Old Testament gospel promises. The New Testament genealogy identifies the Messiah as a descendant of Abraham and shows how God used Israel, Abraham's descendants, so that the promise that all nations would be blessed in Christ could be fulfilled. It establishes Christ's place as the promised Seed of Abraham, with the predicted signs of the Messiah converging in Him, while Israel's separation from surrounding nations guarded that lineage from being obscured. The same record establishes the legitimacy of His succession and His claim to Abraham's inheritance, which includes the whole world.
The promised line was preserved and can be traced literally and legally through the generations toward David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham. Together with Luke 3 it traces the lineage of Jesus through both His mother's side and His father's side, as part of the preserved genealogy of Judah in Matthew 1. While the other tribes were scattered and their genealogies lost, Judah was held together until Jesus came, so rulership did not depart from Judah till Shiloh came and Jesus became the center of the gathering of God's people. God preserved that genealogy by choosing one family, planting them as a separate people, removing idolatry from their land, and acquainting them with truth, so the world might be assured that the promises and prophecies were fulfilled in Messiah. The judgments that guarded that line, the overthrow of the Egyptians and the extermination of the idolatrous and sensual nations of Canaan, were mercy to God's people and to the race to unfold the doctrines and facts of Messiah's future kingdom, and the Levitical law given to that people wisely developed the great plan of salvation step by step to make it plain to human reason and impress it deeply on the human heart.
Christ had a human pedigree and entered the human family by birth, with His ancestry traced in Matthew 1 alongside the genealogy in Luke 3. This distinguishes Him from Melchizedek, who had no recorded pedigree and did not enter the human family by birth. His earthly pedigree is traced back to David through the line of kings and, on the maternal side, through the priestly line. This royal and priestly ancestry points to Him as the heavenly Prince of Peace, whose service fulfills the earlier earthly priesthood.
Matthew 1:15 places Matthan, Eleazar, and Eliud in the genealogical line that leads toward Jesus, with the next verse continuing that line through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband. Together the verses belong to Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations, which presents Jesus' descent through the line of David. That complete record was not openly challenged by His enemies seeking to deny His Messiahship. It bears witness to the reliability of Scripture and to Jesus' identity as the promised Messiah and as a real person. It is a plain historical record whose place is not spiritually unprofitable merely because it records names and historical facts, and whose value is not improved by assigning it a fanciful spiritual meaning, giving Matthew's Gospel the air of a real history of a real person. It is preserved as an original genealogical record in its own form, without editorial explanation or adjustment to reconcile it with other accounts or reshape it into a harmonized history, and its differences from other records show that Scripture retains original documents rather than reshaping them into a single polished history.
Human Nature and Believers' Hope
As part of the genealogy, this link in the succession of human ancestors shows that Jesus truly became a member of the human race by birth, sharing its sorrows, temptations, needs, and mortal inheritance while remaining without sin. He accepted humanity after the race had been weakened by four thousand years of sin and, like every child of Adam, accepted the results of heredity in order to share human sorrows and temptations. His human ancestry grounds His kinship with humanity and His sympathy as High Priest who knows human needs from experience, so that people can approach Him with confidence.
The genealogy traces His descent through ancestors both righteous and wicked whose history shows the effects of heredity. That human line in David's line shared the iniquities common to humanity, establishing that Christ was born according to the flesh in David's human line. He entered the family line carrying its inherited liability to sin, and that descent from humanity was significant to His temptations and life in the flesh.
The line includes sinful men and women, some of another race than the Jews, showing that He came to save sinners and did not refuse to be born of sinners. It exceptionally includes Ruth among four women, and her place in David's ancestry shows that the family line includes a Gentile and expresses His brotherhood with aliens and Gentiles. He took upon Himself the nature of man and was tempted in all points as humans are.
Yet in spite of that human nature He lived a perfect, sinless life, showing that it is possible for human beings to live a holy life here in the world. In doing so He gave the example of a sinless life after accepting weakened humanity.
The genealogy assures believers in Christ that Abraham's promises belong to His spiritual seed, and that through faith in Christ believers have a right to the promised blessing of Abraham. Natural descent gave the literal seed valuable privilege and opportunity, but it did not by itself guarantee heirship, since those promises could be received through faith. The record connects God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Jesus and establishes the legitimacy of His succession and His claim to Abraham's inheritance, which includes the whole world. By faith believers share in Christ that inheritance promised to Abraham and are joint heirs with Christ in the throne of David.
The verse records the succession from Eliud to Eleazar to Matthan to Jacob, tracing fathers and sons in the line that continues through Jacob's son Joseph toward Jesus. It belongs to the genealogy that follows the male line from Abraham through David and Solomon and the kings to Joseph, the reputed and legal father of Jesus under Jewish law. This is the royal legal line through Joseph, distinct from Jesus' literal blood and fleshly descent through Mary. Through Joseph as legal father, Jesus legally received the kingship and is presented as Son of David, Son of Abraham, king, and rightful heir to David's throne and to the promises and inheritance given to Abraham and David. The genealogy thus establishes His identity as the promised Messiah descended from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and David, shows He truly became a member of the human race by birth to share its sorrows and temptations while remaining without sin, and assures believers that Abraham's promises belong to His spiritual seed by faith as joint heirs with Christ.
Names, Wording, and Setting
Matthew 1:15 records the succession from Eliud to Eleazar to Matthan to Jacob, traced from father to son as part of the human genealogy from Abraham to the birth of Jesus. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob stand in the genealogy traced through Joseph, following the male line from David through Solomon to Joseph, the legal and reputed father of Jesus. The line continues in the next verse through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband, toward Jesus, presenting Jesus as heir to the kingdom in His descent through David's male descendants. Together these verses belong to Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations presenting Jesus' descent through the line of David, a record that was not openly challenged by His enemies seeking to deny His Messiahship. This genealogy presents the royal line and legal heirship through Joseph, Jesus' legal father, and is not the account of His literal blood descent through Mary.
The Jacob named here is the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, living just before Christ, not the patriarch Jacob of Genesis who lived 1,750 years before Christ. He is likewise not connected with the Joseph who was sold into Egypt, for Jacob and Joseph were common names among the Jews, with names running through families then the same as now. The term begat describes a man's generating or fathering a child, illustrating that the word for begetting and giving birth can describe men as well as women. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob were real progenitors in Jesus' literal line of descent, just as Joseph and Mary were real people, so that the history connected with them was literal history.
The verse is one of the four verses in Matthew's genealogy that cover the four centuries between the Old and New Testaments. It records the family line leading to Jesus for the purpose of establishing His royal lineage, without characterizing the events of those centuries.
Legal Royal Line Through Joseph
Matthew 1:15 stands in the genealogy that follows the male line from Abraham through David and then through Solomon and the kings down to Joseph, the reputed and legal father of Jesus under Jewish law. This is the royal reigning house traced through the father, presenting Jesus as son of David and son of Abraham, distinct from Luke's genealogy which traces the line from David through Nathan on Mary's side back to Adam as son of man. The royal line is traced through men, and Joseph is named as Jesus' legal father, with Jacob as Joseph's father in Matthew's line. In the course of time the two lines from David onward meet in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in both Joseph and Mary.
Matthew's genealogy is the royal legal side through Joseph, while Luke's genealogy gives literal blood and fleshly descent according to the flesh from Adam through Mary. In law Jesus was Joseph's child, so Matthew gives His throne-right and legal connection to the royal line of David through Joseph, whereas Luke reckons Him under her husband Joseph's name as son of Heli, with Heli as Mary's father and Joseph's father by marriage or father-in-law. The line runs back through David to Abraham, the father of the faithful, and therefore Jesus was legally a Son of David and heir to the kingdom, while also being naturally part of David's royal family through Mary. This genealogy records part of the legal pedigree of Jesus through Joseph, distinct from Luke's genealogy of Mary through Heli which traces the male line back to the promise of the seed of the woman in the beginning.
Through Joseph as reputed father and legal father, Jesus legally received the kingship and is presented as king and heir to the kingdom. The genealogy traces His royal lineage and legal descent through Joseph's male line from Abraham and the royal family of David, beginning with Abraham and arranged in three groups of fourteen generations, establishing His legal claim and right to rulership and to David's throne. It establishes His identity as the promised Messiah and shows His family relationship to Joseph, giving Him a claim through Joseph to the inheritance promised to Abraham and David. That legitimacy of succession and claim to Abraham's inheritance includes the promised territory and the whole world, connecting God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Jesus.
The genealogy traces Jesus' human descent through a direct line to Abraham, establishing His descent according to Hebrew law and His place as the promised Seed. It shows that His parents were Jews and that His family was of David's line and the tribe of Judah, with Matthew 1:1-16 preserving the careful record of the tribe through which Christ came. Matthew's genealogy thus presents Christ as the perfect Jew, a descendant of Abraham through whom God used Israel, Abraham's descendants, so that the promise that all nations would be blessed in Christ could be fulfilled. The promised line was preserved and could be traced literally and legally through the generations toward David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham.
Luke's Line and Arrangement
Matthew's list gives Joseph's ancestry and Christ's legal throne-right, while Luke's list gives His literal human descent according to the flesh from Adam through Mary. Joseph was Jesus' legal father under Jewish law, so Jesus inherited the kingdom from Joseph and the kingdom belonged to Him according to law, showing His right to the throne of Israel through the royal family from David through Solomon, Rehoboam and the kings. By contrast His fleshly descent came through Mary, and Luke's line reckons that descent under her husband Joseph's name as son of Heli, with Heli as Mary's father and Joseph's father by marriage or father-in-law, Mary being treated as daughter of Joseph's father because she was Joseph's wife. Thus Matthew presents Christ's legal connection to the royal line of David through Joseph down through David to Abraham, making Him legally a Son of David and heir to the kingdom, while Luke is understood as Mary's ancestry tracing the male line back through David's seed and Nathan to Adam and to the promise of the seed of the woman in the beginning, making Christ naturally part of David's royal family as well.
The two lines from David onward run one through Solomon to Joseph, his legal father, and one through Nathan on Mary's side. In the course of time they meet in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in both Joseph and Mary. Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan and Jacob stand in Matthew's Joseph line, while Mary's father is called Joseph's father because Joseph was Mary's husband. The longer line through Mary accounts for the difference between the numbers of generations in Matthew and Luke.
The genealogy in Matthew 1 is to be considered alongside the genealogy in Luke 3 as one of two genealogical tables that have been viewed as different or contradictory. It does not name every generation, but selects ancestors and groups them into three sets of fourteen to show the major stages of Hebrew history and Jesus' kingly descent as rightful heir of Abraham. A stated father-and-son link can therefore skip intermediate generations, a grandfather may be called a father, and the royal inheritance descending from David to Joseph is presented rather than necessarily recording an immediate father-to-son link at every step. Its purpose is to trace the royal line through men and its place in God's purposes, with Joseph named as Jesus' legal father through whom Jesus legally received the kingship, not to provide a complete family record or an unbroken chronology. One account describes the first-chapter genealogy as tracing Mary's line from Abraham to Christ's birth while likewise omitting generations to form three sections of fourteen generations each.
Matthew 1 places Matthan, Eleazar and Eliud in the line leading toward Jesus, continued in the next verse through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband, as one link in Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ, each traced from father to son. The time covered by its successive groups of generations varies, averaging about forty or more years to a generation, a figure some use to fix the length of a generation, but no dependable length can be drawn from it. No definite time is allotted to a generation, for no definition of a generation has been given and that time was not designed to be fixed for the last generation. Generation sometimes means race, people, nation, and sometimes means the people living upon the earth at one time, and the time would be longer in the days of the antediluvian patriarchs than at the present time. Even across six thousand years from creation the father-to-son count would be fewer than two hundred, so a thousand generations represents a span far beyond ordinary human history.
Messiahship and Promise Fulfilled
Matthew 1:15 stands in the genealogy that traces Jesus' ancestry through Joseph, His reputed father, from Abraham through David to His birth. That royal line runs through David and Solomon and gives Jesus through Joseph a claim to the inheritance promised to Abraham and David. It shows His descent from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah and thus fulfills the stated descent of the Messiah. In this way it establishes His identity as the promised Messiah and true Son of David.
The genealogical record preserves the lineage leading to Jesus and connects God's promises to Abraham with His birth. That birth is a landmark in the fulfillment of the Old Testament gospel promises. The New Testament genealogy identifies the Messiah as a descendant of Abraham and shows how God used Israel, Abraham's descendants, so that the promise that all nations would be blessed in Christ could be fulfilled. It establishes Christ's place as the promised Seed of Abraham, with the predicted signs of the Messiah converging in Him, while Israel's separation from surrounding nations guarded that lineage from being obscured. The same record establishes the legitimacy of His succession and His claim to Abraham's inheritance, which includes the whole world.
The promised line was preserved and can be traced literally and legally through the generations toward David, Judah, Jacob, and Abraham. Together with Luke 3 it traces the lineage of Jesus through both His mother's side and His father's side, as part of the preserved genealogy of Judah in Matthew 1. While the other tribes were scattered and their genealogies lost, Judah was held together until Jesus came, so rulership did not depart from Judah till Shiloh came and Jesus became the center of the gathering of God's people. God preserved that genealogy by choosing one family, planting them as a separate people, removing idolatry from their land, and acquainting them with truth, so the world might be assured that the promises and prophecies were fulfilled in Messiah. The judgments that guarded that line, the overthrow of the Egyptians and the extermination of the idolatrous and sensual nations of Canaan, were mercy to God's people and to the race to unfold the doctrines and facts of Messiah's future kingdom, and the Levitical law given to that people wisely developed the great plan of salvation step by step to make it plain to human reason and impress it deeply on the human heart.
Christ had a human pedigree and entered the human family by birth, with His ancestry traced in Matthew 1 alongside the genealogy in Luke 3. This distinguishes Him from Melchizedek, who had no recorded pedigree and did not enter the human family by birth. His earthly pedigree is traced back to David through the line of kings and, on the maternal side, through the priestly line. This royal and priestly ancestry points to Him as the heavenly Prince of Peace, whose service fulfills the earlier earthly priesthood.
Matthew 1:15 places Matthan, Eleazar, and Eliud in the genealogical line that leads toward Jesus, with the next verse continuing that line through Jacob and Joseph, Mary's husband. Together the verses belong to Matthew's complete record of forty-two generations, which presents Jesus' descent through the line of David. That complete record was not openly challenged by His enemies seeking to deny His Messiahship. It bears witness to the reliability of Scripture and to Jesus' identity as the promised Messiah and as a real person. It is a plain historical record whose place is not spiritually unprofitable merely because it records names and historical facts, and whose value is not improved by assigning it a fanciful spiritual meaning, giving Matthew's Gospel the air of a real history of a real person. It is preserved as an original genealogical record in its own form, without editorial explanation or adjustment to reconcile it with other accounts or reshape it into a harmonized history, and its differences from other records show that Scripture retains original documents rather than reshaping them into a single polished history.
Human Nature and Believers' Hope
As part of the genealogy, this link in the succession of human ancestors shows that Jesus truly became a member of the human race by birth, sharing its sorrows, temptations, needs, and mortal inheritance while remaining without sin. He accepted humanity after the race had been weakened by four thousand years of sin and, like every child of Adam, accepted the results of heredity in order to share human sorrows and temptations. His human ancestry grounds His kinship with humanity and His sympathy as High Priest who knows human needs from experience, so that people can approach Him with confidence.
The genealogy traces His descent through ancestors both righteous and wicked whose history shows the effects of heredity. That human line in David's line shared the iniquities common to humanity, establishing that Christ was born according to the flesh in David's human line. He entered the family line carrying its inherited liability to sin, and that descent from humanity was significant to His temptations and life in the flesh.
The line includes sinful men and women, some of another race than the Jews, showing that He came to save sinners and did not refuse to be born of sinners. It exceptionally includes Ruth among four women, and her place in David's ancestry shows that the family line includes a Gentile and expresses His brotherhood with aliens and Gentiles. He took upon Himself the nature of man and was tempted in all points as humans are.
Yet in spite of that human nature He lived a perfect, sinless life, showing that it is possible for human beings to live a holy life here in the world. In doing so He gave the example of a sinless life after accepting weakened humanity.
The genealogy assures believers in Christ that Abraham's promises belong to His spiritual seed, and that through faith in Christ believers have a right to the promised blessing of Abraham. Natural descent gave the literal seed valuable privilege and opportunity, but it did not by itself guarantee heirship, since those promises could be received through faith. The record connects God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Jesus and establishes the legitimacy of His succession and His claim to Abraham's inheritance, which includes the whole world. By faith believers share in Christ that inheritance promised to Abraham and are joint heirs with Christ in the throne of David.